Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/ffff
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, wrestle with language in a paddling pool full of custard. Which of us won? Oh. Listen. When you’re doused in wrestling custard, truly there are no winners.
The show is back after a break, so I guess this is the season premiere of season… I dunno, 17? 55? Of the Allusionist! And it’s definitely the start of a series about four letter words. This episode is about one of your favourites, it’s multifunctional, emotionally versatile, a semantic Swiss Army Knife - it even compels a reappearance of Zaltzman’s first law of etymology - and it is a category A swear, so, content note for that, plus some sex references.
There are live Allusionist shows coming up very soon - 1 June 2025 in Toronto, 9 June in Montréal, tickets are linked at theallusionist.org/events. For years people have said, “Oof, I dunno if anybody’s going to come to see you play in Montréal” - prove all those people wrong, Montréal!! The live show is Souvenirs, a three-course banquet of stage entertainment, including the very funny and poignant story of a friendship wrecked by a typeface, and a man from 900 years ago causing sweary tech problems in the present. And everyone who comes gets a bookmark illustrated by me, I’ll be selling exclusive hand-drawn Souvenirs souvenir tea towels too. As in, I drew illustrations and got them printed on a tea towel. I didn’t just draw a tea towel. Or hand you a piece of paper with a rectangle drawn on it, “What is this?” “It is a tea towel that I drew, $10 please.” Although I will draw you a rectangle for free, if you bring your own piece of paper. Anyway, come along, it’s so nice when we can all get together, also this live show is Very Good. theallusionist.org/events
On with the show.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: People, for some reason, expect me to look different than I do, or to look… I mean, I am a fairly academic person. I use the word relatively commonly in the way that most people do, but I'm not constantly going around cursing or insulting people or anything like that. I am careful about this word as I am about my usage in general. I have adopted certain new uses that I find useful, but I'm not going around using this word absolutely constantly. If people expect me to be doing that, then they're going to be disappointed.
Well, I'm Jesse Sheidlower. I'm a lexicographer; I spent 14 years at the Oxford English Dictionary, before that I was in the Random House Dictionary Department, and I am also the editor of the online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, which is a free historical dictionary devoted to the vocabulary of science fiction. I specialize in sexual terms and obscenity, and I have written now four editions of a book about the word fuck called The F Word.
HZ: If you’re thinking, “How the fuck can you write a whole 500-page dictionary just about the word ‘fuck’?” consider, say, the many meanings of ‘ass fuck’, noun and verb - and that’s before you even add similar terms like ‘bumfuck’ and ‘buttfuck’. And there are so many less usual terms, like ‘fucksome’ or ‘fuckstrated’ or ‘fuckist’ or ‘fucktious’.
HZ: How did you get into the F word detail?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: It was pretty much by chance. So when I was at Random House, I had discovered Jon Lighter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang, basically in a drawer. I found it and thought, this is awesome, we should do this.
HZ: Jon Lighter had collected American slang terms spanning 300 years, and after Jesse came across the manuscript, in 1994 Random House published the first volume, from A-G.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Obviously there were a very large number of pages devoted to this word in that, and I thought for a long time, “This is the word people are gonna care about. Like people are gonna find this super interesting. Everyone's gonna turn to the end of F and and look this up.” But this is also a large, expensive - I mean it was published by Random House, but it's still effectively an academic book. It's not easy for people to find. And I thought to myself, “We should publish this as a separate book.” But I didn't say anything because of course this was too absurd. I thought if I actually said this out loud, I would be laughed out of an editorial meeting.
HZ: But he wasn't!
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: And I finally said, “What if we took the F word material from the slang dictionary and published that as a separate book?” And everyone thought, “Yes! That's great!” So I worked on that.
HZ: And he's still working on it. The first edition of The F Word, collecting different uses of the word ‘fuck’ across the eight centuries of its known existence in print, was published in 1995; a second edition appeared in 1999; the book expanded significantly for a third edition in 2009; and expanded and updated yet again for the fourth edition, which was released in November 2024.
