I’ve heard that “mother fucker” is just a thing you call someone.
I’ve heard a of a lot of similar words- they’re insults with an awkward positive energy.
Because I am a philosopher and thought about this kind of slang for 10 years, I’ll tell you what I think a motherfucker is.
A mother fucker is not someone who gets more than what they deserve. Well, that’s part of it.
A mother fucker achieves things by abiding by standards of common decency and considerate personal advancement, but betrays them in a way that’s hard to not find likeable, that’s easy to wish to emulate, but never in a way you’d sincerely try to match.
A motherfucker makes your cheeks clench in bizarre fondness. A motherfucker pulls at what it means to be a good person, but not in the gentle way that makes you feel so very joyful, as you do when making your own complex steps through life.
A motherfucker represents how connected and disconnected everything is, in a way that brings you frustrating kinds of comfort. A mother fucker is what makes your heart sing with wry undulations contemplating the nature of deservingness.
You wouldn’t want nobody to be a motherfucker. But you’d certainly like to stop them at their motherfucker junctures. To change their choices in mild revenge, in a chance at slightly rewriting the nature of humankind. But it’s hard to stop a mother fucker, and you’re likely already very fond of mother fuckers in your life and in the media and history, mother fuckers that done so much mother fucking motherfuckery practically just for you.
What a person you’d call a mother fucking mother fucker is the type of mischievous maturity that makes you feel the universe is expanding, but in a way you find disappointing. So you ache for something better, filled with savory eagerness, never conceding to that strange fondness, carrying it, undulating with it.
Can we just be mother fuckers without fucking over each other? Yeah, that’s the goal. That’s always been the goal, motherfucker. Apologies to PBS.
The Found Emotion (Invoke Yourself) 