THE F-WORD
EDITED BY JESSE SHEIDLOWER
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Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press
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First published in 1995 by Random House
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The F-word / edited by Jesse Sheidlower. -- 3rd ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-539311-8
1. Fuck (The English word) 2. English language--Semantics.
3. English language--Etymology. 4. English language--Obscene words.
I. Sheidlower, Jesse.
PE1599.F83F2 2009
422--dc22
2009018730
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
’Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be looked upon and learned
—Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II
CONTENTS
Foreword by Lewis Black
Introduction
Introduction to the Third Edition
Acknowledgments
The F-Word
Foreword
Fuck
It is an honor and a privilege to be asked by the esteemed Oxford University Press to write the introduction to this wondrous book about the most important and powerful word in the English language. This is like a dream come true. A scholarly publisher of worldwide prestige has blessed this most sacred, most descriptive, most moving of all words.
“Fuck is a sacred word?” you ask.
Fucking A right it is. It is a word that one should not utter because it is such a terrible word of epic proportions, a word whose mere utterance is a sin. A fucking sin, can you imagine? That’s how fucking important fuck is.
And because it’s a sin, using it is so enticing to the young that when they hear it for the first time they are spellbound. And when they use it for the first time, that F and the U bang so deliciously against the hard K, ripping through the lips, it’s as if a caged animal has been unleashed. They feel that they have taken that first mighty step toward adulthood. Some of them may even repeat it over and over, testing to see if God will strike them down for saying it. It’s a word you don’t use in polite conversation or in front of your parents, which makes it even more glorious when chewed on and spit out in the schoolyard or in the bowels of the basement.
I can’t remember the first time I actually used the word myself, but I remember the feeling I had. I am convinced it is akin to a newly converted Christian when he cries out his first hallelujah. What bliss! What joy! What freedom!
Fuck, I believe, is one of the few words in the English language with true medicinal qualities. It clears our heads of the cobwebs that our bosses, our politicians, and our pundits seem to spin with their tired words and useless clichés. I am certainly no doctor, but I believe that judicious use of the word in times of extreme stress or irritation can work wonders for your colon, blood pressure, and central nervous system. It even works as an antidepressant. The word is so efficient, it’s like a miracle drug. One quick guttural expulsion is all you need (or sometimes two or three if things are really bad).
If this power isn’t enough to make fuck the language’s best word ever, remember there is no other word that is so spectacularly utilitarian. Fuck can work as a noun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective. And for many of us—and you New Yorkers know who you are— fuck isn’t even a word, it’s a comma. It can be placed at the end of a sentence to add emphasis to an idea. It can go at the end of a word to give it more punch. It even can be put in the middle of an existing word, giving it extra authority and impact. It’s an unbe-fucking-lievable word. Its gifts are too numerous to mention.
Now I must leave you as you enter the world that is Fuck.
You are fucking lucky to be here.
It’s almost utopian.
Lewis Black, New York, March 12, 2009
Introduction: About the F-Word
Etymology: Where It’s From
The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think. Acronyms are extremely rare before the 1930s, and etymologies of this sort—especially for older words—are almost always false. (The word posh does not come from “Port Outward, Starboard Home,” cop is not from “Constable On Patrol,” and tip is not from “To Insure Promptness.”) To this editor’s knowledge, the earliest suggestion of an acronymic etymology for fuck appears to be in the New York underground newspaper The East Village Other, on February 15, 1967: “It’s not commonly known that the word ‘fuck’ originated as a medical diagnostic notation on the documents of soldiers in the British Imperial Army. When a soldier reported sick and was found to have V.D., the abbreviation F.U.C.K. was stamped on his documents. It was short for ‘Found Under Carnal Knowledge.’” The more usual variant along these lines is “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge,” abbreviated to fuck and allegedly worn on a badge by convicted adulterers, rapists, or prostitutes in some mythical Olden Tymes; other variants include “Found in Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (specifically for adulterers) and “Forced Unsolicited Carnal Knowledge” (for rapists).
The other common acronym is “Fornication Under Consent of the King,” said to have been some form of license granted by a monarch, often specifically to repopulate the country after a plague. This variant is first found in 1970, in the May issue of Playboy: “My friend claims that the word fuck originated in the 15th Century, when a married couple needed permission from the king to procreate. Hence, Fornication Under Consent of the King. I maintain that it’s an acronym of a law term used in the 1500s that referred to rape as Forced Unnatural Carnal Knowledge.”
