The F-Word

by Jesse Sheidlower

  It took a bit more time for the word to penetrate the pages of the august The New Yorker. The editorship of Tina Brown was credited—more usually, faulted—with that journal’s frequent use of the word, and though writers did use it with increasing frequency under Ms. Brown, in fact fuck appeared there, spelled in full, more than once during the editorship of her predecessor, the puritanical William Shawn. Calvin Trillin quoted a Nebraska farmer: “Goddam fuckin’ Jews!… They destroyed everything I ever worked for!” (March 18, 1985), and Bobbie Ann Mason used the word in a short story: “Maybe you have to find out for yourself. Fuck. You can’t learn from the past” (June 3, 1985). The current editor, David Remnick, continues to allow the word to appear as necessary, and it is not uncommon in fiction, reportage, or even editorial text.

  Major American newspapers were typically slow to include fuck for any reason (in Britain, as we have seen, the coverage of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case led to the word’s appearance in several papers there). The Los Angeles Times first used it in 1991, in an article about an attempted coup in Moscow that quoted Gorbachev shouting “Fuck off!” at some conspirators. The Washington Post’s first use was in 1992, in a direct quote about the final days of a death-row inmate.

  Next came the remarkable appearance of fuck, spelled in full, in the pages of the New York Times (and many other newspapers). The Times’s policies on offensive language are usually quite conservative, often to the extent that articles specifically about obscene words do not provide enough information for the reader to determine what the article is about. But in 1998, having committed itself to printing the Starr Report, the Times was obligated to include the money passage on page B6 of its issue of September 12: “Ms. Lewinsky said she wanted two things from the President. The first was contrition: He needed to ‘acknowledge…that he helped fuck up my life.’”

  Another notable political use led to a prominent appearance of fuck in the Washington Post. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney, exasperated with a political opponent, told him, on the floor of the Senate, to fuck himself. The Post ran an article about the encounter on June 25, with more sly wit than one is accustomed to see in political reporting: “The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice. ‘Fuck yourself,’ said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.” Though Cheney and the Republican Party were often said to be in favor of civil exchanges—the same day as this encounter, the Senate had passed the Defense of Decency Act— the Vice President defended his statement, claiming that it made him “feel better.” The Post’s editor personally approved the appearance of the word, on the grounds that Cheney’s remark had appeared in public and “not in a casual way,” though the paper’s ombudsman felt that the “heartbeat” retort was “smart-alecky.”

  In Britain, the earliest use in Parliament was apparently in 1982, when Labour MP Reg Race referred in the House of Commons to advertisements for prostitutes that read, “Phone them and fuck them.” Hansard, the official publication of Parlimentary transcripts, rendered the word as “f***.”

  The F-Word in Movies

  In other media, the word has slipped in on occasion, but it seems that in the movie world, no one even tried to have fuck uttered on the screen until people were ready for it. The abandonment of the Hays Code, the censorship guidelines agreed to by major motion picture studios, in 1968, effectively allowed the word to be used in studio films, and its first appearance in mainstream movies was in 1970. During a football game in the antiwar black comedy MASH, one of the MASH linemen says to an opponent, “All right, bud, your fucking head is coming right off.” Also in 1970, Myra Breckenridge, a sexually frank film based on Gore Vidal’s novel, used the word several times; this film, often regarded as one of the worst ever made, had little influence.

  Though 1970 was the first time fuck appeared in a major film, it had earlier been used in several avant-garde productions. A 1967 Irish production of Joyce’s Ulysses, featuring a script taken almost entirely from the book itself, used the word; the film was not allowed to be shown in general release in Ireland until 2000. The 1967 British film I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname, which portrayed a disillusioned advertising executive who drops out of corporate life, also used fuck in the dialogue; in the United States the film was denied an MPAA seal of approval because of a scene implying oral sex between the executive and his mistress. And yet again in 1967, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary about Bob Dylan, Dont Look Back, shows Dylan drunkenly asking, “Who threw that fucking glass in the street? Who threw it? I’m not going to get fucking blamed for that.”

