Frak!

I needed to use the word “Frak” in a post I was putting together on here and I wanted to double check the accepted spelling. No point is calling myself a nerd if I can’t get my facts straight. While I was searching, I came across this rather interesting article on Wikipedia’s website.

Frack or frak is a bowdlerised version of fuck first used in the original Battlestar Galactica series. In the “re-imagined” version it appears with greater frequency and with the revised spelling “frak”, as the producers wanted to make it a four-letter word. In that framework it seems to function as a substitute for “fuck” in several different forms, as an interjection (“Frak!”), inquisitive idiom (“What the frak?”), verb (“You’re not still frakking Dualla are you?”), adjective (“Get your motherfrakking hands off me!”), a noun (“You miserable frak”) or in words (“What a clusterfrak”).

Gosh, I don’t remember it being used in the original series, but then I haven’t seen an episode for many years. I do love the way the new series of Battlestar Galactica is using it to convey the emotional need to vent using expletives. I think it was in the penultimate episode of mid-season 4 when Colonel Saul Tigh “Motherfraker” with such venom, that I finally came to like the use of “frak” as TV friendly alternative to “fuck”. Farscape’s “Frell”, though intended to be used instead of “fuck”, never had the same intensity as the word it was replacing even if you knew what the characters were trying to express.

Frak has its uses elsewhere too, including it seems within a certain Swedish furniture manufacturers catalogue of products.

Fräck (spelled with the umlaut ä) is also the product name of a shaving mirror produced by IKEA, a multinational home products retailer. Since most IKEA product names are in Swedish, fräck is the Swedish word for audacious, shameless or bold (while frack, without ä, would translate to tailcoat). In the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series, a mirror of this type is installed in the cabin of William Adama.

Which came first though, the mirror or Battlestar Galactica? It’s not the first time IKEA have given their furniture an amusing name. Drew and I had a number of ‘Jerker’ office desks, which we fondlingly referred to as our “Jerk-Off” desks. Of course, seeing how we’re Gay Sci-Fi Nerds who spend a lot of time in front of the Internet, this might not have a wise thing to converse to others over a dinner party.

Frak has seemed to find its place in modern culture now as evidenced by its use in the below mediums.

The word has recently been referenced numerous times in popular culture including in Dilbert, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, Robot Chicken, Scrubs, the English dub of Crayon Shin Chan, The OC and in Marvel Comics’ World War Hulk: Prologue. Star Wars uses this word, but not often. It also appears once in the television series Batman Beyond, in an episode entitled Final Cut.

Surprisingly Star Wars and Batman Beyond have both used Frak, in what I thought we more geared towards a younger audience. Now that La Georgina has offended the old fans with the new trilogy, does he intend to corrupt the young with subliminal swearing too?

During the Battlestar Galactica panel at the 2008 New York Comic Con, SCI FI Channel programming executive Mark Stern had this to say about the word: “The thing is, they’ve done SO much with that word, it’s almost like, beyond. I just was reading a script the other day that had ‘gagglefrak’ in it. Gagglefrak. Okay, I think you’re done, if you’re at gagglefrak.”

“Gagglefrak”! Who the FRAK came up with “Gagglefrak”! Methinks the scriptwriter who came up with that needs to be motherfraking fired!

Wikipedia