The F-Word (5 page)

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, Burchfield 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.”

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.

The expression
four-letter word
is first found in 1897 and was well enough established by the 1930s to be used in Cole Porter’s classic lyric “Anything Goes” in 1934: “Good authors, too, who once used better words/Now only use four-letter words/Writing
prose/Anything goes.” (The related expression
four-letter man
, indicating a “man who can be described by a four-letter word [usually
shit
, but sometimes
goof, bore
, or
dumb
]” was common in the 1920s.) With both
eff
and
four-letter word
in use in the 1930s, it would not be too surprising if
the F-word
were used at that time as well. However, the earliest example of which the editor is aware is not until the early 1950s, and that was in an academic journal, discussing the publication of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(see the entry for F-WORD in this dictionary). The later evidence, however, suggests that it was still mainly used as a childish euphemism—another reason to believe that it may have been used earlier, since words such as these are seldom written down.

The use of
the F-word
increased throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and eventually the suffix –
word
began to be used freely with the first letter of a word—any word—to be avoided. There are occasional examples from the early 1980s of, for instance,
the L-word
for “ lesbian,” but this practice did not really peak until the mid- to late-1980s. By this time it was often jocular, as in
the L-word
for “love” or “ liberal,” or
the T-word
for “taxes,” but serious examples were also used:
the N-word
for “nigger.” This combining form of the suffix -
word
, finally liberated from association with
fuck
, appeared by itself in general dictionaries by the early 1990s.

The trick of spelling out the word
fuck
is not new. When the singer Britney Spears released a single called “If You Seek Amy,” with the song title spelling out “F-U-C-K me,” in 2009, it was viewed as shocking, with parents registering complaints and so forth, despite the fact that phrases of this sort have been around for centuries, including, as we have seen, in Shakespeare. In
Ulysses
, James Joyce made the same pun with the bit of doggerel, “If you see Kay. / Tell him he may. / See you in tea. / Tell him from me,” thus managing to spell out
cunt
as well. Take that, Britney!

Indeed, the trope is well established among musicians. The blues pianist Memphis Slim recorded a wistful song about his lost
girlfriend, called “If You See Kay,” in 1963. In 1977, lo-fi pioneer R. Stevie Moore released his “If You See Kay,” a lopingly heartbroken revenge song that concludes: “If you see Kay you.” The title was used, less wistfully and less heartbrokenly, by the Canadian rock band April Wine, on their 1982 album
Power Play
(sample lyrics: “She had the look of need / Like ‘Give it to me’/I decided I should take a chance”). The pop-punk band Poster Children released a ragged, raucous version on their 1990
Daisychain Reaction
. The Norwegian punk band Turbonegro released the slick and poppy “If You See Kaye,” performed in English, in 2005. Aerosmith used the line in a lyric in their 2006 song “Devil’s Got a New Disguise.” (In 1991, Van Halen released the album
For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge
, though this was surely not intended to be even remotely subtle.) One of the catchiest recent iterations of this trope comes from the Irish band The Script, which released its “If You See Kay” on MySpace. In a 2009 interview, the band explicitly acknowledged its debt to James Joyce—whom they helpfully identify as “a literary god in Ireland”—noting the use of the gag in
Ulysses
.

In all of these cases, the performers are letting the double-entendre work for them; this is not the case with Britney, whose use of the phrase is not a pun. There is only one possible way to interpret it, since the lyric itself makes no sense in context: “All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to if you seek Amy.” The use of
Amy
in this context does seem to be new, though.

Aside from the the use of initial letters, the use of euphemisms for
fuck
itself is also long established. This dictionary includes a number of euphemisms for
fuck
that are used as phonetic substitutions for the word, with
frig
being both early, and also used in a very wide variety of constructions.