  A number of films are regarded as extreme in the number of times fuck has been used in them. Until recently, it was very difficult to get more than an impressionistic idea of frequency. But there are now several Web sites devoted to tracking the uses of obscenity in film—usually intended for parents to determine how appropriate a film is for children—and so a more accurate breakdown is possible.

  The standout among all mainstream films is, appropriately, the 2005 documentary Fuck, a film about the word itself (in which this editor had a minor role), which used a form of fuck 824 times in 93 minutes, for an average of 8.86 uses per minute. In second place, and with the highest number of uses in a narrative film, is 1997’s Nil by Mouth, written and directed by the actor Gary Oldham, about a lower-class family in London, which had 428 fucks. Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Casino rounds out the top three with 398. Other high-ranking films include Summer of Sam, Menace II Society, and Goodfellas. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, often regarded as exceptionally vulgar, make the list down at numbers 20 and 21, with 269 and 265 fucks, respectively.

  The F-Word in Titles

  It should not be surprising that the appearance of fuck in titles, band names, and the like is a relatively recent phenomenon. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “The Big Space Fuck” was published in Harlan Ellison’s 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions; Vonnegut later claimed that it was “the first story in the history of literature to have ‘fuck’ in its title.” This is not strictly true. The earliest work of any sort with fuck in the title is apparently the 1879 erotic work A New and Gorgeous Pantomime Entitled Harlequin Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fairfuck, or the Frig, the Fuck and the Fairy (cited in this dictionary as Harlequin Prince Cherrytop). In “proper” literature, Ed Sanders’s underground Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts, which began publication in 1962, is likely the earliest. Similarly the poet Douglas Blazek, one of the founders of the “Mimeo Revolution” of self-published poetry, published Fuck Off Unless You Take Off That Mask in 1969.

  In 1968, the British writer J. G. Ballard published a pamphlet entitled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, written as a scientific paper analyzing Reagan’s psychosexual appeal. When this paper was included as an appendix to his 1970 collection The Atrocity Exhibition, Doubleday, Ballard’s American publisher, pulped the entire printing.

  The practical difficulty of using fuck in a title is that most mainstream publications, even today, will not be able to write about it. It is not clear what the intended title is of Greg Araki’s 1993 gay-themed film Totally F***ed Up; the title is thus in its own advertising material, but the title may be meant to be spelled without any asterisks. Arthur Neresian’s 1997 novel The Fuck-Up is perhaps one of the more prominent nonunderground works of this type, but Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 play Shopping and Fucking was also notable. Shocking for its sexually violent content as well as its title, the play has received various forms of treatment from different publications. When the New York Times reviewed a 2005 New York revival, too prominent to ignore, it used Shopping And.…

  The earliest use of fuck in the title of a scholarly paper, according to the MLA bibliography, is Roger Luckhurst’s “Shut(ting) the Fuck Up: Narrating Blue Velvet in the Postmodernist Frame,” published in 1989 in the journal Bête Noire. The first scholarly paper to be titled “Fuck” exclusively seems to be one by Christopher M. Fairman, a professor at Ohio State, first published in 2006 as
the Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series No. 59. The paper analyzes various legal implications of the use of the word.

  The F-Word in Dictionaries

  The first appearance of fuck in a dictionary was in John Florio’s Worlde of Words, a comprehensive Italian-English dictionary published in 1598—before any monolingual dictionary of English had yet appeared. It was one of five synonyms given to translate the Italian word fottere; the others were jape, sard, swive, and occupy. Fuck was first included as a main entry, in its proper alphabetic place, in Stephen Skinner’s Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae (1671), a dictionary of English etymology that was written in Latin.

