One of the best parts of Stephen King’s “It” is how King fully embraces the 1958 vibe of the children’s timeline. King himself was a child in 1958, so he drew on the slang he and his friends used, with a specificity that would have been difficult to grasp if he hadn’t been there himself.
King’s experience as a child of the ’50s and a teenager of the ’60s proved useful to the writers of the upcoming HBO series “It: Welcome to Derry.” Showrunners Andy and Barbara Muschietti, both born a generation after King, don’t have this intimate knowledge of ’50s slang and profanity, so they relied on the author himself to help write the dialogue for these 1962 child characters.
“In these exchanges, there’s a lot of detail that you can’t get unless you’re talking to someone from that generation,” Andy Muschietti said of King in the latest issue of SFX Magazine. He added:
“One of the most special moments we had in all of these developments was when Steve writes an email and says, ‘Well, we didn’t use the word ‘f***’ much when we were kids. In fact, if you said ‘f***’ or ‘f***ing’ in front of someone, you’d expect to get knocked down.’ So he wrote a whole email about the word ‘f***ing’ because, of course, there’s a lot of swearing in our movies.”
The lack of f-words in 1950s slang is visible throughout the book. While modern kids would tell talkative Richie to “shut up,” kids in 1958 would instead say, “Beep, beep, Richie.” You might think this is the author sanitizing the story, but the rest of the book – which doesn’t shy away from describing the offhand insults people would throw at the time – makes it clear that that’s not what’s happening here.
The F-word has certainly evolved over the years
It’s easy to understand what King means, because even in the last 20 years you can definitely see the decline in the taboo nature of the f-bomb. I often hear children today say this word, and their parents barely pretend to be angry with them. We’ve reached a point where even milquetoast self-help books will have swearing in the title, and teenagers will mock these titles for trying too hard.
Perhaps the clearest sign of changing times is how politicians have used it. Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke called a guy a “son of a bitch” at a 2022 campaign rally, and people barely noticed. Some Republicans tried to denounce this, but they couldn’t because, look at all the really vile things their leader has said. At some point, swearing by politicians ceased to be a memorable thing for voters, even though 20 years ago it would have gotten them into serious trouble. By 2025, we’ve reached a point where a politician saying the f-word seems more corny than dangerous. Once Chuck Schumer starts dropping F-bombs, you know the word has lost all its bite.
Another indicator comes from reactions to this word broadcast live on television. When Charles Rocket said “f***in'” on an episode of “Saturday Night Live” in 1981, it shocked the nation. He had to go on an apology tour to NBC executives and was fired a few weeks later. Meanwhile, in a 2018 “SNL” sketch, host Sam Rockwell accidentally let the f-word slip, and everyone found the mistake charming. In the late 1950s, in Stephen King’s “It,” saying “f***” on live television would have horrified half the audience; today, they would forget about it by the time the series went to commercial.
