term F-Bomb

The English language is not administered in an authoritarian manner. We have no analog to L'academie Française to keep slang and foreign words out of the dictionary; no government department like pre-war Germany to coin words like Kraftwagen and Fernsprecher in order to prevent the invasion of alien words like "automobile" and "telephone."

No one keeps our language "pure." That's been a difficult task since the Romans added all their ecclesiastical and administrative words to Anglo-Saxon, and it became hopeless when the Normans occupied Britannia, made French the official language, and overlaid a superstrate of thousands of words of Latin/French origin about business, government, education and daily life on Middle English--even everday words like color, face, question, second and use. And of course science and academia have added so many "modern" Latin and Greek words (including some bizarre Greek-Latin hybrids that neither Homer nor Caesar would have understood like "television") to our lexicon that "pure English" is almost impossible to define. One of the things that makes our language great is its ability to easily borrow foreign words. This is much more difficult in highly inflected languages like Russian or languages with highly constrained phonetics like Chinese.

English is more of a democratic language. Any words that come into wide use, and remain in wide use for a reasonable period of time, are accepted by the organizations that publish our dictionaries. These days, at least in the USA, dictionary.com is our default authority because A) it exists in cyberspace where we all now live, and B) it is a compendium of the entries and definitions from all the respected print-media American dictionaries.

As a practical matter, the news media function as our gatekeeper. When a word has appeared in print on a regular basis over a reasonable span of time, the dictionaries pick it up. I'm fairly certain that the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), which serves the non-North American portion of the world's anglophone community, works on the same principle: they take their words from the news media after allowing a reasonable time for temporary fads to blow over.

The term "F-bomb" was (IMHO) a rather clever coinage on the model of "A-bomb" (atomic bomb) and "H-bomb" (hydrogen bomb), implying that it, too, has explosive power. In fact it specifically refers to saying the word f*** out loud in a situation where it is guaranteed to cause great offense.

I've been conscious of "F-bomb" for at least five years, and I've seen reports (which I don't have handy to cite) that it goes back about twenty years. That gives it enough staying power to merit a place in the dictionary.