Search Results for: THE F-WORD

Back in 2009, I raved about the then-new third edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s magnum opus, The F-Word; now Jesse is soliciting help with the forthcoming fourth:

The first edition came out in 1995, and was based on the Historical Dictionary of American Slang (the fuck-containing volume of which had been published in 1994). This edition largely ignored non-American uses of the word, and its treatment of entries beyond the letter F was spotty. The second edition of 1999 remedied these and other problems. The third edition, published in 2009, was a massive update; by that point I had become an editor at the OED, and was able to use its resources, as well as the greatly increased availability of online sources, to significantly expand the book. The fourth edition will benefit from the further expansion of online databases, as well as increased interest (both popular and academic) in both the use and the study of offensive language.

I’d been doing haphazard work on the fourth edition since the third edition went to press, but in the last year, I’ve been working in earnest. There are over 1,500 new quotations; over 100 antedatings (earlier evidence for existing senses, forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about a word’s history); and over 80 new senses. […] I will also be revising the Introduction, incorporating new discoveries about the earliest known examples of fuck, and discussing the constantly shifting acceptability of offensive terms in current usage, where mainstream American newspapers have begun printing the word openly (often spurred by the frequent use of such language by prominent political figures).

As for how the rest of us can help, he says:

There are many ways. You can suggest items that should be in, preferably with good examples of usage. If you have antedatings of any of the new examples listed above, I’d love to get those. If there are particular quotations, anecdotes, or the like that you think deserve to go in, please suggest them! […] Finally, I do have a list of items I’m actively looking for. For these specific items, I already have an entry; I am looking for actual quotations. The general idea is to find “good” examples (except for antedatings, which can be anything): nothing from glossaries, nothing referring to the word as a word, nothing from “the Internet” at random. Printed examples from published texts are preferred, but anything traceable, or from sources that are well-known or reliable, is fine. Indeed, my coverage of online sources could be improved, so I would welcome evidence from major websites, prominent social media accounts, and so forth. Least preferable are totally random examples such as “I’m familiar with this,” or ones found by Googling, searching Twitter, or the like.

The list of specific items starts with cuntfuck, n. (“British use as a term of abuse: antedating 2002”) and ends with SNEFU ‘situation normal, everything fucked up’ (“any evidence not from glossaries”); visit the post for many glorious examples of wordfuckery, and of course help out if you can.

Oxford University Press sent me a copy of the new third edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s magnum opus, The F-Word. Before I continue, I should point out that the book, and therefore this post, is chock-full of examples of the most notorious curse word in the English language. You have been warned.

As I say, this is the third edition. Some of you who have acquired one of the earlier editions may be wondering “Do I need the third?” The answer is: Yes, yes you do. If you care enough about the history and use of the word fuck to own the book, you owe it to yourself to get this edition. This is not one of those pro forma “revisions” that correct a few errors, toss in a few added items, and add a new preface; no, the text of the dictionary is twice as large as the second edition, over a hundred new words and senses have been added, and coverage is far wider. The first edition included only American uses; the second added some U.K. and Australian examples, but more as flavoring. This one aims to cover the entire English-speaking world, a project greatly aided by Sheidlower’s having gone to work for Oxford UP and thus getting 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.” A word that has circled the globe deserves no less.

The introduction is worth the price of admission all by itself. Beginning with the etymology (which continues to be unknown, and my one criticism of Sheidlower is that he starts off by spending two paragraphs debunking the silly explanation that makes it an acronym for various fanciful phrases—the debunking, while necessary, should have come later, preferably in a footnote, because people’s psychology is such that they are likely to remember the prominently displayed fake etymology and forget the debunking), he goes on to discuss the word’s taboo status, its earliest uses in print and movies, its appearance in dictionaries (first in John Florio’s Worlde of Words, a 1598 Italian-English dictionary, and first as a main entry in Stephen Skinner’s 1671 Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae), and the general phenomenon of taboo avoidance (citing David L. Gold’s comparison to Marcus Terentius Varro‘s dicite labdeae ‘tell him/them to lambda,’ lambda being the first letter of laecasin—a Latin equivalent of ‘tell [someone] to go to hell’ was laecasin dicere, literally ‘tell [someone] to suck’); in this last section, he discusses the trick of spelling out F-U-C-K as “if you see Kay” (used by Joyce in Ulysses!) or, in Britney Spears’ 2009 version, “If U Seek Amy” (not, as Sheidlower has it, “If You Seek Amy”).