In reality, fuck is a word of Germanic origin. It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meanings such as ‘to strike’ or ‘to move back and forth’. Ultimately these words represent a family of loosely related verbs having the structural form f + a short vowel + a stop (a consonant such as k, d, g, or t, in which the flow of air from the mouth is briefly interrupted), often with an l or r somewhere in between. These words have the basic meaning ‘to move back and forth’, and often the figurative sense ‘to cheat’. English examples of this family—all found later than fuck—are fiddle, fidget, flit, flip, flicker, and frig.
The English word was probably borrowed in the fifteenth century from Low German, Flemish, or Dutch, though the word is found earlier in English than its equivalents in these languages. There is no way to know for sure which language is the ultimate source. Fuck is not an Anglo-Saxon word—the term “Anglo-Saxon” refers to the earliest period of English (now usually called Old English), before around AD 1100—and fuck is simply not found this early.
There are various claims that certain words in Old or Middle English represent early examples of fuck, but these are usually unprovable. For example, Carl Darling Buck, in his 1949 Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, cited a 1278 example of the name “John le Fucker.” However, he did not cite the source of this name, and no one has found a reference to it. More important, even if the source is authentic, there are many other possibilities for the name (the word fulcher ‘soldier’ being the most likely) other than an early example of fuck. However, if the bird name WINDFUCKER noun (or FUCKWIND noun) is ultimately related, it is interesting to note an occurrence of the surname Ric Wyndfuk and Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous, found from 1287 in documents related to Sherwood Forest, which may show another form of the bird name. Use in the sense of “to strike” could perhaps also be reflected by the surname Fuckebegger (also 1287); perhaps compare the Anglo-Norman surname Butevilein (literally ‘strike the churl or wretch’), found in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The relevance of superficially similar words in other languages— Latin futuere, for example—is small. Though the Latin word is vulgar and means ‘to copulate’, is it almost certainly not related to fuck, owing to complicated linguistic reasons that are beyond the scope of this introduction. Theories attempting to tie the word to words in other languages, sometimes via a proposed Indo-European root meaning ‘to strike’, are also uncertain.
Despite the importance of the F-word, scholars have yet to discover an example of fuck (or any of its Germanic relatives) before the late fifteenth century. The lateness of this evidence for the word may have more than one explanation. One possibility is simply that the word isn’t much older than that, that it was a new development at that time. The usual Middle English word for sexual intercourse was swive—a word that itself was considered vulgar—and fuck could have arisen to take its place as it became more rare. Another possibility for fuck is that the word carried a taboo so strong that it was never written down in the Middle Ages. The fact that its earliest known appearance in English, around 1475, is in a cipher lends surprising, though limited, support to this interpretation.
Since many of the earliest examples of the F-word come from Scottish sources, some scholars have suggested that it is a Norse borrowing, Norse having a much greater influence on the northern and Scottish varieties of English than on southern dialects. But the 1528 example at FUCKING adj. sense 1—found in that common source of bawdy jokes, a marginal note to a manuscript—and the pre-1500 ciphered example are both from England, proving that fuck was not restricted to Scotland in its earliest days. The explanation for the profusion of Scottish examples might be simply that the taboo against the word was less strong in Scotland.
Taboos against particular words or types of speech are not new. There is no shortage of evidence from the earliest times in England that certain forms of speech were restricted. As far back as the seventh century, there are records of a law from Kent reading, “If anyone in another’s house…shamefully accosts him with insulting words, he is to pay a shilling to him who owns the house.”
Curiously, the proposed etymology as an acronym does at least have a touch of realism about it. When purported acronymic origins are suggested, the original phrase usually sounds artificial, not like some real phrase in the language that would be common enough to be abbreviated. And so it is with “for unlawful carnal knowledge”—it has the ring of something that is made to sound like a stilted legal expression. But in fact, “unlawful carnal knowledge” is found in legal sources going back quite some time. The full phrase is first found in the South African Law Journal, volume 46, in 1929: “One of the latest instances occurred in the case of Alfred Ayles, sentenced at the Central Criminal Court in 1928 to seven years’ penal servitude for unlawful carnal knowledge of a child.” And the phrase “unlawful carnal knowledge” as used in definitions of rape under English Common Law can be found in Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and is still present in Northern Ireland’s current statute on sex offenders, the Statutory Instrument 1994 No. 2795 (N.I. 15) and the Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Order 1994: “procuring unlawful carnal knowledge of woman by threats or false pretences or representations or administering drugs…unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under 17 years of age” and others. Even earlier, this formula was found in criminal statutes throughout the southern United States, where rape was defined as “the unlawful carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” Such language is attested from the 1870s and 1880s from Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. All this evidence for the phrase still does not mean that the word fuck derives from this or any other acronym; it does not. However, it is notable that the story is at least not completely absurd.
