by Rufus Lodge
But, as Hamlet says to Laertes, ‘I have done you wrong’, sweet Bard. The clue is in that mysterious ‘suppofe’: there, as in the offending rabbit reference, a sinless ‘s’ has been printed as a fallacious ‘f’, translating a sucking rabbit (or someone who makes a habit of sucking these innocent furry creatures) into a fornicating example of the same mammal. A veritable comedy of errors, my lord.
How, you might ask, did the Bard convey the sense of the F-word without descending to such common tongue? By referring to an ‘act’, on occasion, as an abbreviation (though not too abbreviated, one hopes, for Juliet’s sake) of the enactment of copulation. On two occasions, however, Shakespeare was cunning enough a linguist to suggest the forbidden term whilst still being able to swear innocent intent.
The first returns us, inevitably, to the company of Falstaff, in the same play in which he debates the rearing habits of the rabbit. Near the climax of the drama, he is engaged in heated conversation with the aptly named Pistol, a hothead who is much given to letting rip with his own command of invective. Where his twenty-first-century equivalent might cry, ‘I don’t give a fuck about …’, Pistol opts for the safety of a foreign language, in this instance French, while still giving his monolingual audience enough of the F-sound to make his meaning entirely clear. So let’s hear him in action: ‘A foutra for the world and worldlings base!’ And, a few lines further: ‘A foutra for thine office’. Pistol certainly can’t be accused of going off half-cock. (For an entire scene devoted to the build-up to a ‘foutra’ joke, meanwhile, try Henry V, III. iv.)
Sir John Falstaff was also in the cast of Shakespeare’s second foray into F-word euphemism, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, IV.i. But for once he is out of the room when Sir Hugh Page, a Welsh parson of less learning than he assumes, gives the leading characters a break by quizzing young William Page about his knowledge of Latin grammar. Having led him through the pitfall-free ground of the nominative and accusative cases, he asks the boy to provide him with the ‘focative’. Good scholar that he is, William corrects him: ‘O, vocativo’. But Sir Hugh ploughs on with his ‘foc’-word, setting up Mistress Quickly for a particularly limp pun about a carrot. By the time that Sir Hugh moves on to the genitive case, the coarser element of the Elizabethan audience would doubtless have been in hysterics – repeating ‘He said “focative”!’ and ‘Ha, ha! “Genitive”!’ to each other like schoolboys who’d just learned Monty Python’s parrot sketch. Fortunately, as keen viewers of BBC3 will tell you, modern comedy is much more sophisticated.
Poetry in Flyte
It was, perhaps, the Renaissance equivalent of battle rap: two skilled artisans in the arts of insult and verse, flinging lines back and forth for the entertainment of a rabid crowd. This was not a beer-soaked hip-hop club on Detroit’s 8 Mile Road, however, but a rowdy evening at the court of King James IV of Scotland, circa 1500. The monarch would assemble his courtiers, and let loose two of his sharpest wordsmiths to heap invective and obscenity on each other’s head.
The result was a jolly good flyting, a word that promised scolding and wrangling with the overtones of violence. As the audience was hand-picked by the King, there were no holds barred – with the result that the strenuous Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie has passed into history as the earliest known printed text to include one of the rudest words in the Scottish (and English) language.
The two participants were William Dunbar and his slightly older but less celebrated opponent, Walter Kennedy. Dunbar was the man who would go down in literary history, the Ali to Kennedy’s Frazier; but it was the lesser-ranked fighter who was credited in the 1507 anthology of Dunbar’s verse with calling his antagonist a ‘fantastic fule’ and ‘ignorant elf’ to warm himself up, before delivering his killer lines: ‘Skaddit shaitbird and common shamelar/Wanfukkit funling that Natour maid ane yrle’. Which translates, roughly, as ‘Mangy rascal and common scrounger/Misbegotten [wanfukkit, or produced by an unhappy act of intercourse] foundling that Nature made a midget’.