HZ: What has it been like being essentially a lexicographer for a single word for 30+ years?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Well, it's interesting, of course. I find the word interesting. The thing about this word is that most people find it interesting, and at this point it's clear that we are allowed to find it interesting. But that wasn't always the case. When I started, it was not really considered appropriate for academics or scholars to spend time working on words of this sort. The idea that you could be a real academic and spend a lot of time working on a sexual terminology: like, no, no, this is off the table. So in fact, there wasn't that much serious scholarship that had been done about this word or similar things. There were some documents that were well known among a small number of people that were never published but passed - Allen Walker Read, the great scholar, had a paper in American speech in 1934 called ‘An Obscenity Symbol’ that was entirely devoted to the word ‘fuck’, but never used the word ‘fuck’.
HZ: Practically an Ouilipo exercise.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: And this was the first thing that was seriously written about it - again, without using it.
HZ: Among Allen Walker Read's research interests were Britishisms, absolutisms, yells, American place names, the etymology of 'blizzard'; he did extensive research into the term "OK", for which there had been lots of flimflam explanations floating around until he located its probable origins; he wrote serious linguistic study of latrinalia, which is graffiti in public lavatories, and had to publish it himself in Paris in 1935 because American publishers wouldn't touch something so obscene - eventually they did relent and publish it, but not until 1977 - and Allen Walker Read's 1934 paper Jesse mentioned, 'An Obscenity Symbol', was an unprecedented linguistic study of the word fuck. But now it's a lot easier to publish academic work about it. And why wouldn’t you? For a start, it’s so unusual in being so many parts of speech for a start. It's a verb. It's a full sentence on its own. It's a noun. Why wouldn’t you study it?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Well, people have tried. The famous anecdote about this - so Farmer and Henley's slang dictionary, the multivolume Victorian slang dictionary, had a tremendous amount of sexual and other material in there. But it was a serious work. It was a work of scholarship: many languages, many historical quotations. It was printed for private subscribers only. So this wasn't something that you would run into in any kind of public way.
When the second volume was about to come out, the volume that contained ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’, Farmer's printer refused to print it. That left him in the lurch and he had to find another printer at short notice, eventually had to go to the continent for this, and meanwhile sued his printer for breach of contract for the year it took him to find another printer and redo everything and so forth. And there was a public trial that actually got a fair amount of attention about this. There were Oxbridge scholars who testified that, no, this is a work of scholarship; this is important, this is real. And it took the jury three seconds to find for the printer - like, obviously this could not be printed, like of course you could break a contract to avoid having to print this.
Obviously things have moved on quite a bit - this is 1893 - but it can be difficult, the notion that it doesn't matter how good it is in terms of academic quality, if this is not okay to do, it's not okay to do. The study of popular culture is relatively recent, studying things of this nature, by which I mean broadly popular culture, was not something that was really acceptable for academics to do. And now this is much more acceptable; now you can write about this, you can research this, you can publish it.
HZ: Did you have any problems with the printer saying, “I simply cannot publish this volume of obscenities?”
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: No, we didn't, and that was actually a bit surprising. We were genuinely worried that there would be a strong negative reaction to it, but in fact, there was almost no problem at all. There was no negative reaction. Everyone thought that it was worth discussing. Everyone understood that it was interesting, but it was also a serious project - we weren't trying to do this to get a rise out of people, we were doing it because it was intrinsically interesting and worthwhile project. As time goes on, it's more clear that no, this is a serious subject for research.
HZ: Would you have anticipated that you would by now have done four editions? That this would've been part of your work for such a long time?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: I did not think so. No. Of course, with any dictionary project, it's never done. There's always more work to do. You can always keep revising, but I didn't think there would be so much to do. I didn't think there would be so many changes.
HZ: The project has evolved. The first edition in 1995 was based heavily on the aforementioned Historical Dictionary of American Slang by Jonathan Lighter.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: It was mostly not my work; it was Jonathan Lighter's work. And there were some problems with that. The HDAS was devoted, as its name makes clear, to American slang. So things that were exclusively British were not included.
HZ: Jesse sought to fix that in the second edition of The F Word, which appeared in 1999. And he continues to expand it.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: I put in the non-American things, I put in worldwide uses. The editing of HDAS had only gone through the early part of the alphabet - I mean, it still hasn't gone past that. But I had more time to do research on F words that came later in the alphabet, and so forth. The third edition doubled the size of the previous of the second edition, which I did not expect. Partly that's because in the 2000s, there was a tremendous amount of additional online historical data that I could usel and also at that point I had joined the OED, so I had access to all of the OED sources. Tremendous amount there that I wasn't expecting.
