Watch “The F-Word.”

A father finds himself wading deep into the politics of language when his young daughter looks up from her coloring paper to ask “What does ‘fuck’ mean?” The dad, played by the comedian Chris Gethard, offers her a survey of the word’s meanings: how it can express pain or triumph, indicate sex or threat, or be sprinkled into otherwise vanilla sentences for simple emphasis. The short, directed by Alex and Paul Cannon, goes beyond dictionary definitions. As the two characters get into the grammar and start to appreciate the term’s versatility, they each end up revealing something unexpected about themselves.