But the meat of the book, of course, is in the collection of entries with their wealth of citations. From absofuckinglutely (adverb, absolutely… 1921 Notes & Queries (Nov 19) 415 [refers to WWI]: The soldier’s actual speech…was absolutely impregnated with one word which […] the fastidious frown at as “filthy”…. Words were split up to admit it: “absolutely” became “abso – lutely”) to zipless fuck (noun, an act of intercourse without an emotional connection… 1971 E. Jong Fear of Flying 11: My fantasy of the zipless fuck… Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like petals), there are 270 pages of exhaustive documentation of every well-attested expression using the f-word, including 35 pages of the star word itself, as noun, adjective, verb, and interjection (in this last section alone we get citations from Ian Fleming, Robert Stone, Peter Benchley, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton, Norman Mailer, Armistead Maupin, and Stephen King, inter alios). I say “well-attested” because it doesn’t even attempt to include all existing uses:

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… The editor encourages readers to write in with suggestions for words that are omitted, especially if there is solid evidence for their genuine use, for possible inclusion in future editions.

A few random things I enjoyed: the first use of the verb fubar (derived from the adjective, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition”) is 1946 “J. MacDougal” in Astounding Science Fiction (Oct.) 55/1: “Well, there are a lot of minor ones, which must have fubared things in all directions once Co-ordination accepted them”; it delights me almost as much as it must have delighted James Blish and Robert Lowndes (the writers hidden behind the pseudonym) that they managed to slip this past the notoriously prudish John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding. An acronym I’ll have to add to my own vocabulary is DILLIGAF (“do I look like I give a fuck?”). The first cite for go fuck yourself is from an 1895 police report (“He said, ‘Go on, fuck yourself, you son-of-a-bitch; I will give you a hundred dollars’; he tried to punch me, and I went out”); the last is Dick Cheney’s famous 2004 use (in the perhaps unprofessionally snarky words of the Washington Post: “‘Fuck yourself,’ said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency”). And there are nine citations, ranging from ca. 1950 to 2006, for the expressive hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire (immediately followed by frak, the euphemism coined for Battlestar Galactica, also with nine citations, ranging from 1978 to 2009).

So far, I’ve only found one typo (on page 261, under tarfu [“things are really fucked up”], the 1944 quote from Ernie Pyle should have “mystic” instead of “mytic”), which is pretty darn good these days. This book is a gem, and it makes me proud to be a part of a civilization that could produce such a thing. Fuckin’ A!

A nice piece of etymological discourse from Haggard Hawks (see this LH post):

Last week, a sweary fact about kestrels turned out to be not only HH’s most popular fact of the week, but one of our most popular facts ever. Back in the sixteenth century, kestrels were known as windfuckers and fuckwinds. Having said that however, there’s a theory that claims you should in fact change those Fs to Ss. Some etymologists (presumably looking to make the history of the English language slightly less offensive than it actually is) will have you believe that those windfucker and fuckwind nicknames for the kestrel are actually misreadings: they come from a time when the archaic long S character < ſ > was often used to be used in place of < s > at the beginnings and middles of words, and so it’s entirely possible that that long S was simply misread as a lowercase F < f >.

So those kestrels? Perhaps they weren’t so much fucking the wind as they were sucking it. So to speak. It’s a neat theory, certainly, but alas it’s not the case; these nicknames really were as uncompromising as they sound. Take a look at this page from Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, for instance, and you’ll see under the French word crecerelle—well, pretty clear proof that there was no sucking involved whatsoever […]

[Read more…]

Caroline Davies reports for the Guardian:

So it’s farewell to bloody Nora. The f-word has become Britain’s most popular swearword, overtaking “bloody”, as the nation’s use of expletives has dropped over the past two decades, a linguistics study has found. Data on the use of 16 swearwords in the 1990s and the 2010s shows the f-word was the most frequently used, taking the title from “bloody” which was beaten into third place by “shit”.

The study, by Dr Robbie Love at Aston University, found there was a 27% drop in swearing in Britain over the 20-year period, down from 1,822 to 1,320 swearwords per million. Men still swear more than women, and swearing still peaks in people’s 20s and declines thereafter, Love found.

His study, published in Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies, analysed transcribed spoken conversations that took place in 1994 and in 2014 and looked at changing preferences for the 16 swearwords. “Bloody” saw an 80% fall in popularity in the 20 years leading up to 2014, accounting for just 128 words per million. The word “fuck” was said slightly less, down to 542 from 564 words per million. “Shit” almost doubled in usage during the two decades, reaching 326 words per million in 2014. […]

Love, an English language lecturer, told the Guardian: “Overall the data suggests that while swearing occurrence in casual British English speech is still within an expected range, it is lower than it was in the 1990s. It’s hard to say exactly why this appears to be the case – it may be due to shifts in what we consider to count as swearing, or that speakers perform the functions of swearing using other words that might not be considered to be taboo.

See the link for further details of this sad decline. Thanks, Trevor!