I thought, "Well, we already had a lot of information. How much more can there be?" Yeah, there can be a lot more. The Internet Archive has so much material. A colleague who's been working for a number of decades on a dictionary of sexual slang graciously gave me pretty much every related entry I might need. And there were also a couple of archives of the history of sex, very broadly considered: so Victorian pornography, modern; archives of homosexual pulps; things like that. I mean, so much there. I was expecting a moderate update, and it turned into an enormous update, with a huge amount of new information in there. I couldn't have predicted the extent to which electronic research would completely transform the ability to do research.
HZ: There's a lot of internet to have to wade through for the last 20+ years of how people swear a lot more and write a lot more how they speak, which is less available in written materials from previous centuries. That seems overwhelming.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: There's a lot; there's a lot. For the early editions, I thought, okay, I'm pretty much anything I've heard of will go in. And now no, there's no way to do that. I mean, you look at something like Urban Dictionary and just infinite amounts of stuff that you can't really tell how much currency this has. I have to be much more careful now about putting in things that the only evidence is a couple of random online things. So if there's something that, not that much evidence relatively recent and not from a very mainstream source, I will record it, but perhaps not put it in at this point.
HZ: Even without that stuff, there's plenty to include.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: This new, the fourth edition has over 150 new entries and over 150 antedatings as earlier examples. So, it's not just a few new things. It's a tremendous amount of new things. There's really a lot out there. It really is a major update.
HZ: Are you bracing yourself for a fifth edition?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: I am already collecting material. Of course, there are a number of things that I've drafted or, or, or have notes for, but I, that didn't make it into the print version. People have sent me a couple things and, yeah, I don't know if I will live to see it or if anyone will want to publish it, but I am definitely collecting more material.
HZ: A lexicographer's work has never done,
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Never.
HZ: The word ‘fuck’ didn’t make it into a mainstream dictionary of English until 1966, but it had been around for hundreds of years prior. It is difficult to know precisely how long ago, though, or how widespread it was or how people used it, because it didn’t appear in print overtly all that much - sometimes coded, sometimes euphemised. Taboo words are particularly tricky for etymologists.
HZ: What do we know about the origins of the word ‘fuck’?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: We know it's Germanic. That's all we can say for sure. The etymological meaning is something like to move back and forth, to thrust or to strike to hit - that comes from that. And the sexual meaning also comes from that sense. So that's where the core meaning comes from. How it got there, we're not sure.
We know that it's a Germanic word. So it's the English word is in fact the earliest example, in any Germanic language, which is not common - usually there would be examples in other languages earlier. But it shows up in Dutch, in German, in Swedish and Norwegian. It appears in most of the Germanic languages having sexual meanings or meanings that are comparable meanings like to thrust or to move back and forth. So you see this in a wide variety of Germanic languages. Beyond that, we don't really know.
HZ: Why do people really want this work to be an acronym? How many times do we have to tell them it's not an acronym?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: There are many words from acronyms. The number of people will come up to you and say, "Hey, did you know that you know, fuck or COP or TIP or golf or whatever, are acronyms?" No, they never are. So, yeah. But no one will ever say, “Hey, do you know that ‘laser’ stands for ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’?”
No. And no one will say that. So if you just say, “No, it's not an acronym,” you'll always be right. The exception to that is, in fact, two F words, which are SNAFU and FUBAR, which I'm very sure are acronyms.
HZ: Probably both are World War Two military slangs. SNAFU stood for’ situation normal, all fucked up’; FUBAR for ‘fucked up beyond all recognition.’ There was also SUSFU, ‘Situation unchanged: still fucked up’, but I don’t hear that one wheeled out. And just to preempt any of you landing in my inbox to say ‘fugazi’ is an acronym from the Vietnam War, standing for “fucked up, got ambushed, zipped in (a body bag)” - I think that’s a backronym, there’s no evidence for it being an acronym and if it were an acronym, what happened to the body bag, why is it not ‘fugazibb’? Plus when it first started appearing in print in the 1970s, it ended with a Y not an I. Make an acronym make sense! (MAAMS.)
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: But no, ‘fuck’ itself is not an acronym. It is far too old to be an acronym.
HZ: Zaltzman’s first law of etymology: if a word existed prior to the 20th century, it’s never an acronym.
