F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word - Rufus Lodge

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last scientific fact: by accessing an area of the brain left untouched by more delicate language, swearing provides a form of catharsis, bypassing the usual restraints of polite conversation. So swearing relieves stress, and helps to ease the experience of pain. But why do English-speakers, who have an array of foul language at their disposal, almost universally agree that the most satisfying and cathartic form of swearing has to involve the F-word and its various derivatives?

      Here we must leave human biology and head into the realms of psychology. What does the word ‘fuck’ convey? Sex, simply enough; and, beyond that, a degree of violence. ‘Fuck’ is a much more aggressive term than ‘have sex’ or ‘make love’: it can be consensual (between two saucy so-and-so’s who say to each other, ‘Let’s fuck’) but it can also be directly the opposite (‘I’m going to fuck you up’). It breaks two of society’s strongest taboos, and multiplies the impact of both misdemeanours by combining them.

      Taboos don’t exist in isolation: they need a group of people to decide that something is beyond the pale, and then respect that decision. The English-speaking world has chosen to accept the F-word as one of the most offensive terms in its language. As expletives, ‘flip’ and ‘fuck’ perform exactly the same function, but only one of them is like to raise your maiden aunt’s eyebrows. The boundaries of taboo can change: for centuries, any reference to God’s wounds (those suffered by Jesus on the cross, in other words) enjoyed terrifying cultural power. Now ‘zounds’ survives only as an exclamation in comedy sketches about the Three Musketeers. But for more than 600 years ‘fuck’ has remained outside the realms of common decency – and only in the last fifty years has it slowly crept into the mainstream of our culture, to the point where some (but by no means all) newspapers and magazines will dare to print the four forbidden letters in full.

      ‘Fuck’ is also one of the most adaptable and multi-purpose words in the English dictionary, giving it a universal power that is denied to the C-word or the increasingly verboten N-word. It’s also, strangely, an equal-opportunity four-letter word. No races, genders, or minorities are singled out by its use: it divides the world easily into two groups, those who say ‘fuck’ and those who find it shocking. Some people step backwards and forwards between those two categories – the men who swear in the office or in the pub, for instance, but hate to hear the F-word being used ‘in front of the ladies’; or the parents who damn each other to hell, but drag their children away from the telly when Gordon Ramsay’s producer is shouting down his earpiece that he hasn’t said ‘fuck’ enough times yet.

      ‘Fuck’ is, when you get down to it, just a word like any other. But, at the same time, it’s different from every other word you know. Pour boiling water over your fingers, and you’ll soon remember why.

       Origins

      F.U.C.K.? No!

      It is true that F.U.C.K. is an abbreviation for the phrase For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. But it is not true that this abbreviation is the source of the word ‘fuck’. Neither, for that matter, is another phrase that spells out the same unseemly word: Fornication Under Consent of the King.

      Both phrases have a legal ring to them, and the hint that they might belong to bygone centuries, and so a pair of urban myths has grown up around the pair of them, in tandem. The explanations that their supporters employ are long and imaginative, but they boil down to a single, gristly core: that men in medieval authority grew so tired of writing out the phrase in question that it was abbreviated to save their time and their quills, and the condensed version survived long after the ancient civil service jargon was no longer relevant.

      For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was supposed to have been given as an explanation, in official papers and parchments, whenever a case of adultery was discovered and charged. It has even been claimed that the phrase, or its abbreviation, would be written across the stocks when a philanderer was facing the wrath of the people. Not true: adultery may indeed have been a crime in the past, but never under that name.

      At the other extreme, some people were supposed to have been given a special licence to have sexual intercourse, or to produce babies: to these lucky souls, so the theory goes, was given permission for Fornication Under Consent of the King. You have to admit that this is a particularly attractive idea: it’s easy to imagine the heraldic symbols belonging to the King’s 1st Regiment of Shaggers. But, sadly, it’s another invention.

      Not that this prevented the rock band Van Halen from prolonging the myth that Carnal Knowledge was the root of the illicit F-word. In a burst of adolescent bravado, the band decided in 1999 to call their next album Fuck. Once they had been informed that this would prevent the record being sold at almost all retail outlets, they fell back on the old canard about the punishment of adulterers, and named their album after the phrase that spelled out F.U.C.K. Their information may have been way off beam, but not their commercial instincts, as the record reached the top of the American charts. This proved conclusively that none of the buyers at the nation’s biggest and most conservative retail chains – usually primed to slap a sales ban on anything that might corrupt the innocent masses of Middle America – was capable of recognising a blatant reference to the F-word when it was placed in front of them.

      Channel Crossing

      Some of our rudest words can be traced back to those dirty Anglo-Saxons, who seem to have had an anal fixation a full millennium before this crucial stage of child development was first identified. Not content with beating each other over the head with cudgels and writing Beowulf, they made several fundamental contributions to our native tongue. It’s the lads in helmets whom we have to thank for such earthy terms as ‘shit’, ‘turd’, ‘fart’, and ‘arse’ – sparking the 1,300-year-long obsession with potty language that has made us the great nation we are today.

      Enter the French. William’s conquerors may have invaded the country, killed our king, immortalised the battle in a wide-screen (tapestry) epic, and written down all our assets in a big book with a gloomy title; but apart from that, what did the Normans ever do for us? Well, they taught us how to ‘piss’: we must have been desperate to go by the time they arrived.

      After the French, things became more confused: the natives were too busy cooking onion soup and composing chansons to keep track of what was happening to England’s glorious tongue. Those scholars who love wallowing around in the pre-history of foul language, and then have to compile entire dictionaries of more respectable words to disguise their bad habits, are generally agreed that some of our most traditional curse words, such as ‘bum’, ‘cunt’, and ‘twat’, have origins that are, to say the least, rather muddy. Some people would like to place the blame on visitors from Scandinavia, Holland, or Germany, but they all have alibis for the night in question, which leaves us none the clearer.

      So it won’t surprise you that none of these filthy foreigners is prepared to own up and admit responsibility for creating the king of our four-letter words. So let’s examine what we know for sure. ‘Fuck’ (or ‘fucke’ or ‘fuk’ or ‘fukk’ – the same people who thought the Earth was flat weren’t very good at spelling, either) was definitely a part of our language before 1598, which is when John Florio, the original Englishman abroad, compiled his Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes. He defined the Italian verb ‘fottere’ as meaning ‘to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy’. Florio soon became the English tutor of Queen Anne of Denmark, and it’s intriguing to wonder how many of those words he taught her before she made any state visits to the British Isles (and also whether he told her what they really meant).

      When I said ‘our’ language above I was being deliberately vague. The prime exponents of the F-word during the sixteenth century were the Scots, which won’t surprise anyone who’s ever watched a Celtic vs. Rangers derby at close quarters. Indeed, they are responsible for all of its pre-Florio appearances on paper. But nowhere even in the distant history of the English tongue is there any suggestion that ‘fuck’ first landed in Scotland, and then surreptitiously made its way south, quickly corrupting Newcastle and Liverpool before

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