  Samuel Johnson’s immediate predecessor, Nathan (or Nathaniel) Bailey, listed the word, with a Latin definition, in his 1721 Universal Etymological English Dictionary. Bailey’s popular 1730 follow-up, the Dictionarium Britannicum, contained the curious note that it was “a term used of a goat”; this odd limitation may have been intended to mitigate the inclusion of the word (words inappropriate to humans might be allowable if referring to animals) and not as an indication of actual usage. Samuel Johnson excluded it from his great dictionary in 1755, but he made a conscious decision to omit vulgar words, so the absence of it from his dictionary does not indicate the word’s rarity. Still, the word’s omission provided one of the great dirty-words-in-dictionaries anecdotes: when complimented by a lady for having left out this and other offensive words, Johnson is said to have replied, “No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers. I find, however, that you have been looking for them.”

  The last general dictionary of this era to include fuck seems to have been John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1775, and still containing the word in its 1795 second edition. Ash—a Baptist minister—called it “a low vulgar word,” and defined it as “to perform the act of generation, to have to do with a woman.” Ash also included cunt in both editions of his dictionary, also marked as vulgar and defined as “the female pudendum.” After Ash, it was to be 170 years until fuck again appeared in a general dictionary.

  In the late Victorian era, the great slang dictionary of the time, John Farmer and W. E. Henley’s Dictionary of Slang and Its Analogues, featured extensive treatments of cunt and fuck in volumes published in 1891 and 1893, respectively. The entries included compounds, phrases, and numerous dated quotations. Though the volumes were privately published for subscribers only, Farmer’s original printer refused to print the second volume of the work after seeing the nature of the contents, and Farmer took him to court to recover the costs of switching printers at such short notice. Despite the claim that the work served a historical and scholarly purpose, the jury, shocked by the extent of the obscene vocabulary, found for the defendant.

  Even in the twentieth century the presence of fuck in specialized dictionaries has caused problems. The slang lexicographer Eric Partridge included over a dozen F-words in the first edition of his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, but he spelled the word “f*ck.” In spite of this, his compilation, in that and its various later editions, generated protests to the police, school authorities, and libraries; as late as the 1960s special permission was needed to view it in some libraries. In his etymological dictionary Origins, published in 1958, Partridge added a second asterisk to make the word a potentially less offensive “f**k.” The missing letters were restored to the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in its Supplement of 1967.

  Other large general dictionaries cannot be seriously faulted for omitting the word, given the tenor of the times. The next major dictionary to miss its chance was Webster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961. Groundbreaking in its approach to slang and colloquial language—for which it was harshly condemned by many critics—the Third did include cunt, and had set a fuck entry into type, but the officers of the G. & C. Merriam Co. vetoed it at the last minute. (The linguist Mario Pei criticized the dictionary’s “residual prudishness” in a review.)

  Similarly inhibited was Random House, whose 1966 Random House Dictionary of the English Language was the other great dictionary of the 1960s. Jess Stein, the editor-in-chief, told the New York Times about a meeting he convened with the company’s editorial and sales staff to discuss cunt and fuck: “When I uttered the words, there was a shuffling of feet, and a wave of embarrassment went through the room. That convinced me the words did not belong in the dictionary, though I’m sure I’ll be attacked as a prude for the decision.” Stein did not have to wait long to be proven right on the last point: a mere two weeks later, on September 30, the Times’s own book reviewer wrote, “Unfortunately, a stupid prudery has prevented the inclusion of probably the most widely-used word in the English language. The excuse here, no doubt, is ‘good taste’; but in a dictionary of this scope and ambition the omission seems dumb and irresponsible.”

  Only the previous year, the British Penguin English Dictionary, edited by G. N. Garmonsway, had become the first general English dictionary to include fuck since Ash’s 1795 second edition. The entry—“ludicrously brief,” in the words of OED editor Robert Burchfield—consisted in its entirety of “(vulg) (of males) have sexual intercourse (with).” In America the honor of first inclusion fell to the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary—ironically, given the otherwise conservative approach that dictionary took to language issues. The treatment was reasonably full, with five verb senses, two noun senses, and adjective and adverb entries. All were labeled “Vulgar.”

