The F-Word (2 page)

Taboos against particular words or types of speech are not new. There is no shortage of evidence from the earliest times in England that certain forms of speech were restricted. As far back as the seventh century, there are records of a law from Kent reading, “If anyone in another’s house…shamefully accosts him with insulting words, he is to pay a shilling to him who owns the house.”

Curiously, the proposed etymology as an acronym does at least have a touch of realism about it. When purported acronymic origins are suggested, the original phrase usually sounds artificial, not like some real phrase in the language that would be common enough to be abbreviated. And so it is with “for unlawful carnal knowledge”—it has the ring of something that is made to sound like a stilted legal expression. But in fact, “unlawful carnal knowledge” is found in legal sources going back quite some time. The full phrase is first found in the
South African Law Journal
, volume 46, in 1929: “One of the latest instances occurred in the case of Alfred Ayles, sentenced at the Central Criminal Court in 1928 to seven years’ penal servitude for unlawful carnal knowledge of a child.” And the phrase “unlawful carnal knowledge” as used in definitions of rape under English Common Law can be found in Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and is still present in Northern Ireland’s current statute on sex offenders, the Statutory Instrument 1994 No. 2795 (N.I. 15) and the Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Order 1994: “procuring unlawful carnal knowledge of woman by threats or false pretences or representations or administering drugs…unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under 17 years of age” and others. Even earlier, this formula was found in criminal statutes throughout the southern United States, where
rape was defined as “the unlawful carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” Such language is attested from the 1870s and 1880s from Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. All this evidence for the phrase still does not mean that the word
fuck
derives from this or any other acronym; it does not. However, it is notable that the story is at least not completely absurd.

In the category of folk etymology, a recent development has been the popularity of the “pluck yew” story, which conflates the origin of
fuck
with an earlier piece of folklore about the origin of the offensive backhand two-finger gesture (the British form of what is usually an extended middle finger in America). According to the original form of the tale, before the battle of Agincourt in 1415 (immortalized in Shakespeare’s
Henry V
) the French taunted the English longbowmen by waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers—used to pull back the bowstring—could never defeat the mighty French. After the English longbowmen rather convincingly demonstrated their superiority (10,000 French dead to a mere 29 Brits, in Shakespeare’s exaggerated count), the English responded by waving their two fingers back at the French in the now familiar gesture. The recent twist has been to use the fact that longbows were traditionally made of yew to claim that the act of drawing back the bowstring was called “plucking yew,” and thereby to assert that the victorious English not only waved their fingers at the French but shouted “We can still pluck yew! Pluck yew!” at them. A convenient sound change and a respelling brings us to the familiar phrase “fuck you.” This story, totally ludicrous in any version, was popularized on the NPR show
Car Talk
, where it was meant as a joke; it spread on the Internet in the 1990s as a serious explanation.

The demand for bawdy humor meant that in the past, as now, writers found ways to use certain words even if such words were
prohibited by social conventions. In Shakespeare, for instance, one can find two clear references to
cunt
. In
Twelfth Night
(Act II, scene v), Olivia’s butler Malvolio receives a letter written by Maria but in Olivia’s handwriting. Analyzing the script, Malvolio says, “By my life this is my lady’s hand. These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s.” With the
and
sounding like “N,” Shakespeare not only spells out
cunt
, but gets a pun on
pee
in there as well. And more famously, in
Hamlet
(Act III, scene ii) the prince uses the phrase “country matters” in a manner clearly alluding to
cunt
(Hamlet’s next crack is about what “lie[s] between maids’ legs”).

Though Shakespeare never actually uses
fuck
itself, his plays contain several examples of probable puns or references to the word. A Latin grammar lesson in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
(Act IV, scene i) gives us the
focative case
(punning on the
vocative case
, used for direct address), followed up immediately with a raft of lewd wordplay, including sexual puns on Latin words and references to various English words for the sexual organs. In
Henry V
(Act IV, scene iv) the notoriously bawdy Pistol threatens to “firk” an enemy soldier; though
firk
does have a legitimate sense ‘to strike’, which is appropriate here, it was used elsewhere in the Elizabethan era as a euphemism for
fuck
, and it is quite likely that Shakespeare had this in mind as well. In several places Shakespeare refers to the French word
foutre
, which is the literal (and also vulgar) equivalent of
fuck
; the most notable is this passage in
Henry V
(Act III, scene iv), in which Princess Katherine is having an English lesson:

K
ATHERINE
. Comment appellez-vous les pieds et la robe? [What do you call
le pied
and
la robe
?]

A
LICE
.
De foot
, madame; et
de cown
[a French pronunciation of
gown
; these English words sound like the French words
foutre
‘fuck’ and
con
‘cunt’].

K
ATHERINE
.
De foot
et
de cown?
O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique! [Dear Lord! Those are bad-sounding words, wicked, vulgar, and indecent!]

Shakespeare elsewhere (
2 Henry IV
Act V, scene iii) has Pistol say, “A foutra for the world and worldlings base!” and in at least one place (
Merry Wives of Windsor
Act II, scene i) he uses
foot
as a probable pun on
foutre
. As the
Henry V
passage shows, Shakespeare was well aware that this word was vulgar—at least in French—and there is a good possibility that these examples are intended to represent the taboo English word
fuck
.