HZ: Is that why people want it to be an acronym though, because the origins of it are a little obscure?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: That's the usual reason. Usually when people say something's from an acronym, it's a combination of the fact that the story itself is somewhat interesting in its own right, like it's intrinsically amusing or interesting, and the fact that there's nothing else you can point to to say, “No, this is it.” That wouldn't necessarily matter, but it would help. So ‘posh’: we don't know the origin of ‘posh’, we know conclusively that it's not from “port out, starboard home”, but we don't know what it is. If we knew and if we could absolutely say "No, it's absolutely from this, here's proof," that would help, a little bit, but not that much.
So people want, first of all, they do want a good story, but they also do want an answer. So in the case of words where you don't have an answer, yeah, the academic thing to do is to say, “Well, we don't know.” The popular thing to do is say, “Well, if we don't know, then this must be correct.” Or, “We have to find something, so we'll use this, even if it makes no sense,” because knowing something wrong is better than not knowing anything at all. And I do think that's the inspiration behind assigning acronym origins to stuff where there's no basis for it. You know, you have to have an answer. And wrong is better than no answer.
HZ: What chaotic imagination conceived of "fornication under consent of the king" though? Come on.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: A thing that surprised me quite a bit was, there there are two main acronym suggestions. One is "fornication under consent of the king". The other is "for unlawful carnal knowledge". In fact, things like that - the phrase, not the use of that as an acronym for fuck, but the expression "unlawful carnal knowledge" or "for unlawful carnal knowledge" does appear in legal records going back to the 19th century. It was a real legal term referring to exactly what it sounds like. Now, again, this was not wordplay, they weren't making a joke, they weren't suggesting this; but it happens that you can find "unlawful carnal knowledge" in legal texts in the 1880s, in several different places. So, it's not true, but there is at least a plausible origin for that.
HZ: There seems to be an above average amount of maybe not true stuff that you have to sift through when researching this area of language.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Yeah, for any of this, you need actual documents from the time, not someone saying, "Oh, did you know that this meant so and so?" - you get stuff like that constantly. And someone simply asserting something obviously isn't reliable.
HZ: One of the first reliable examples of the word ‘fuck’ in the sense we’ve been talking about is in a place name in England.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: This is from the late 14th century, and it actually had this name or variance of this name for many centuries after that: a place near Bristol, a field called Fucking Grove. This was in a charter: "Well, you go up to the small pile of rocks here and then left to whatever, and it's a place called Fucking Grove." It seems that "a grove where one copulates" is the only plausible meaning here. There are other parallels for that. You know, there, there are places called "loving field", things like that. So it seems like yes, the word at meant this, at least in proper names in the 14th century.
HZ: I'm feeling a rare stab of pride to be British right now.
HZ: The Austrian village named Fucking was famous for tourists going there and stealing the town’s signs, to the residents’ annoyance. A vote to change the village’s name failed in 2004 - they thought, “Why should we have to change?” - but on 1 January 2021, Fucking did change its name, to Fugging. For a few months after, swear-tourists scrawled 'Fucking' over the new town signs for 'Fugging', but eventually they got bored, and the 100 or so inhabitants - aka Fuckingers - have been left in peace.
But the town's name wasn't even from the word 'fuck' that we're talking about - it's an ancient eponym, after a sixth century Bavarian aristocrat named Focko, and in 1070 when the town name was documented, 'Fucking' would probably have been pronounced 'Fooking' anyway. But when have we ever let etymology spoil our fun? Don’t answer that.
The poem ‘Flen Flyys’, meaning ‘Fleas and Flies’, from 1475 is written in a mixture of Latin and English and it satirises Carmelite friars, with the line “they are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely” - Ely the town in Cambridgeshire and also a wordplay on hell. This poem is currently the earliest known written example of the word ‘fuck’ definitely in the sexual sense and as a common word, as in not a place name - or a person’s name. Yes, people actually had names containing fuck’.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Well, this was a great discovery. A historian working on what seemed like relatively dry legal records, in Cheshire in the early 14th century, found an example of a man whose name was Roger Fuckebythenavele.
HZ: Amazing choice of first name for that second name.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: It's a wonderful, it's an astounding coincidence, but it's a coincidence, I'm sure. ‘Roger’ as a sexual term is much, much later than that.
So he had committed some crime; we don't actually know what the crime was, but he committed some crime and the authorities were having trouble tracking him down. So over the course of months, there were many records of their trying to find him. and this is his name, and it's spelled in a couple of different ways, as is typical for the time. This doesn't appear once, it appears seven times over the course of a number of months. So we know this was his name. This wasn't some weird slip of the pen or something in inexplicable - we know this was his name. The question of how to interpret it is open, of course. But it seems the only plausible interpretation is that Roger either attempted to copulate in this manner or thought that this is how you do it.