Dunbar wasn’t a man to let that kind of thing stand unanswered, of course, and he quickly replied with some delicious lines alleging that Kennedy was both ‘cuntbitten’ and ‘beschitten’. Ah, the magic of poetry …
What isn’t clear is how these insults were recorded for posterity, the court of James IV being intolerably ill-supplied with cassette recorders or iPhones. Did the King’s retinue include the speediest scribe in the land? Did both men actually arrive with their anger pre-cooked, and merely pass over their manuscripts to an editor at the end? Or did Dunbar, in fact, cook up the whole stew himself, thereby entitling himself to sole credit for the results? History does not tell us. Nor, after the sixteenth century, did collections of verse dare to reproduce the most extreme of the two poets’ slingshots in full: ‘wanfukkit’ was quietly censored to read ‘wanthriven’; ‘cuntbitten’ revised as ‘flaebittin’, suggesting that those midges were every bit as annoying four hundred years ago as they are today.
Grose Vulgarity
Of all the lexicographers, etymologists, encyclopedics, and anoraks who have devoted their lives to chronicling the English language at its most blunt and disorderly, the award for displaying the most conspicuous courage in dictionary corner must go to Francis Grose. Aptly named, you might think, and the surviving engraving of his friendly form does suggest that he was the answer to the oft-voiced question, ‘Who ate all the pies?’. But Grose deserves every credit for his lifelong quest to bring recherché knowledge into the public eye. He penned comprehensive (for the late eighteenth century) volumes devoted to sites where antiquities might be found; to the history of armour and weaponry; and to local proverbs gathered from every nook and cranny of the British Isles.
His enduring monument, though, was his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, first published in 1785 and reprinted many times thereafter – although as the boundaries of good taste narrowed during the nineteenth century, later editions tended to remove some of Grose’s more daring entries.
From the start, he was prepared for outrage from the disgusted citizens of the newly fashionable resort of Tunbridge Wells. ‘To prevent any charge of immorality being brought against this work,’ he declared in his introduction, ‘the Editor begs leave to observe that when an indelicate or immodest word has obtruded itself for explanation, he has endeavoured to get rid of it in the most decent manner possible; and none have been admitted but such, as could not be left out, without rendering the work incomplete.’ Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Daring though Grose was in the collecting of his vulgar language, there were some words that still had to be hidden beneath a veil of modesty. Most extreme was ****, which could not even be included in the alphabetical dictionary without revealing its identity. But Grose did offer some clues: a ‘nincompoop’, he declared, was ‘one who never saw his wife’s ****’; while a gentleman who entered a woman without sparing any of his vital fluids could be said to have ‘made a coffee house out of a woman’s ****’. Not that Grose was exactly short of synonyms for a woman’s mysterious ****. Among them were her ‘bite’, ‘bumbo’ (as used, apparently, by ‘Negroes’), ‘Carvel’s ring’, ‘cauliflower’, ‘cock alley’, ‘cock lane’, ‘commodity’, ‘dumb glutton’, ‘gigg’, ‘madge’ (has Madonna been told?), ‘mantrap’, ‘money’ (rather alarmingly, this was used only of young girls), ‘muff’ (oops, nearly given the game away), and ‘notch’.
On special occasions, the woman’s **** could be joined with the man’s ****, or, in other words, his ‘prick’, ‘tarse’, or ‘plug tail’, kept fuelled by his ‘bawbels’, ‘gingambobs’, ‘nutmegs’, ‘tallywags’, ‘tarrywags’, and ‘whirlygigs’ (don’t try that one at home). The act of union could be described (yes, even in 1785) as ‘making the beast with two backs’, ‘making a buttock ball’, doing a ‘clickit’ (as foxes do, noisily, at night), ‘docking’ (think space capsules), ‘humping’ (going out of fashion by the 1780s, we learn), ‘joining giblets’ (very romantic they were, in t
he late eighteenth century), ‘creating a goats-gigg’, ‘strumming’ or ‘knocking’ (a man did this to a woman), ‘mowing’ (but only in Scotland; in England, you better keep off the grass), ‘screwing’, ‘wapping’ (now we know why Rupert Murdoch based his newspapers there), or, most common of all in the years preceding 1800, ‘swiving’. In order to prevent an unwanted outcome, a man might choose to ‘fight in armour’ by wearing a ‘c-d-m’ (that’s a ‘cundum’ to you and me, sir).