In the category of folk etymology, a recent development has been the popularity of the “pluck yew” story, which conflates the origin of fuck with an earlier piece of folklore about the origin of the offensive backhand two-finger gesture (the British form of what is usually an extended middle finger in America). According to the original form of the tale, before the battle of Agincourt in 1415 (immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V) the French taunted the English longbowmen by waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers—used to pull back the bowstring—could never defeat the mighty French. After the English longbowmen rather convincingly demonstrated their superiority (10,000 French dead to a mere 29 Brits, in Shakespeare’s exaggerated count), the English responded by waving their two fingers back at the French in the now familiar gesture. The recent twist has been to use the fact that longbows were traditionally made of yew to claim that the act of drawing back the bowstring was called “plucking yew,” and thereby to assert that the victorious English not only waved their fingers at the French but shouted “We can still pluck yew! Pluck yew!” at them. A convenient sound change and a respelling brings us to the familiar phrase “fuck you.” This story, totally ludicrous in any version, was popularized on the NPR show Car Talk, where it was meant as a joke; it spread on the Internet in the 1990s as a serious explanation.
The Taboo Status of Fuck
The demand for bawdy humor meant that in the past, as now, writers found ways to use certain words even if such words were prohibited by social conventions. In Shakespeare, for instance, one can find two clear references to cunt. In Twelfth Night (Act II, scene v), Olivia’s butler Malvolio receives a letter written by Maria but in Olivia’s handwriting. Analyzing the script, Malvolio says, “By my life this is my lady’s hand. These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s.” With the and sounding like “N,” Shakespeare not only spells out cunt, but gets a pun on pee in there as well. And more famously, in Hamlet (Act III, scene ii) the prince uses the phrase “country matters” in a manner clearly alluding to cunt (Hamlet’s next crack is about what “lie[s] between maids’ legs”).
Though Shakespeare never actually uses fuck itself, his plays contain several examples of probable puns or references to the word. A Latin grammar lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act IV, scene i) gives us the focative case (punning on the vocative case, used for direct address), followed up immediately with a raft of lewd wordplay, including sexual puns on Latin words and references to various English words for the sexual organs. In Henry V (Act IV, scene iv) the notoriously bawdy Pistol threatens to “firk” an enemy soldier; though firk does have a legitimate sense ‘to strike’, which is appropriate here, it was used elsewhere in the Elizabethan era as a euphemism for fuck, and it is quite likely that Shakespeare had this in mind as well. In several places Shakespeare refers to the French word foutre, which is the literal (and also vulgar) equivalent of fuck; the most notable is this passage in Henry V (Act III, scene iv), in which Princess Katherine is having an English lesson:
KATHERINE. Comment appellez-vous les pieds et la robe? [What do you call le pied and la robe?]
ALICE. De foot, madame; et de cown [a French pronunciation of gown;
these English words sound like the French words foutre ‘fuck’ and con ‘cunt’].
KATHERINE. De foot et de cown? O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique! [Dear Lord! Those are bad-sounding words, wicked, vulgar, and indecent!]
Shakespeare elsewhere (2 Henry IV Act V, scene iii) has Pistol say, “A foutra for the world and worldlings base!” and in at least one place (Merry Wives of Windsor Act II, scene i) he uses foot as a probable pun on foutre. As the Henry V passage shows, Shakespeare was well aware that this word was vulgar—at least in French—and there is a good possibility that these examples are intended to represent the taboo English word fuck.
Though the evidence clearly shows that fuck was considered vulgar in Shakespeare’s time, it’s hard to tell just how bad it was. But we have a remarkably informative example from the late seventeenth century of the word’s status from a source unexpected in this early era: pornography. Though the amount of truly explicit English erotica before the Victorian era is small, there are exceptions, one of which is the 1680 The School of Venus, a translation of an earlier French work. This graphically illustrated book—surviving in only a single copy, in the Bayerischer Staats-bibliothek in Munich—is presented in the style of a dialogue between a sexually experienced older woman and her young niece, a format (common especially in the eighteenth century) allowing highly explicit discussions to appear in the guise of instruction. The author of this work appears to have been unusually interested in language: at one point the characters discuss the precise differences in meaning among occupy, fuck, swive, incunt, and other verbs, and elsewhere the older woman explains why men use offensive words like cunt during intercourse. And the reader is also treated to a clear statement of how offensive the word fuck was:
There are other words which sound better, and are often used before Company, instead of Swiving and Fucking, which is too gross and downright Bawdy, fit only to be used among dissolute Persons; to avoid scandal, men modestly say, I kissed her, made much of her, received a favor from her, or the like.
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