Though the evidence clearly shows that
fuck
was considered vulgar in Shakespeare’s time, it’s hard to tell just how bad it was. But we have a remarkably informative example from the late seventeenth century of the word’s status from a source unexpected in this early era: pornography. Though the amount of truly explicit English erotica before the Victorian era is small, there are exceptions, one of which is the 1680
The School of Venus
, a translation of an earlier French work. This graphically illustrated book—surviving in only a single copy, in the Bayerischer Staats-bibliothek in Munich—is presented in the style of a dialogue between a sexually experienced older woman and her young niece, a format (common especially in the eighteenth century) allowing highly explicit discussions to appear in the guise of instruction. The author of this work appears to have been unusually interested in language: at one point the characters discuss the precise differences in meaning among
occupy, fuck, swive, incunt
, and other verbs, and elsewhere the older woman explains why men use offensive words like
cunt
during intercourse. And the reader is also treated to a clear statement of how offensive the word
fuck
was:

There are other words which sound better, and are often used before Company, instead of Swiving and Fucking, which is too gross and downright Bawdy, fit only to be used among dissolute Persons; to avoid scandal, men modestly say, I kissed her, made much of her, received a favor from her, or the like.

Certainly the word was considered literally unprintable except in obscure, secret, or privately printed publications throughout the nineteenth century. Important early authors known to have used the word include Lord Rochester in the seventeenth century and Robert Burns in the late eighteenth century; Burns was probably the latest important author known to use the word before the twentieth century, and he uses it only in
Merry Muses of Caledonia
, a bawdy manuscript intended for private circulation only. Even Captain Francis Grose—a friend of Burns—in his
Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1785 and later editions; the word was expunged from the 1811 edition by a different compiler) felt compelled to spell it
f–k
.

In a striking example of the unfamiliarity of some Victorians with bawdy vocabulary, we see that the poet Robert Browning egregiously misunderstood one common word. He encountered the couplet “They talked of his having a Cardinal’s hat,/They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat,” in a seventeenth-century poem. Erroneously believing from this passage that the word referred to a part of a nun’s habit, Browning wrote of “Cowls and twats” in his 1848 poem
Pippa Passes
.

This does not imply that
fuck
was unused, of course. John Farmer and W. E. Henley’s monumental
Slang and Its Analogues
(privately printed; the volume with
fuck
appeared in 1893) included the use of
fucking
as both an adjective and an adverb, described respectively as “A qualification of extreme contumely” and “a more violent form of
bloody
.” These are labeled “common,” despite the fact that this editor has been able to discover hardly any earlier examples of this sense outside Farmer and Henley’s dictionary. No doubt this and various other senses were common but unprinted for some time previously. While there seem to be a large number of new senses that are first found around World War I, it seems likely that these were in use earlier, and their appearance in the 1910s is more a result
of weakening taboos than of an actual increase in the number of words coined in that era.

For although
fuck
may have been strictly taboo in mainstream usage in the nineteenth century, it was extremely common in the flourishing world of Victorian pornography. Many explicit F-words are found in such sources from the 1860s onward, often in ways that are scarcely different from the hard-core pornography of the present day. And research in the past ten years has shown that various forms or senses that were thought to have come later were indeed in use in the nineteenth century.

In two remarkable incidents,
fuck
even found its way into the very proper London
Times
in that prudish era. Reporting a speech delivered by Attorney General Sir William Harcourt, the
Times
printed on January 13, 1882:

I saw in a Tory journal the other day a note of alarm, in which they said, “Why, if a tenant-farmer is elected for the North Riding of Yorkshire the farmers will be a political power who will have to be reckoned with.” The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking. I think that is very likely.

It took the stunned editors four days to run an apology for what must have been a bit of mischief at the typesetter:

No pains have been spared by the management of this journal to discover the author of a gross outrage committed by the interpolation of a line in the speech of Sir William Harcourt reported in our issue of Monday last. This malicious fabrication was surreptitiously introduced before the paper went to press. The matter is now under legal investigation, and it is hoped that the perpetrator of the outrage will be brought to punishment.

And later that year, on June 12, 1882, the following advertisement appeared: “Every-day Life in our Public Schools. Sketched by Head Scholars. With a Glossary of Some Words used by Henry Irving in his disquisition upon fucking, which is in Common Use in those Schools.”

Different kinds of language have been considered incendiary at different times. Several hundred years ago, for example, religious profanity was the most unforgivable type of expression. In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking: in nineteenth-century America even the word
leg
was sometimes considered indecent; the proper substitute was
limb
. Now racial or ethnic epithets are the scourge; one prominent professor told
U.S. News & World Report
in 1994 that if she used
fuck
in class, no one would bat an eye, but that she would never dare to use any racial epithet in any context.

Today it seems that the taboos against the F-word are weaker than ever. While a few publications still refuse to print
fuck
regardless of the circumstances, the word can be found quite easily in most places. The more literary magazines have printed
fuck
for some time, but now even
Newsweek
and
Time
have used the un-censored word; the publication of the Starr Report in the
New York Times
, and a notable comment from Vice President Cheney in the
Washington Post
, has meant that even the proper papers consider
fuck
fit to print. Even commercial television, though still subject to FCC regulations, is becoming more open in its use.

The unpredictable nature of live television has allowed
fuck
to slip past would-be censors. Kenneth Tynan, then the Director of the National Theatre, was the first to manage this in England, in a November 13, 1965, appearance on the late-night satirical talk show “BBC-3.” Asked whether he would stage a play where sexual intercourse was depicted on stage, he replied, “Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be be printed or said can also be seen.” This provoked a huge reaction in England, with the BBC being forced to apologize and politicians attempting to remove Tynan
from his post, remove the head of the BBC from
his
post, and to prosecute Tynan for using obscene words in public. Tynan quickly made a less-than-conciliatory public statement that he “used an old English word in a completely neutral way to illustrate a serious point, just as I would have used it in similar conversation with any group of grown-up people.”