Some gentlemen preferred not to bother with the ladies at all, and might fairly be described as a ‘back gammon player’, an ‘indorser’, ‘a madge cull’ (doing away with a ‘madge’, presumably), a ‘shitten prick’ (slightly too graphic, that one), or as frequenting the ‘windward passage’ (much more poetic).
If more solitary pleasure was intended, a man (but obviously never a woman) might ‘frig’ (‘to be guilty of the crime of self-pollution’), ‘get cockroaches’ (maybe I’m doing it wrong), ‘box the Jesuit’ (likewise), or ‘mount a corporal and four’ (the corporal is the thumb, and you can work out the rest for yourselves). Once he’d tired of playing by himself, the man could entice the lower class of woman to perform ‘bagpipes’ upon him (‘a lascivious practice too indecent for explanation’), give him a good ‘huffle’ (‘a piece of beastiality too filthy for explanation’, but strangely similar to that bagpipes manoeuvre), or even indulge him in a quick spasm of ‘larking’ (‘a lascivious practice that will not bear explanation’, even here, where I can only refer you to a modern dictionary and the word ‘irrumation’).
Many of Grose’s definitions shine a surreal light upon the habits and prejudices of 1785, not least the three-and-a-half pages he devoted (in a dictionary!) to a diatribe against gypsies. He was greatly interested in the word ‘dildo’, defined thus: ‘an implement resembling the virile member, for which it is said to be substituted, by nuns, boarding school misses, and others obliged to celibacy, or fearful of pregnancy’. These unusual objects ‘are to be had at many of our toy shops and nick nackatories’, though I wouldn’t advise you to enquire at Toys R Us.
It’s intriguing, to say the least, to discover that the eighteenth-century gentleman needed a phrase to describe ‘a lighted candle stuck into the private parts of a woman’, which was known as a ‘burning shame’. Maybe the candle was an attempt to burn the disease out of a ‘fireship’ (a woman with a STI), who was suffering perhaps from ‘French Disease’ (damn those dirty frogs) or ‘Drury Lane Ague’ (known today as luvvie’s syndrome). Of course, all that unpleasantness could be avoided by a ‘flogging cully’: ‘one who hires girls to flog him on the posterior, in order to procure an erection’ (the life of an architect was clearly not a happy one).
But you haven’t come to the pages of this book for such trivia, I hear you say. So we move, at last, to the pages of the dictionary devoted to words beginning with the letter ‘F’, of which precisely two had to be abridged in the interests of public decency: ‘f—k’ (meaning ‘to copulate’, you will be startled to discover); and ‘f—k beggar’, which is of course a synonym for ‘buss beggar’; you know, ‘an old superannuated fumbler’, fumbling in this instance suggesting that the architect’s erection might be less sturdy than he was hoping. There was one further reference to our favourite word, in the appearance of ‘duck f-ck-r’, which Grose helpfully defined as ‘the man who has the care of the poultry on board a ship of war’ (no bestiality in the Navy, maties).
Of course, as keen lexicographers, you will be much more interested to know that, in Grose’s alphabet, words beginning with ‘I’ and ‘J’ intermingled in a saucy manner, as if the two letters were interchangeable; and that ‘V’ came before ‘U’ (whereas a gentleman always makes sure that ‘U’ should come first).
Doctor in the House
Doctor Samuel Johnson is still revered today as the doyen of dictionary makers, despite – or perhaps because of – his refusal to countenance the inclusion of any language that he could not repeat in genteel society. Yet the doctor was not deaf to the existence of such terms. In a true meeting of eighteenth-century giants, Johnson was once asked by actor David Garrick to name the greatest pleasure in life. His reply, Garrick related, was ‘fucking; and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were no more drunkards, for all could drink, though all could not fuck.’
One of those who could undoubtedly do both was Johnson’s Boswell – the original Boswell of the cliché, in fact, who in his journals reported that a prostitute named Louise had congratulated him on the remarkable feat of achieving intercourse five times within a single night. This was, of course, James Boswell, who dogged the doctor’s footsteps for several decades, committing all the great man’s aperçus et bons mots to paper. He duly chronicled the ‘fucking and drinking’ quip, but (to the disappointment of students for centuries thereafter) elected not to include it in his epic Life of Samuel Johnson, reserving his multiple volumes for all the discussions in which the doctor triumphed over his interlocutors without resorting to the F-word.
