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Would an American girl aged 12-14 really use the "F-word" casually like this in 1947?

English Language & Usage Asked by Humburg on December 21, 2020

In the 1997 movie "Lolita", in the beginning set in 1947, there is a scene where Dolores Haze (12 or 14, White, girl) has this conversation with a friend:

Mary Rose: "See you later, alligator."

Dolores: "After a while, crocodile."

Mary Rose: "Real soon, Daniel Boone."

Dolores: "Get fucked, Daffy Duck."

Source: https://www.scripts.com/script.php?id=lolita_1354&p=2

Would such a young girl in 1947 really say "fucked" rather than something far more innocent, such as "stuffed" or "ducked"? Is this an anachronism? At first, I thought I heard this wrong, but according to sources, she really says "fucked" and not something similar-sounding.

The reason I’m unsure about the age is that in the book, she is 12 in the beginning, but (according to my memory) she is said to be 14 in the movie. Which is very odd since this kind of muddles the whole point of the story, although they perhaps had to claim that she was 14 in order to not upset people too much, even though it’s implied that she is actually 12. (Or maybe it was in the 1960s movie that she is explicitly said to be 14, and my memory is at fault here…)

One Answer

If the girl were, say, 13 in 1947, she was born c. 1933. In the decade 1930 - 39, the population growth in the US was 7% (A Short Retrospective on 20th Century U.S. Population Change by John Besl)

The action takes place in New England. In the 1930s, New England had a population of ~10 million (https://www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org/sites/default/files/Figure1-Large.jpg)

Half of these would be female. (5 million) and by 1940, 7% of those would be born in that decade: 50,000 x 7 = 350,000.

Reducing this by two-thirds to give a 3 year age span, we would have approx 200,000 girls of Dolores's age in New England.

Assuming that a girl of that age spends 1 hour a day talking to her friends, in a year, 365 x 200,000 hours have been spoken. 73,000,000 hours of talk.

It takes 2 seconds to say "Get fucked, Daffy Duck." this gives 73,000,000 x 60 x 30 opportunities in a year to say the sentence. 657,000,000,000 opportunities.

Say only 1 in 100 million of the words is "fucked"... The chances are still that it would have been said.

Answered by Greybeard on December 21, 2020

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