ALBANY — I am no linguistic prude and I do not mind profanities. I have been known to use curse words from time to time. I try to employ them sparingly, as the situation warrants.

But lately, I have noticed that one of the all-time greatest expletives is being so overused that its power has been severely diluted. It runs the risk of becoming verbally irrelevant.

And that, gentle readers, would be a freaking shame.

I speak here of the F-bomb.

I work on a college campus and have noticed recently that the F-bomb is being tossed about in casual banter among young men and women the way filler words such as "um" and "like" and "ya know" and "man" used to be.

Once upon a time, it stopped me in my tracks because it is such a jarring word to overhear. It used to seem like the aural equivalent of a slap across the face. But I have grown numb to this daily fusillade of F-bombs that I move through. The word is so casually dropped into mundane conversations that it has begun to seem almost as natural as drawing a breath. I visit local high schools occasionally and work out at a local YMCA and I have observed the same trend among teens: F-bomb creep.

The word used to signal something taboo, a shocking utterance that had real potency. It possessed a galvanic force because it was employed sparingly and usually at a moment of extreme frustration – hitting your thumb with a hammer, stepping barefoot on a child’s Lego piece, getting off at the wrong highway exit, trying to put together a piece of IKEA furniture.

Nowadays, it is lazily inserted as an adjective and almost as an afterthought, reflecting more of a vocabulary deficiency than as a sign of a louche hipster.

The word, used as a sardonic question, has become its own social media meme. WTF commands several Twitter accounts, a podcast and a trending hashtag.

Hollywood is following suit. Marissa Martinelli writing in Slate recently ranked Martin Scorsese’s movies based on the number of F-bombs. She counted 136 uses of the word and its variations in the Academy Award-winning director’s latest film, "The Irishman." That’s a mere pittance of F-bombs compared to Scorsese’s "The Wolf of Wall Street" (569), "Casino" (422) and "Goodfellas" (300).

Merriam-Webster added the word to the dictionary in 2012, defining it as the four-letter word “used metaphorically as a euphemism.” The dictionary said the first known use of F-bomb was in 2005 when Major League Baseball analyst Timothy Kurkijan said Houston Astros pitcher Brad Lidge “dropped an F-bomb” during a live TV interview after his team clinched the National League Wild Card spot.

The ascendancy of the F-bomb says something about this cultural moment. It has infiltrated many arenas, including national politics. The junior senator from New York, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, made headlines in 2017 when she dropped a handful of F-bombs during a speech at the Personal Democracy Forum at New York University. “If we are not helping people, we should go the [F-bomb] home,” she was quoted as saying. She also dropped an F-bomb in a 2017 interview with New York magazine. In her 2014 memoir, “Off the Sidelines,” Gillibrand traced her foul mouth to her grandmother, Dorothea “Polly” Noonan, a powerful force in Albany’s Democratic machine. Gillibrand wrote that Noonan “could rattle off strings of expletives as long as a string of Christmas tree lights – five, eight even ten in a row, never the same curse twice.”

Edie Falco starred as Noonan in a 2018 Off-Broadway hit, “The True,” playwright Sharr White’s examination of the complicated love triangle of Noonan, Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd (played by Michael McKean) and Noonan’s husband, Peter (portrayed by Peter Scolari). I attended the show with my daughter, Caroline. White captured the essence of Albany’s bare-knuckle politics in 1977 with pitch-perfect tone. That was the year state senator Howard Nolan of Albany challenged Corning in a bitter and divisive Democratic mayoral primary – the only primary Corning faced in 11 terms.

In a bravura performance, Falco embodied the ferocity of Noonan, Corning’s confidante and defender. Playwright White dropped a lot of F-bombs into Falco’s lines and she delivered them with gusto. The words shocked and packed a punch the first few times, but after more than a dozen (I lost count), the F-bombs landed with a dull thud and lost their explosive power. By the end of the play, the high F-bomb count, along with a sprinkling of mother F-bombs, seemed stale and even a bit annoying.

The F-bomb is a Germanic word that traces its roots to the 16th century, but it was omitted as taboo by the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary when the “F” entries were compiled in the 1890s. The first time it was included in an English language dictionary was in 1965 by the Penguin Dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary began including the word in 1969, but it also published a “Clean Green” edition without the word to appease its profitable public high school market.

In the Times Union newsroom of the late-1980s and early-1990s, editor Harry Rosenfeld grew annoyed at the rise of the F-bomb and other swear words tossed around loudly and cavalierly – including at the afternoon news meeting of senior editors. Rosenfeld instituted an F-bomb ban and offenders had to fork over $1 for each infraction. The curse cash was kept in a jar and turned over to the newspaper’s charity to assist needy old people at the holidays. Rosenfeld was no petunia-mouthed editor and he, too, had to pay the fine. But it worked. It had a softening effect on the language, at least for a time. And the newsroom was none the worse for this small act of linguistic decorum.

While the F-bomb appears to be running rampant among young people, I am happy to report that I cannot recall a single instance among several friends in their 90s. I consider them wise elders and they have never dropped an F-bomb in my presence. Perhaps it is a generational thing, or maybe they have a deeper respect for the quality of public discourse.

My modest proposal is not for eradication of the F-bomb, but for limiting its use so that it retains its raw power. I don’t think that’s censorship, but rather common sense. Let us listen to our elders and restore this potent word to its rightful place.

Paul Grondahl is director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany and a former Times Union reporter. He can be reached at grondahlpaul@gmail.com.