All Over the Effing Place
(Some of) the Many Faces of the F-Word
FUCK: verb (intransitive)
To have sexual intercourse. ‘I fuck as often as I can.’
FUCK: verb (transitive)
To have sexual intercourse with someone. ‘I fuck my wife as often as I can.’
To damn or dismiss something or somebody: ‘Fuck my wife!’
To exploit: ‘If she asks for a divorce, I’m going to fuck her completely when it comes to a settlement.’
FUCK: verb (often with additions)
To mess things or people up: ‘I’m going to fuck up my wife and fuck with her head for asking for a divorce.’
To make a mistake: ‘I may have fucked up when I told her I fancied my secretary.’
FUCK: noun
The act of sexual intercourse: ‘I caught my wife having a fuck with her lover.’
One thrust in the act of sexual intercourse: ‘Then she said that he gave her one last enormous fuck, and she came. Again.’
Someone who has sexual intercourse: ‘I’m the best fuck in town, despite what my wife may tell you.’
A bastard, a rascal: ‘That guy who’s fucking my wife is such a fuck.’
Something of no value: ‘I couldn’t give a fuck about that fucker.’
Something of some quantity: ‘She says his organ is as big as fuck.’
FUCK: exclamation (often with additions)
An expression of contempt: ‘Fuck off! What do you see in this guy?’
An expression of annoyance: ‘Fuck! I saw him at the golf club. His penis is huge!’
An expression of surprise: ‘Fuck me! How does he get it in his trousers?’
FUCKER: noun
Someone who has sexual intercourse: ‘She says her lover is an amazing fucker …’
A bastard, a rascal: ‘… but he’s just a complete fucker as far as I’m concerned.’
Something bad: ‘She’s leaving me for him. Isn’t that a fucker?’
FUCKED: adjective
Pertaining to sexual intercourse: ‘She said that for the first time in her life she felt utterly and completely fucked.’
Pertaining to exhaustion: ‘And then she had the nerve to say, “We’ve done it so many times, I’m completely fucked”.’
Pertaining to drink/drugs: ‘I had so many vodkas to get over the shock that I was completely fucked.’
Pertaining to exploitation: ‘She’s getting fucked, and I’m left feeling fucked.’
Pertaining to mental derangement: ‘She is totally fucked, going for this guy, just because he’s great in bed. And has a huge penis. And an apartment in Nice. And a private jet.’
FUCKING: noun
An act of sexual intercourse: ‘She says he’s coming round again tonight, to give her a proper fucking.’
An act of exploitation: ‘I’m paying the bills, he’s screwing my wife, and I’m getting a good fucking.’
FUCKING: participl
e
Having sexual intercourse: ‘I caught the pair of them, fucking on the new sofa. Where did we get it? Ikea, actually.’
FUCKING: intensifying adjective
Something negative and annoying: ‘That sofa is fucking ruined.’
A sentence-filler that expresses extreme emotion: ‘No one seems to want to go near it. I might as well chop the fucking thing off.’
Extensions
A Bit on the Side
Not content with its reputation as an all-purpose, linguistic assault weapon, the F-word also has a penchant for seeking out company. It has the power to transform the most innocent of words into verbal grenades, as these examples demonstrate …
ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY: A prime example of what the linguists call ‘infixation’, in which one word insists on sitting right in the middle of another. Now you know what it’s called, you can make up your own examples.
BUMBLEFUCK: ‘Bumble’ stands for ‘bumbling idiot’; ‘fuck’ stands for everything that it usually does. So a ‘bumblefuck’ is a ‘fucker’ who is also an idiot: or an idiot, in other words. When applied to a situation, a bumblefuck is one that was probably designed by a whole circus of bumblefucks, and thus should be avoided wherever possible.
BUMFUCK: Forget the obvious definition, which is … yes, you’ve got it. A ‘bumfuck’ can also be a ‘bum fuck’: that is, someone with whom it is not much fun to share a sleeping bag. On the basis that someone’s sexual etiquette is probably a reflection of their wider character, the word can also be applied to a person who is unpleasant with clothes on or off.