HZ: The medieval historian Paul Booth who found Roger Fuckbythenavele’s name in the Cheshire documents, thought the name must have been bestowed upon him as an insult, a form of revenge from a sexual partner. It could also be a masturbation reference.
Now, there were actually some fucknames that occured earlier: John Le Fucker, recorded in court documents from April 1278 because he had been charged with double murder. But etymologists debate over whether his last name was actually from the sexual sense of fuck, most err towards it being from another non-sexual derivation, perhaps related to the word ‘fike’ meaning to be restless or fidgety, or a variant on ‘fulcher’ meaning soldier, or a misspelling of Tucker. And around 1290, there may have been one Simon Fuckbutter - he beats butter in the act of churning it, or at least that’s the public version of the story, what he does with butter in his spare time is his business - and William Smalfuk, which likely meant a small sail. Whereas the reason Roger Fuckbythenavele is an important discovery in the history of fuck is that his name is difficult to interpret as anything other than the sexual sense of the word, even though that had been rare in writing when Roger Fuckbythenavele was enshrined in documents then being declared an outlaw in 1310 and 1311.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: This seems like it has to be the sexual use. This seems like it has to be the same word. People have looked at it and tried making arguments about what else it could mean. It seems that this has to be sexual. I don't know any other way around it.
HZ: So what are the meanings of the word ‘fuck’ around that? Are there any meanings that aren't sexual then?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: No. No. Right. Pretty much not. For almost the entire history of the word, it is sexual. And that's one of the big things about the study of this word. People regard ‘fuck’ as a sexual term; in fact, if you go to a corpus now, and just take a random sampling of uses of fuck, overwhelmingly, it is not sexual.
HZ: It appears in so many different non-sexual forms: as intensifiers, insults, expostulations, punctuation…
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Yes, it is sexual in origin, but these are all rather new indeed. There are one 18th century example, a couple of small handful of 19th century examples. And again, despite the fact that the word was very common, like if you look at these Victorian pornography collections that I've mentioned, ‘fuck’ appears all over the place, always in sexual use. And, of course, that's what they're writing about. But you don't like accidentally come across some non-sexual example, given that they're clearly okay with using the word itself. So things like that suggest that, no, it really wasn't in use in figurative contexts until very recently.
I mean, things like ‘fuck you’: ‘fuck you’ is 20th century, we don't see that in until, I think, 1905. ‘Fucking’ is an intensifier - "I'm fucking exhausted", that sort of thing - the earliest completely clear example of that is in fact in Farmer and Henley's dictionary from 1893. It's described as common, but we don't have an earlier example. But the point is this is something that's overwhelmingly common now, and we just don't have much evidence for it until fairly recently; many of these are very recent.
HZ: ‘Fuck off’ as in ‘go away’ - that’s documented from 1929, as is the verb ‘fuck up’; ‘fuck over’ 1961; “Fuck me!” as expression of surprise, 1929; ‘fuckton’ 1995; ‘fuckwit’ 1968, the insult ‘fuckpig’, 1922; but, don’t forget, lexicography only gets to go on written examples. People could have been shouting “fuckpig!” every day of their lives 500 years ago, but since nobody jotted that down in their diaries or poems or legal documents, we can’t know. Oh for a time machine!
In the fourth edition of The F Word, around 150 terms have been antedated, meaning Jesse has been able to include earlier citations than were previously known about.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: One of the big antedatings is the word ‘unfucked’, meaning literally someone who has not had sex, which had an antedating of over a hundred years to Horace Walpole, in the 1740s, of all people.
