Back in 2009, I raved about the then-new third edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s magnum opus, The F-Word
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.
Update (Oct. 2024). The new edition is out:
This new, fourth edition (2024) is not just a minor update but a comprehensive revision. The fourth edition includes over 2,500 new quotations; over 150 new entries; and over 150 antedatings—earlier examples of existing entries, improving our understanding of the word’s development. Major new discoveries push back the known history of fuck by almost 200 years.
Quotations are as recent as 2024, taken from a wide range of sources, both literary (traditionally published books, magazines, and newspapers) and nonliterary (rap songs, TV shows (The Wire, The Sopranos, and Succession are quoted dozens of times), 19th-century pornographic phonograph records, and internet sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Urban Dictionary, and Reddit).
The many new entries include, in general use, brainfuck; the MILF spinoff terms DILF and GILF; thank fuck; the group of expressions of the sort to give no fucks or zero fucks given; fuck around and find out (and its abbreviation FAFO); fuck bitch; fuck doll; the social game Fuck, Marry, Kill; fuckton; several new senses of fuck with including ‘to enjoy’; and trophy fuck.
New entries from literary figures include James Joyce’s fuckbird and Henry Miller’s concept of the Land of Fuck.
New initialisms or abbreviations, often associated with online communication, include AF ‘as fuck’; DTF ‘down to fuck’; FFS ‘for fuck’s sake’; FML ‘fuck my life’; LMFAO ‘laughing my fucking ass off’; and WTAF ‘what the actual fuck’.
Many antedatings represent significant improvements in our knowledge of the word’s history. The expression for fuck’s sake, previously first recorded in 1943, is now known from 1922; fucked ‘crazy’ has been improved from 1971 to 1951, fuckload from 1984 to 1970, headfuck ‘something that causes confusion’ from 1993 to 1976, ratfuck ‘a frenetic social event’ from 1979 to 1969. In particular, research into early erotica has resulted in a number of major antedatings. The noun ass-fuck, previously first found in 1940, is now recorded in 1874; dogfuck has been improved from 1980 to 1867, face-fuck from 1972 to 1899, fuckstick ‘the penis’ from 1973 to 1904, mouth fuck from 1954 to 1868, and tongue fuck from 1974 to 1902.
The 2,500 new quotations include an enormous range of prominent writers and public figures, in many genres. Some of the additions include Amy Schumer, Maria Dahvana Headley (from her award-winning translation of Beowulf), Jonathan Franzen, Mike Tyson, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Bukowski, Horace Walpole (yes, the 18th-century writer), the pop singer Lorde, William Vollman, James Ellroy, William Gibson, Marilyn Manson, Margaret Atwood, Joan Rivers, George Pellicanos, Dan Savage, Dave Eggers, N.K. Jemisin, Larry Kramer, John Waters, Nick Cave, David Foster Wallace, Rebecca Traister, Rachel Kushner, 50 Cent, Lauren Groff, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Sally Rooney, Tupac Shakur, Colson Whitehead, Charlamagne tha God, Anthony Doerr, Ottessa Moshfegh, Gary Shteyngart, Ocean Vuong, Marlon James, Ben Lerner, Amor Towles, Hank Green, Marc Maron, John Oliver, and Elon Musk.
I’m too lazy to put all the new terms in boldface as he does, so just imagine it (or click through).
I see clusterfuck is getting due recognition in The F-Word, so all is well.
I’m sure we’re all eager to see the windfucker issue advanced toward a stable solution. There has been doubt about its meaning “fucker of the wind” (here at LH even). But that is exactly what it appears to be doing, as if it were hovering over a genuine feathered object of its attentions.
I think The Daily Show’s
is an interesting attestation. It was always bowdlerized on television—both visually (as you can see from how it was written) and aurally (bleeped out). However, I believe that it is well established that Jon Stuart did always actually say “clusterfuck” in the studio.
fuckwittery-I always thought Billy Connolly was saying “fuckweight”…
Don’t know if one particular use of “ratfuck” has made it into the corpus, nor have I looked for it online. Coffee first, then research, as dear old Uncle Elmer might have said. To ratfuck a door was/is to open it when locked out of your own college dormitory room, c 1965. Bits of plastic or wood strips were employed, along with wire coat hangers.
Note that this is different from the fairly well documented uses of ratfuck in military and Nixonian political spheres. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=41530
Now caffeinated, I’ve failed to find any documented door opening uses of ratfuck.
I think that in wartime Britain it was SNAFU (situation normal, all fucked up) — not SNEFU, but maybe that was used as well.
Oh, I’ve seen “a snafu” in the wild pretty often, and the explanation was as above (or “fouled”). Never seen SNEFU.
…though it would have been a great in-joke if he actually said “clusterbleep” and that got bleeped out.
(Alas, that’s lip-readable.)
I think that in wartime Britain it was SNAFU (situation normal, all fucked up) — not SNEFU
Yes, SNAFU was the normal form, which is why the variant is interesting.
It seems to me that the two senses of ratfucking are in fact semantically unified. Using a non-key to open a locked door is certainly one species of prank.
Partridge’s Dictionary of Catch Phrases mentions SNEFU as an “occ. var.” of SNAFU, but I can’t recall ever seeing it in the wild. The google n-gram viewer thinks it’s so rare it won’t even do a comparison against SNAFU for you.
@John Cowan: Campaign ratfucking ain’t just a prank.
And it doesn’t sound like ratfucking a door is about pranks either, if the reference is to getting into one’s own room when locked out.
I doubt if the word is only applicable to opening one’s own door.
But if it is applicable to opening one’s own door it doesn’t seem like it has any implication of pulling a prank, but cuchuflete would know better.
The book is out; see the Update.
Looking back through this thread has me wondering Did anyone get an update from or about JC?
See updates in Don’t Be So Wet.
Well, I’ll be darned.
There’s a lot about political ratfucking in James Elroy’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Six_Thousand
see for ex
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/qmlez4q
J Elroy Cold Six Thousand 257: Jack gets death. Ratfuck Bobby resigns as AG…
It’s part of his Underworld USA trilogy, a kind of horrible paranoid fantasy which in
retrospect becomes even more concretely imaginable. But among other things it makes
the point that ratfucking has an enormous economic culture (perhaps especially in the South;
I remember noticing it in high-school debate topics when I was a kid, and wondering what it
was up with).