The F-Word

EDITED BY JESSE SHEIDLOWER

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

OXFORD NEW YORK
AUCKLAND  CAPE TOWN  DAR ES SALAAM  HONG KONG  KARACHI
KUALA LUMPUR  MADRID MELBOURNE  MEXICO CITY  NAIROBI
NEW DELHI  SHANGHAI  TAIPEI  TORONTO

With offices in
ARGENTINA  AUSTRIA  BRAZIL  CHILE  CZECH   REPUBLIC  FRANCE  GREECE
GUATEMALA  HUNGARY  ITALY  JAPAN  POLAND  PORTUGAL  SINGAPORE
  SOUTH KOREA  SWITZERLAND  THAILAND  TURKEY  UKRAINE  VIETNAM

Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

First published in 1995 by Random House

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

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

Foreword by Lewis Black

Introduction

Introduction to the Third Edition

Acknowledgments

The F-Word

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

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,
F
ornication
U
nder
C
onsent of the
K
ing. I maintain that it’s an acronym of a law term used in the 1500s that referred to rape as
F
orced
U
nnatural
C
arnal
K
nowledge.”

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.