HZ: Horace Walpole’s 1743 poem ‘Little Peggy’ was a celebration of sorts of his probable boyfriend’s baby being birthed by one of his other lovers. “His small cock… Women unfucked at sight of it should breed,/ and other virgins teem with heav’nly seed.” This poem really flustered Walpole’s editors well into the 20th century; they struggled with whether to publish it, because of obscenity and because they didn’t want to suggest that Walpole was a sexperson at all, let alone one who had sex with men. Anyway that’s the earliest known instance of ‘unfucked’ to mean ‘someone who has not had sex’, 1743.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: So everything you think is new has been around a lot longer than you think. Of course, there are some things that are genuinely new, but most of the time, by the time you've heard of something or by the time you can react to it, it's been around for quite some time, even if you're really active in paying attention to these things and trying to follow it. That's just the way things are. There are some genuinely new things: "AF" for "as fuck", this is 2010s, for example; to fuck meaning to be great, like “that song fucks” - that's also pretty new, a decade, a decade and a half old. But many things are older than you think and many things that have been in the whole time. There are a lot of antedatings, I mean a tremendous number of antedatings here, where you find earlier examples of things.
HZ: Some of the other antedatings in 4th edition: ‘fuckery’ was previously dated from 1954, now antedated to 1900, the noun ‘tongue-fuck’ from 1972 to 1902 and the verb ‘mouth-fuck’ from 1954 to 1868; ‘fuckstick’ from 1973 to 1904, ‘ass-fuck’ 1940 to 1874, ‘dogfuck’ 1980 to 1867…
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: You always want to find earlier examples, which is a key point of research in historical lexicography. This is what you wanna do. Some people treat this as a competitive game. And it's not just for the purpose of competition, it's not just showing off or whatever: when you find earlier examples, it shows that what you thought you knew about the history of language was not correct.
And it particularly matters for terms like this where, if you have something from 1975, let's say, you don't know if it's actually from 1975 or actually much older and just not written down because it's vulgar. And if you make discoveries about that, it really tells you something about the culture to find earlier examples. It's not just like, "Hey, cool, I beat you by two months" - it's a real discovery. It really changes how we look at the language, how we look at the culture.
HZ: Are there ways in which the word is used in more recent editions of the book that weren't around then, and you were like, “Oh, that's surprising,” or “That feels new”?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: One of my favourite of the new entries is the group of expressions of the sort ‘to give no fucks’ or ‘zero fucks given’, which was actually very hard to figure out how to define this. I ended up saying, "In idiomatic uses in negative contexts, a small or insignificant amount of caring or empathy regarded as a quantifiable unit."
So, of course you have ‘don't give a fuck’ - that goes back quite some way depending on how you look at that evidence. But that's not a specific thing here, ‘to give no fucks’, ‘zero fucks to give’, ‘you couldn't give two fucks’, this kind of thing; that's a quantifiable thing. And I find this interesting. The earliest example of this, rather to my surprise in fact, goes back to 1945 in a letter from, of all people, Philip Larkin.
HZ: Oh, kind of tracks, yeah.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Yeah. I mean, it tracks. But if you had asked me, I wouldn't have said, “Oh yeah, it is probably from Larkin,” something like that. But, yeah, I mean, a great example from that. Examples from the 1970s, the 1990s: ‘I don't give a fuck’, ‘not a single fuck’, ‘not a single solitary fuck’ from Boss the rapper in 1993. So that's something. Okay. It's been around for quite a number of decades now.
But still, these uses feel pretty new to me now. Like the early ones felt like if you'd asked me in the mid-1990s, I would've thought, “oh, that doesn't really count,” or “that's a one-off now.” It's like, no, this, it's a whole group of expressions. It's really common. It's definitely out there. This is a real thing. This is a new thing. It feels new to me, at least.
HZ: I was wondering if you were still able to use it in a way that is immediate, or if it requires like too much intellectual processing?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Well, there are some that would, but most of the time, no. In fact, this came up recently: I teach a class in lexicography at Columbia University, usually once a year. And I pay attention - well, of course I pay attention to everything as I'm teaching - and I do notice that very occasionally I might use the word in conversation. And I'm always curious how I use it and how people react to it when I say this.
And when I do, it gives us the opportunity to, to discuss the nature of taboo in general. Like, I can use it in figurative senses. If I used it in some way to express exasperation, that would be okay. But I couldn't use it in class in a sexual way because the subject is not appropriate. It's not the word itself. If I said, " sorry, I'm late, there was this fucking traffic," whatever, something like that, I could get away with that. But there's no context in which I, as a professor, could be speaking about sex and, and use this word, because sex is not something that you can talk about in this way, you know? So, I'm paying attention to things like that all the time.
HZ: I asked Allusionist listeners if they had questions for you, and they sure did. And several of them were very interested in fuck as an infix and just why that is English's basically only infix?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: So an infix is using something inside an existing word, like 'absofuckinglutely' is one of the classic examples. And infixed fucking goes back to the World War I basically and fairly commonly thereafter, there are other infixes.
