Filed under: History Lesson
Fuck.
One of the most interesting, variable and emotional words used in the twisted and strange English language.
English has a myriad of words that begin with f, but only one will get you grounded if you use to early in life. Only one can consistenly make people frown, wince, smile or glower. And only one is known instantly by referring to it simply as the ‘f-word’.
The history of the word fuck is as varied as the modern uses of the word. Some say it came from Germany, others that is a Saxon word that slipped into profanity when the Saxons lost their land to the Romans. There is one legend that states:
In ancient England, single people were forbidden have sex unless they had the consent of the king. The king was said to gave the eager couples a placard to be placed on their door whilst the deed took place. Thusly did the couple prove to passers by that all was well. For on the placard was written: Fornication Under Consent of the King. And from an acronym, a word was born. Supposedly.
This same story is said to refer to the dispensation an invading King gave to his troops when they were in the mood to pillage but religious laws forbade them after battle snacks.
Of course, they King would be so busy attending to the needs of his horny constituents, one would assume the King would have little time for anything else. Like, say, running a kingdom.
Snopes goes into greater detail as to why this story is… well, fucked:
One last nail in the coffin of the ‘fornication under consent of the king’ origin
comes from the word ‘fornication’ itself.
Though many reasonably conclude fornication is the old-time word for having sex,
the term specifically excludes the physical union of man and wife.
One can fornicate premaritally or extramaritally,
but not intramaritally.
In light of this, any claim wedded couples trying to entice the stork down their chimney
were granted fornication permits crashes
against the rock of the wrong word being used.
From a purely entymological standpoint, fuck may be connected to the Latin word futuere (hence the French foutre, the Italian fottere, the Romanian fute, the vulgar peninsular Spanish follar and joder, and the Portuguese foder).But the most likely source may be the common Germanic fuk- which appears in Latin and Greek words meaning “fight” and “fist”.
The word was likely used first as a slang or euphemistic replacement for an older word for “intercourse”, and then became the usual word for “intercourse”.
Fuck finds it’s way into other Germanic languages, such as Middle Dutch fokken (to thrust, copulate, or to breed), dialectical Norwegian fukka (to copulate), and dialectical Swedish (to strike, copulate) and fock (penis).
Fucks first foray into print may have been in a poem by William Dunbar called “Brash of Wowing”. Here are a few lines:
“Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane.”
For quite a while, the bird we know know as the kestral was referred to as a ‘windfucker’.Fuck did not makes its way into any commonly used dictionary until the Oxford Dictionary in 1972.
D.H. Lawrence popularized the word with his scandalised Lady Chatterly’s Lover, printed in 1928.
When Henry Miller, Lenny Bruce and James Joyce used it, their work was outlawed. That’s a lot of power for just one little word.
Urban legend has Norman Mailer’s publishers convincing him to change the ever offsensive “fuck” into “fug” in “The Naked and the Dead” in 1948. Supposedly, Tallulah Bankhead greeted him with the quip, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.” It’s lucky she had a team of PR men to come with such clever quips for her.
Kurt Vonnegut* wrote a short story called “The Big Space Fuck” in the early seventies and fucks inclusion in daily life, on the tongues of rebelling youth and angry protesters, was born.
Although fuck is currently protected by the United States Constitution, people still get more than a mere slap on the hand when using it freely on public airways. But with people like Bono to Dick Cheney, and from Madonna to Larry Flynt (“Fuck this court!”) using it and using it good, it is clear that fuck is here to stay.
Mr Vonnegut came up with one of my favorite retorts:” Take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.” in his book Slapstick*
