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of which helps us to discover where we – Scottish or English – picked up such a dirty word. Given that our Anglo-Saxon heritage brought us so much earthy filth, it would be easy to imagine that ‘fuck’ came from the same source. But the Angles and Saxons seem to have been too busy farting to worry about copulation. So, with no evidence of ‘fuck’ pre-dating the French, is it possible that William’s lads didn’t just conquer us but also perverted our vocabulary? Here there is the partial evidence of the French verb ‘foutre’ (sometimes rendered in the past as ‘foutra’), which comes from the Latin ‘futuere’ – both describing the action of sexual congress.

      That might explain the ‘fu–’ of ‘fuck’, but where could the ‘–ck’ come from? Enter the historians who stake the case for the German influence – specifically the verb ‘ficken’ (meaning ‘to strike’, a theme that crops up in several English sex verbs between 1400 and 1800). But though logic might suggest that ‘fuck’ was therefore a French/German hybrid, words don’t evolve that way, with a polite sharing of letters from two different sources to create something new: like the armies that spoke them, languages tend to fight to the finish, knocking out their opponents and establishing themselves on their vanquished turf with all their letters intact.

      In any case, there’s a third strand to consider: from Scandinavia. Old Norse pretty much ruled the roost over all of that territory in the years after William the Conqueror shouted out ‘Harold, is that a bird or a plane?’ and the king of England got an arrow in his eye. And in Old Norse there’s a verb that both sounds and looks like a close cousin of our own faithful F-word – ‘fukja’, meaning ‘to drive’ (as in the sense of chasing things around, rather than getting stuck in a six-lane contraflow on the M1). Two words of Scottish dialect, ‘windfucker’ and ‘fucksail’, seem to confirm that ‘fukja’ did cross the North Sea to Aberdeen and Dundee, although neither of them has the slightest hint of profanity about it.

      But wait: here’s a fourth contender, from another land entirely. Not content with creating Edam cheese, the inhabitants of Holland concocted Middle Dutch, a collection of related dialects that left their mark on Germany as well. Hiding among the multiple terms for clogs and windmills (though very few for mountains) was ‘fokken’ – a verb that meant exactly what it sounds like, widening its terms very quickly (by linguistic standards) from a word for ‘thrust’ to one that implied one person thrusting something into another.

      Case closed, then? Not entirely. Because while the Dutch were busy ‘fokken’, those Scandinavians were keeping themselves warm during the long Nordic winters by developing their own tongues (and not like that). At around the same time, the word ‘fukka’ cropped up in Norway; and ‘focka’ in Sweden, where there was also a noun, ‘fock’, for the male organ.

      So what seems to have happened is that what became known as Great Britain was surrounded by foreigners, all of whom were inventing their own words for sexual intercourse while the Brits were still swapping fart jokes. And during the fifteenth century, one or more of those illegal immigrants crossed the waters and started showing our innocent lads and lasses that there was something in life even more fun than having a poo. ‘What’s that called?’ asked our medieval Gavin and Stacey. And so Britain fell in love with an imported word that, like German lager and Indian food, has become so central a part of our culture that we prefer to think it was ours from the beginning.

      Some Word There Was, Blacker Than Tybalt’s Death …

      ‘A word,’ Shakespeare’s characters are wont to say, as they beg a moment of their companion’s time. But surely one word was forbidden even to this most vocabulary-rich of writers? Could the Immortal Bard really have resorted to the basest of language to please the filthy ears of the theatre-goers at the pit of the Globe?

      Several early editions of his work suggest that he could, and did. Not the F-word, as such, but a six-letter term for someone in the very act of fornication – and not with a timeless heroine, a Cleopatra or a Juliet, but with a more humble member of God’s kingdom: the common British rabbit.

      The offending text, if offence it should cause, could be found in Henry IV Part 1, Act II, Scene iv, in the voice of the one Shakespearian character whom it is possible to imagine effing and blinding in the wings: that buffoonish gourmet and glutton, Falstaff. At which point I refer you to the 1778 edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays: in which Falstaff appears to dare his king to ‘hang me up by the heels for a rabbet-fucker, or a poulter’s hare’. The editor has inserted a helpful footnote from no less an authority than lexicographer extraordinaire, Dr Samuel Johnson: ‘“Rabbet-fucker” is, I suppofe, a fucking rabbet.’ (By the same logic, Dr Johnson would doubtless have explained that a ‘motherfucker’ was actually a fornicating matriarch.)

      But, as Hamlet says to Laertes, ‘I have done you wrong’, sweet Bard. The clue is in that mysterious ‘suppofe’: there, as in the offending rabbit reference, a sinless ‘s’ has been printed as a fallacious ‘f’, translating a sucking rabbit (or someone who makes a habit of sucking these innocent furry creatures) into a fornicating example of the same mammal. A veritable comedy of errors, my lord.

      How, you might ask, did the Bard convey the sense of the F-word without descending to such common tongue? By referring to an ‘act’, on occasion, as an abbreviation (though not too abbreviated, one hopes, for Juliet’s sake) of the enactment of copulation. On two occasions, however, Shakespeare was cunning enough a linguist to suggest the forbidden term whilst still being able to swear innocent intent.

      The first returns us, inevitably, to the company of Falstaff, in the same play in which he debates the rearing habits of the rabbit. Near the climax of the drama, he is engaged in heated conversation with the aptly named Pistol, a hothead who is much given to letting rip with his own command of invective. Where his twenty-first-century equivalent might cry, ‘I don’t give a fuck about …’, Pistol opts for the safety of a foreign language, in this instance French, while still giving his monolingual audience enough of the F-sound to make his meaning entirely clear. So let’s hear him in action: ‘A foutra for the world and worldlings base!’ And, a few lines further: ‘A foutra for thine office’. Pistol certainly can’t be accused of going off half-cock. (For an entire scene devoted to the build-up to a ‘foutra’ joke, meanwhile, try Henry V, III. iv.)

      Sir John Falstaff was also in the cast of Shakespeare’s second foray into F-word euphemism, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, IV.i. But for once he is out of the room when Sir Hugh Page, a Welsh parson of less learning than he assumes, gives the leading characters a break by quizzing young William Page about his knowledge of Latin grammar. Having led him through the pitfall-free ground of the nominative and accusative cases, he asks the boy to provide him with the ‘focative’. Good scholar that he is, William corrects him: ‘O, vocativo’. But Sir Hugh ploughs on with his ‘foc’-word, setting up Mistress Quickly for a particularly limp pun about a carrot. By the time that Sir Hugh moves on to the genitive case, the coarser element of the Elizabethan audience would doubtless have been in hysterics – repeating ‘He said “focative”!’ and ‘Ha, ha! “Genitive”!’ to each other like schoolboys who’d just learned Monty Python’s parrot sketch. Fortunately, as keen viewers of BBC3 will tell you, modern comedy is much more sophisticated.

      Poetry in Flyte

      It was, perhaps, the Renaissance equivalent of battle rap: two skilled artisans in the arts of insult and verse, flinging lines back and forth for the entertainment of a rabid crowd. This was not a beer-soaked hip-hop club on Detroit’s 8 Mile Road, however, but a rowdy evening at the court of King James IV of Scotland, circa 1500. The monarch would assemble his courtiers, and let loose two of his sharpest wordsmiths to heap invective and obscenity on each other’s head.

      The result was a jolly good flyting, a word that promised scolding and wrangling with the overtones of violence. As the audience was hand-picked by the King, there were no holds barred – with the result that the strenuous Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie has passed into history as the earliest known printed text to include one of the rudest words in the Scottish (and English) language.

      The

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