Aramaist Edward Cook has fun with recent pop-culture uses of Aramaic in his post “You Won’t Believe These Unbelievable Aramaic Expressions!!” (Great title, as is the name of his blog, Ralph the Sacred River.) He gives a noogie to Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, which purports to quote an actual sentence:

I’m not sure if Quentin recited the text from right-to-left, in which case the sentence runs backward (although the words are not backwards), or left-to-right (in which case the words are backwards, but the sentence gives the correct word order). Maybe it’s a Unicode thing, or just a magic thing.

Then he gets into the series Spartacus on the Starz network:

I’ve not found out who did the Aramaic, but I infer from the scripts (which are available here) that the language consultant employed mainly Talmudic Aramaic…

Also interesting are the “four-letter words” (obscene language). We don’t have any obscene language from ancient Aramaic — as far as I know — and it therefore presents a vexing problem in back-translation. I’m not going to go through all of them, lest I arouse distaste in some of my readers. However, the four-letter word par excellence, the F-word, gets a thorough workout in the scripts, and the back-translation is interesting, if not historically valid.

The whole thing is well worth it just for the philological exegesis of “Hare mezayyne. [Fucking shits.]” (Thanks, Paul!)

Geoff Nunberg was kind enough to have his publisher send me a copy of Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, which I (as a connoisseur of feelthy language) was looking forward to. It turns out to be not as much in my wheelhouse as Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word (see this post), which of course was my automatic point of comparison; most of it is taken up with what you might call the sociological analysis of assholism (puts the anal in analysis!), which is fun and thought-provoking but not really LH material. But there are nice bits of philological investigation as well. Chapter Three, “The Rise of Talking Dirty,” is excellent stuff; it starts off by quoting Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead: “Lieutenant (sg) Dove, USNR. A Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect asshole.” Nunberg then writes:

By the time asshole appeared in print, it had undoubtedly been circulating in army slang for quite a while. In fact it doesn’t really make sense to ask when this use of asshole was “coined.” It isn’t one of those items like pizzazz or beatnik that a clever columnist or copywriter can drop into the language some Tuesday morning. After all, it doesn’t take a great deal of ingenuity to compare someone you want to disparage to the anus, and it’s fair to assume that people have been doing that from time to time for as long as asshole (or in its older form arsehole) has been around.

Still, it isn’t likely that asshole was a conventional epithet much before the modern period. Even in more straight-laced ages, vulgarities and profanities show up in sources such as diaries, personal letters, pornography, slang dictionaries, and the records of prosecutions for public disorderliness or military insubordination (“Go and f— yourself” made its first print appearance in the proceedings of the Old Bailey in 1901). People have been using arsehole to refer to the anus at least since Chaucer’s time, and there are citations from the 1860s on for the metaphorical use of the word for the most detestable spot in a region, as in “the arse-hole of the universe.” So if asshole had been a routine term of abuse much before World War II, there would most likely be some record of it. Ernest Hemingway didn’t use the word in the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms that he submitted to Scribner’s in 1929, which included shit, fuck, cocksucker, cunt, and balls, none of which made it into the published version. That’s not conclusive, of course, but if asshole had been around then, it’s a fair bet Hemingway would have taken to it (it did show up in Islands in the Stream, written in the early 1950s and set during World War II).

That’s good stuff there! He goes on to discuss the change from profanity proprement dit (damn, God, Jesus, etc.) to our modern secular swearing and the spread of such swearing from the military and other restricted circles into the wider society. And throughout the book he has intriguing charts tracking the ascent of asshole against the parallel ascent of words like empathetic and the descent of words like cad. In short, if the topic of assholes and assholery (or, to use Nunberg’s preferred term, assholism) interests you, this is the book for you.

Oh, and if you’re curious, as I was, about the Russian equivalent of asshole, Anatoly has a thorough discussion; I’m willing to accept his decision that мудак is the best candidate.

Addendum. Clayton Moore interviews Nunberg; a sample:

Why doesn’t this particular pejorative get the respect it deserves?

Vulgarity has a lot to do with it. There was no particular reason why we had to give a vulgar name to the people we used to these people—when you call someone an asshole, you’re not necessarily saying anything about his sex life or personal habits. But the vulgarity of the word marks it as something that grows out of our unreflecting everyday experience, something we all understand without instruction. It’s not a word that anybody ever bothers to look up in a dictionary—and if you did, you’d just find something like “a contemptible person,” which is not very helpful.

The Browser has one of its FiveBooks interviews with Jonathon Green, whose admirable Green’s Dictionary of Slang I wrote about in this post; I especially liked his discussion of the five books he recommends, ending with Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word (which I reviewed here): “Everybody should look at this and see how lexicography should be done, because it is a superb piece of work. It’s not a grubby book, or a meretricious book, it’s an amazing piece of scholarship.” Quite so, and the same is true of Green’s own magnum opus.