As we have seen, when Norman Mailer published
The Naked and the Dead
in 1948, he was persuaded by his publisher to use the spelling
fug
, leading to the story that Tallulah Bankhead (or, in
some versions of the anecdote, Dorothy Parker) approached Mailer at a party and said “So you’re the young man who can’t spell
fuck
.” (Of course this spelling was never intended to be any kind of a true mask.)

Another form of avoidance was the use of typographical markers to show that certain letters in a word are to be omitted. The earliest known example of this practice is from 1680, in a poem by John Oldham entitled “Upon the Author of a Play call’d Sodom,” where the word
turd
has the vowel replaced by a dash. Richard Ames’s 1688 “Satyr Again Man” includes a number of typographically bleeped words, including
bl–d
for ‘blood’,
w–nds
for ‘wounds’ (both only when used as oaths; in their normal senses they are written out in the usual way), and
G-d
and
d-mn
. By 1698 we have our first example of the bleeped
fuck
; see the quote at
FUCK
v
. sense 1.c. in this dictionary.

Such dashes were common throughout the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth century (if not earlier), asterisks were pressed into service. The 1857 example in this dictionary at
FUCKING
adj
. sense 2 is striking in its combination of dashes (to partly obscure the less offensive word
bitch
) and asterisks (to entirely obscure a word that we must conclude is
fucking
).

This book contains every sense of
fuck
, and every compound word or phrase of which
fuck
is a part, that the editor believes has ever had broad currency in English. It does not contain words meaning ‘to have sex’ or ‘to victimize’ that are used, often unconsciously, as euphemisms for
fuck
, such as
lay, screw, shaft
, or
do it
. However, it does include euphemisms for
fuck
that directly suggest, in sound and meaning, the word itself: thus the inclusion of
freaking, foul up, mofo
, and others. These words are typically used as direct replacements for
fuck
.

In earlier editions of this book, priority was given to American English; indeed, in its first edition, forms not found in America were excluded entirely. However, the text is now much more wide-ranging, thanks to the editor’s access to the files of the
OED
: uses that are specifically British, Australian, or Irish are included in their own right, and a very large number of quotations have been added from non-American sources to illustrate all entries, not just those associated with a particular national variety. The reader will thus find vastly more British examples (including Welsh and especially Scottish in addition to English), and also quotations from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, and elsewhere.

Preference has been given to words found in actual use, though the editor did find it necessary to consult other dictionaries or word lists. For earlier uses, where evidence from written sources is sparse, a dictionary quotation may represent a genuine use that is simply unattested elsewhere. But in many cases, words that are found only in dictionaries are joke words, made up as a lark, and there is no way of gauging their true currency; compilers of slang dictionaries put them in because they find such words amusing, or because they can’t verify whether the words are truly in use and want to be safe by being completist. For example, the World War II
snafu
gave rise to a number of other words with the
fu
element, including
janfu, snefu
, and
tarfu
, and
fubar
and its relations. Certain specialized dictionaries or glossaries of World War II language contain many more examples, but we have no written or spoken evidence of actual use. This suggests that these words were never used seriously, but treated only as jokes. Thus this dictionary does not include
tasfuira
‘things are so fucked up it’s really amazing’, among others.

The availability of massive full-text databases, as well as Google and other search engines, has, perhaps contrary to expectations, greatly complicated the decision-making process. Even a quick look at, say,
www.urbandictionary.com
will show that there are
very many words or phrases with
fuck
that are not included in this dictionary. Opening the book up to every word or compound for which examples can be found on the Internet would make it very much longer than it is now, with uncertain benefits. The editor has thus done his best to try to determine which of these is most likely to be in truly broad circulation. In general, examples from printed sources have been given preference over online examples. Uses from popular movies or television shows have also received preferred treatment, though even some prominent examples from these genres did not make the cut. Though the song “Uncle Fucka,” from the 1999 movie
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut,
is a brilliant work and won an MTV Movie Award for Best Musical Performance,
uncle fucker
was not included; there was simply no evidence for a broad use of the term.