Other languages have a lot more infixation. English doesn't, that is not how English works. There are other things than fucking: ‘goddamn’ -
HZ: - ‘bloody’.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: ‘Bloody’ - ‘absobloodylutely’, yeah, ‘indebloodypendant’; but they're always with some sort of obscene term, some kind of taboo term inserted into an existing word. Because if you are going to have something, you're not going to do it for complex morphological reasons that some other languages allow. You're going to have it in some straightforward exclamatory use, where it doesn't require that large bending of English grammatical structures.
HZ: Scott says: "Why did ‘fuck’ end up getting into places that seemingly have nothing to do with sex? Like ‘WTF’? Why is it there? As far as I have considered, no other word could really take its place. ‘What the ass/shit,’ et cetera, doesn't really work."
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Well, ‘hell’ works. The problem with taboo words, the very broad category of taboo words, is that they don't necessarily substitute for each other easily. For example, right now the most offensive words in English are generally group terms - so racial slurs, ethnic slurs, things referring to group membership - these are the ones that you can't say, but that doesn't mean that you can substitute these words into F word or S word expressions; that's not how things work. So the fact that you can't use some offensive words in that structure, you can use other ones.
So yes, there are expressions, in fact ‘puck’, PUCK, is an Irish English term for the devil. And there are examples from the early 19th century, I think, of "What the puck" meaning “what the devil”, “what the hell”, that are used the same way that “What the fuck” is used nowadays. And this could be just a complete coincidence, but in fact things like “what the hell” or “what the devil” have been used for many centuries.
I think ‘fuck’ lends itself to various kinds of figurative language in ways that make sense. They don't have to be pleasurable. "Fuck you" has generated the expression "unfuck you", from 1960 or so, the conscious suggestion that, "sex is a pleasurable thing. This is not something I would want to wish on an enemy therefore I will use unfuck. You meaning the same thing, but in a presumably non-positive way."
HZ: And ‘unfuck’ meaning to fix something that is fucked also shows up in writing from the same time.
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: So anyway, the point is that there are a wide variety of figurative uses that makes sense for how fuck could be used. And that is true for certain things. ‘Shit’ has a huge amount of uses that also seems like it's well suited for that; ‘cunt’, not so much. Very much more frequently used in British English than American English, but it doesn't feel to me like that that's a word that could generate the incredibly wide variety of figurative uses that ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ can.
HZ: Alison said: "What do you think of the fact that if you add fucking to your Google search at the moment, it will return your search result without the AI summary?"
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: I think it's great. I mean, of course any any use of fuck I'm happy with, but anything to defeat AI, yes. If ‘fucking’ can defeat Google's AI, that's a huge win for me. I think that's fantastic. I love it.
HZ: Are there any other terms you can imagine spending so much time working on?
JESSE SHEIDLOWER: Well, this has been a very long time. I do think that "shit" is an extremely interesting word. It is also used in an enormously wide variety of uses and examples and proverbs and phrases and jokes. I think one could write an interesting book about that as well. But, it's a lot.
HZ: Jesse Sheidlower is a lexicographer, writer and editor. Among his work is the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, which you can browse at sfdictionary.com, and the four editions - so far! - of The F Word, a history and dictionary of the word fuck and its many variants, available to buy now and it’s a fucking good read. Next up in four letter word season, we’re going to revisit an even stronger one.
If you like this four letter word stuff, or even if you don’t, come to the Allusionist live show in Toronto or Montréal in June! There’s a section - an act? - in it about ancient words becoming modern sweary problems, it’s very educational I promise. Get tickets at theallusionist.org/events. Also if you’re a member of the Allusioverse, you get special merch perks at the live shows, as well as a bunch of other things in our usual online realm: you help to keep this independent podcast in existence in the heinous media landscape of today; you get regular livestreams with me reading from my collection of reference books; you get behind the scenes info about the making of every episode; and you get to hang out with your fellows in the Allusioverse Discord, an online community that isn’t a shitshow, and we get about our problems and our faves, our finest fountain pens and our foulest portmanteaus, and we watch tv and films together too. Join us via theallusionist.org/donate.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
katabatic, adjective, Meteorology (of a wind): caused by local downward motion of cool air.
Try using ‘katabatic’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, with original music by the singer and composer Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
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