  The words cunt and fuck had been kept out of the Oxford English Dictionary—the F entries were edited in the 1890s—though by the time the editors made it to W in the 1920s, they decided to enter windfucker as a name for the kestrel. Eric Partridge reported a discussion with C. T. Onions, one of the OED’s editors, about why the earlier editors had left out cunt and fuck. Onions: “They considered the two unspeakables to be also unprintables…and although I cannot speak for Craigie, I do myself think them beyond the pale of all decency .… I wouldn’t have liked my own children to find these words in a volume on my library shelves.” Partridge countered by observing that people would never find the words if they didn’t already know to look for them, to which Onions grudgingly answered, “Yes, perhaps, perhaps, but I still think the OED was right to ban them.”

  The omission of these words had been objected to at least as early as 1934, when the linguist A. S. C. Ross (now best known for the concept of “U and non-U” language, popularized by Nancy Mitford) reviewed the first OED Supplement (1933) in the scholarly journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. Ross wrote,

  As regards the latter [i.e. “obscene” words] there appears to have been a definite policy of omission; it certainly seems regrettable that the perpetuation of a Victorian prudishness (inacceptable [sic] in philology beyond all other subjects) should have been allowed to lead to the omission of some of the commonest words in the English language.… Often the words are attested from an early period and their omission from the NED [as the OED was then called] has sometimes led to the anomaly of their not appearing in the standard etymological dictionaries either.

  Some other comprehensive scholarly dictionaries had included these words. The Middle English Dictionary published a full treatment of cunte in 1961; fuck is not attested in Middle English and thus could not have been included. There are very brief entries for fuck and some derivatives in the section of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue that appeared in the late 1940s, but the citations consisted only of bibliographic references, without the quotation text itself, forcing readers to go to the library if they wanted to see the context.

  Fuck and cunt finally entered the OED in 1972 with the publication of the first volume (A–G) of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. When Robert Burchfield accepted the editorship of the Supplements in 1957, he thought that “the time had not yet come” to include the word, but he eventually changed his mind. After consulting scholars around the globe and drafting entries for the words, Bur
chfield wrote to the Delegates of Oxford University Press that the draft entries were “based on the printed evidence which, though scanty in some centuries, is substantial enough to permit the compilation of articles comparable in quality with those for other words of similar date.” And in 1968 the Delegates, as well as the Proctors of the University of Oxford itself, approved the inclusion of the two words in recognition that “standards of tolerance have changed and their omission has for many years, and more frequently of late, excited critical comment.”

  Euphemism and Taboo Avoidance

  As one can see from the entry for EFF in this book, the use of the first letter of fuck as a euphemism for the word itself arose by the 1920s at the latest. There are earlier precedents for this dodge. In H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the librettist Sir W. S. Gilbert alludes to the use of damn:

  Though “Bother it” I may?

  Occasionally say,

  I never use a big, big D.

  A fascinating—and much earlier—parallel is found in classical Latin, as David L. Gold has shown in a recent article. In his Menippeae, Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) writes psephistis dicite labdeae. The sense of the first word in this context is not known, but the next two words are clear: they are an allusion to the Latin idiom laecasin dicere “to tell (someone) to go to hell,” which literally means “to tell (someone) to suck,” and is based on , a vulgar Greek verb for fellate. (Labdeae is the word for lambda, the Greek letter L.) An English translation of the Varro quote, then, would be something like “Tell him to go S himself!”

  Of course, all this is not to suggest that the expression “the F-word” is modeled on a Latin phrase, or even on a Gilbert and Sullivan comedy. But the two usages illustrate the same device: the name of the first letter of a vulgar word euphemistically standing for that word.