Having posted on the first two installments of Dave Wilton’s “word of the year” series (words of 1911, words of 1912), I hadn’t been planning to continue, but his latest post, on words first attested in 1916, contains one so dear to my heart I can’t resist: proto-Indo-European, n. and adj. Another striking entry:

fuck-all, n. and adj. The so-called f-bomb may be the most versatile word in the language, appearing in countless forms and contexts. This particular variant, meaning “absolutely nothing,” appears in a British trial transcript from this year, indicating that despite the popular opinion that our use of the language is coarsening, fuck has been in wide and versatile use for a long time, only publishers wouldn’t admit it.

As I did in the related Wordorigins forum thread, I’ll quote the full sentence from the trial transcript to give the flavor of army English of the day: “He then said, ‘You are a fucking coward & you will go to the trenches—I give fuck all for my life & I give fuck all for yours & I’ll get you fucking well shot.'” (From Record of the Trial of H. Farr, quoted in Jesse Sheidlower’s invaluable The F-Word, which I reviewed here.) Some other interesting words first attested in that year: ambivalent, dealership, dysfunction, National Socialist, red giant, and tank.

Geoff Pullum has a post at the Log in which he painstakingly analyzes a sentence uttered at a concert by an exasperated Van Morrison. (I forgive Geoff his lack of appreciation of the great Belfast singer; as I wrote in a comment there, “I am a huge fan of his, but I can easily understand why his voice turns some people off.”) Warning: People offended by the f-word should not click on the link, which blasts it from both barrels in the very title, but they will be missing a fascinating and very funny discussion. Curse words, among their other interesting features, tend to muddy grammatical analysis.
Related only by the most tenuous of threads are the video linked by Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org and the cartoon I link in the first comment, but I wanted to share them with you. (Thanks for the cartoon, tanahair!)
Addendum. And it turns out Jesse Sheidlower has a new edition of The F-Word coming out in September—read all about it!

A couple of interesting stories from the New York Times. I can’t get a blogsafe link for the first, so it may disappear in a few days:
Composing the Work an Ill-Fated Poet Never Began, by Alan Riding, describes a new book about (and by) Marina Tsvetayeva:

Now, in a new book published [in Paris], Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-born French philosopher and literary critic, believes he has found a way of introducing Tsvetayeva to a larger public outside Russia. In “Vivre Dans le Feu: Confessions” (Éditions Robert Laffont), or “Living in Fire: Confessions,” Mr. Todorov has organized extracts from nine volumes of her letters, notes and diaries into what he calls the autobiography she never wrote.

“When I first read the material in Russian, I thought it was amazing, but also a bit difficult to follow,” Mr. Todorov said in an interview, “because when you take all this writing, it’s not a finished work. So I decided to carry out a labor of love, to compose a book that Marina had already written so that anyone could read the confessions of one of the great writers of the past century.”

That’s a book I’d like to read. The other story is about the new breed of young, hip lexicographers: In Land of Lexicons, Having the Last Word, by Strawberry Saroyan (no, that’s not an April Fool’s joke, it’s her name). It focuses on Erin McKean, 33, editor in chief of the Oxford American Dictionary, but features others as well:

They include Steve Kleinedler, 38, who is second in command at American Heritage and has a phonetic vowel chart tattooed across his back; Grant Barrett, 34, project editor of The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, whom Ms. McKean describes as looking as if he’d just as soon fix a car as edit a dictionary; and Peter Sokolowski, 35, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster and a professional trumpet player. Jesse Sheidlower, 36, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, is best known among the group so far, partly because he is also editor of “The F-Word,” a history of that vulgar term’s use in English. He is known for his bespoke English suits, too…

Sidney I. Landau, a former editor of Cambridge Dictionaries and the author of “Dictionaries: The Art And Craft of Lexicography” (and at 71, a member of an older generation), said a shift in people’s interests had also played a part. “In the early part of the 20th century, science and technology were very big in terms of marketing dictionaries, and they’d make claims about having 8,000 words dealing with electricity or mechanics,” he explained. But now, he added, “I think there has been a shift in terms of recognizing the importance of youth culture and slang.” In other words, people like Mr. Barrett, who marvels at a term like “ghetto pass,” which refers to street credibility for nonblacks, are in demand. He can trace its mainstream usage back to the hip-hop artist Ice Cube in 1991.
John Morse, the publisher and president of Merriam-Webster, said many young lexicographers had a natural social aptitude that helped them rise in the field. “I think if you go back 20 or 30 years, dictionary editors kind of sat in their office, did what they were supposed to do,” he said. “But what we realized – at least what I realized about 10 years ago – is that we needed to put a public face on dictionaries. Editors needed to be engaging with the public. And I think that activity is something younger editors stepped up to.” Ms. McKean often appears on public radio talking about words, and she has been dubbed “America’s lexicographical sweetheart” by National Public Radio’s program “Talk of the Nation.”

The whole article is interesting, and it’s always good to see Grant Barrett getting some press.