The Four F's

So I'm slowly getting through this Physiological Psychology book. Really I'm only reading it for about 30 mins twice a week, and it's pretty dense stuff (for me at least) so I'm only about 90 pages into it. I really like it, this stuff is so interesting. Did you know that if you unfolded the gray matter of the average brain it would stretch out to about 2.5 feet square? Or that your brain is so gelatinous that, without your skull, it wouldn't be able to support its own weight and would likely squish itself all over the place? Neat, huh?

Well, I'm reading along and I get to a section discussing the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that "organizes behaviors related to survival of the species -- the so-called four F's: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and mating."

Mind you, I'm sitting in the quiet reading room of the library when I get to this... I pause and think to myself, 'that's only 3 F's...' Then I, pretty loudly, let out a single "HA!" when I figured it out... F*CKING! I guess the author was a little concerned about dropping the F-bomb in his textbook, or perhaps his publisher didn't like the idea. But really, if you're gonna say "The four F's" then you need four F's. I've seen this before in other books and they do just fine with the word fornicate. Although, maybe the author is having a little fun leaving it ambiguous, this way his readers get to fill in whatever enthymeme they want to, whether it's f*ck, fornicate, or fondle... although I don't fondling can be considered a necessary to the survival of the species.