A FRIEND of mine recently wrote a story about a guy who drives himself crazy because three girls in a row give him a brush-off. In a frenzy at the climax of the story, the guy tells the third girl, "If you don't want to go out with me, go fuck yourself!" The story ends with its hero in post-orgasmic ecstasy.

This would have been an effective ending, I thought, but for one curious fault: the word "fuck" seemed inadequate. Somehow that most onomatopoeic word for "doing it" just wasn't strong enough any more.

Ten years ago, of course, the word would have been perfect. Everyone understood exactly what it meant back then, and everyone would have considered it powerful enough--even shockingly so--for the situation above.

I sure would have. I first heard "fuck" just about ten years ago, when I was in the fourth grade, and it sounded so fine. I used it with gusto for at least three months before some sixth-grader finally explained what it meant. After that, my friends and I whispered it behind the coat rack at school and shouted it down at the river bank. We believed that the sixth-graders had made it up and that no girl had ever heard it, because it was for men only.

With disenchantment and a little pride I eventually learned that kids and adults everywhere use the word among themselves. I read it in books, too, usually the kind we bought at the bus station. I heard later that even Presidents use it. That was okay, though, because it was still the coveted property of all us men. Men have used "fuck" at least since Elizabethan times, passing it from mouth to mouth through the generations as the last word in verbal virility. So what if a woman or prude challenged one's masculinity? A man could always take refuge in "fuck".

BY NEW, however, all that has changed. Liberated chicks began slipping the word into conversations during this past decade but we didn't really mind, because it was still private and full of meaning. When good novels could no longer sell without it well, that was all right, too; it was passed strictly between the author (ess) and the reader.

But recently "fuck" has been thrown around publicly in all kinds of ways, and it has suffered accordingly. As Eldridge Cleaver and many others, including lots of young girls, openly exhorted us to fuck such undesirables as Reagan, Daley, and the Chicago police, the word began to lose both its masculinity and whatever juicy meaning it had left. It became, in effect, an extremely derogatory form of "damn." And now even that meaning is being diminished. People use "fuck" so freely, and so many respectable magazines have decided to print it wherever necessary, that at least one writer in Esquire has used **** instead.

It's all our fault, fellows. We've let our King of the Four Letter Words out into the open, and now the news media and everybody's sister have pounced on it and stripped it of its power. The Movement, as a matter of fact, is the main culprit. It crippled the word by allowing it to become a public symbol of rebellion. I'd bet that if Lyndon Johnson had another year in office, he would destroy "fuck" on national television, just as he destroyed "We Shall Overcome" and "the Ballot or the Bullet."

But that makes no differences; as a shocker, the word is dying. I haven't yet run across it in the Ladies' Home Journal, but then I don't read that magazine every month either. We may as well face reality. "Fuck," like "Agnew," is becoming a household word.