Bawdy Language: Book Excerpts
As a public service, to advance the world's awareness and understanding of the origins of curse words, swear words, dirty talk, and sexual slang, and to whet your appetite for more, we offer for your pleasure a page from each chapter. These samplers provide a good sense of the subject matter of each chapter, each of which is self contained. They are cool both for reading and as a gift. Individual chapters can be downloaded at a mere $1.99 each. Such a bargain!
The Big F: Book I - The Erotic Tongue
The Erotic Tongue
Haste Makes Waste: The Book of the TOILETTE
I was walking along this fucking fine morning,
fucking sun fucking shining away,
little country fucking lane,
and I meets up with this fucking girl,
fucking lovely she was,
so we gets into fucking conversation,
and I takes her over a fucking gate
into a fucking field,
and we has sexual intercourse.
- An Australian "rigamarole" quoted by Wayland Young in Eros Denied, 1968
My Word!
Whence came fuck? Nobody really knows. Some think it derives from the acronym for "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," maintaining that it was a form of legal shorthand for recording cases of rape and sodomy. Some trace it to the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony; others to medieval times. Further investigation, however, shows this hypothesis to be just so much fucking nonsense. There is no substantive evidence to support these claims, and it's further unlikely the word was ever an acronym given the many variations in its spelling.
Others argue that the word comes from the sound of the act itself: in and out, in and out, in and out - "ph-ck," "ph-ck," "ph-ck" - sounds only a trained ear could distinguish.
There is no consensus among serious students of the language. They used to believe that the word originated with the French foutre, or the Latin futuere, a theory now pretty much discounted.
If etymologists appear somewhat aroused by the topic, it's only because there are those who find fuck's origins in the German ficken, to "strike, beat, knock, or bang," a theory that converges nicely with the fact that men today hit on a woman (make sexual advances). Over the years, synonyms have included thump, smack, batter, stuff, punch, ram, jolt, cramp, poke, and wallop - leaving little doubt as to how men conceived the act. Ficken's roots are the Indo-European peik, meaning "enmity, evil, maliciousness,"
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