fuck
The origin of the f-word meaning 'sexual intercourse' is actually
rather obscure. There is a legend that the old name for the crime
of rape was 'Forced Unlawful Carnal Knowledge', and part of the
punishment was that an abbreviation of the crime would be branded
on the perpetrators head. Hence, people with 'F. U. C. K.' on their
head were known to be rapists. A similar story is that during the
time of the plague when it was necessary to increase the population
a royal injunction was issued telling the common folk to 'Fornicate
Under Command of the King.' These, however, would appear to be
acronyms intentionally spelling out an existing word rather than
new creations themselves.
Eric Partridge, a famous etymologist, has suggested that the Old
German 'ficken' or 'fucken', meaning 'to strike or penetrate', was
related to the Latin words for pugilist, puncture, and prick4 , or
to the Latin 'futuere' which had the slang meaning 'to copulate'.
There are also clearer links to Dutch where 'fokken' means breed
and is applied to cattle, and to a Swedish dialect word 'fokken'
which has the English meaning. Certainly, all the earliest uses of
the word in English came via Scotland, suggesting a Scandinavian
origin5.
Records from as early as 1278 identify a man called John Le-Fucker
(which, considering people often had names to do with their
occupations, makes the mind boggle), and it was certainly in common
usage by the 16th Century, appearing in a dictionary, John Florio's
A World of Words, in 1598. By the 18th century, it had became a
vulgar term; It was even banned from the Oxford English
Dictionary.
DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover (written in 192
was
the first serious (ie non-pornographic) book in English to use the
word accurately and in context and was famously banned for over
thirty years. In 1960, US publishers Grove Press won a court case
permitting it to publish the book in America, meaning it was the
first time the word had been legally used in print, while three
years later, the ban was overturned in a British court in the
infamous 'Lady Chatterly trial'. American author Norman Mailer used
the euphemism 'fug' in The Naked and the Dead, and when famous wit
Dorothy Parker met him at a party, she said, 'So you're the young
man who can't spell f***?'
It has been recognised as one of the most versatile words in the
English language, and can be put to use as an expletive, an
adjective, a noun or a verb, as demonstrated in an email circular
that has been widely distributed over the years.
