Historical Smoking “AF”!

I must warn you that this blog may contain semantic peril, and may reference “historical smoking”. Yes, I said it, “historical smoking”. For starters, I happened to notice this week that there is a new popular burger chain campaign that uses “AF” in the tagline. Also, Fiat has used the “AF” in their 124 Spider commercials in a tongue in cheek fashion that reveals “Stylish A- F—”  before the other letters fill in the rest of the image to read ” STYLISH AS FIAT”.  For those of you reading this that have not yet noticed the trend with current social media efforts trying to understand the existing parental guidance “guidelines” while coming up with more “suggestive” suggestions, “AF” stands for “As F*ck”. I feel like I have barely gotten used to “BS” being common speak and used regularly among our youth… and this seems to be “okay” with everyone.

I think we are looking at a time where language is evolving faster than we can add words to the dictionary. Thanks to the urban dictionary, a place exists now where language can get a trial run on being accepted. If it passes there, we might just see it show up in a traditional dictionary. The evolution of “parental guidance” and communication evolution is alive and well. On one hand, we are watching the use of “AF” bloom into a common saying, and with the blessing of major brands and prime time advertisements. On the other hand, we are warning viewers that a movie contains “historical smoking”? This is happening while Sean Penn smokes away on Steven Colbert’s show without a warning? We might be witnessing a time where things are a little out of balance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un-j-7qwMas

Simply saying the F-word can be shocking enough for some, but its power is limited to just that. Populating and encouraging the use of the phrase “AF” and especially encouraging its use as a “healthy alternative”, might be drawing more attention to the word and giving it more power than we realize. Having a disclaimer at the beginning of a movie that draws attention to the “historical smoking” that it includes might also be drawing unnecessary attention to that as well. As of late, we can see that the new Chappaquiddick movie about the Kennedy sex scandal… haha, I mean, which one? Right?) states that one of the reasons it has a PG rating from the MPAA is because of “historical smoking”.

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/chappaquiddick-film-about-kennedy-sex-scandal-rated-pg-13-for-historical-smoking/

I can’t prove this theory yet, but as a parent of a 10-year old that is exposed to movies and commercial television, I have been asked the question “What is “AF” dad?” and what is “historical smoking?” I tend to balk at these questions. Sigh… I know there will be many more questions to come.
Maybe it really is a simple “age thing”, but if you want to watch a classic western movie, I’m not sure what sets “Western violence” apart from other kinds of violence. Would the violence in a film about the Mafia constitute “Italian violence”? And how is “historical smoking” different from the smoking today? To help keep it politically correct… maybe a “Native American” smokes a peace pipe? Or sends up a smoke signal (Hundehutte, 2016)?

I guess I am CTFU a bit while writing this blog post… click around a bit, you might just CFTU a bit as well.

Cheers,

Darian