From Heres Snijder, Canada: ?I remember someone telling me once, long ago, that actually the F-word is an abbreviation. The last two letters of the word were, I believe, contracted from the words Carnal Knowledge. Could you help me out here, perhaps with some additional etymological data??
[A] ******, the most-used item of vulgar slang in the language and still one capable of shocking even in these linguistically tolerant times, has always fascinated the know-alls of etymology, especially those who see acronyms everywhere.
Jesse Sheidlower, in The F-Word, his magisterial examination of the word?s origins and usage based on the researches of Professor Jonathan Lighter, says that acronymic suggestions for its origin only began to appear in the 1960s, at about the time that the traditional taboos on printing it were beginning to decline. If you hunt about you will find quite a number, all variations on a theme:
* It originated as a medical diagnostic notation relating to soldiers in the British Imperial Army. When a soldier reported sick and was found to have VD, an abbreviation was stamped on his documents, short for Found Under Carnal Knowledge.
* The origin was in the fifteenth century, when a married couple had to have permission from the king to procreate. Hence, Fornication Under Consent of the King (or sometimes Fornication Upon Command of the King).
* During the time of the Puritans, a person imprisoned in the stocks would have his or her crime displayed on the timbers. Because space was tight, when adultery was involved they used an acronym that represented the words For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.
There are others. All are nonsense, of course, as is a story I?ve heard, told to a World Wide Words subscriber during his journalism training by a law lecturer, that ****** was commonly used in Chaucerian times in the sense of ?dibble?. A farmer would use his thumb to dibble the soil, to make a hole into which he then dropped a seed. There is, as you may surmise, not the slightest evidence that the word was ever used in this sense.
It is often classed as one of the archetypal Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, but it isn?t Anglo-Saxon?it?s not recorded until the fifteenth century. The first known appearance is in a Latin poem dated sometime before 1500 that satirises the Carmelite friars of Cambridge. It includes the line Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk. The code can easily be broken to read Non sunt in coeli, quia fvccant vvivys of heli. Being translated, this says ?They are not in heaven because they ****** wives of Ely?. Fuccant (in modern spelling) looks like Latin, but it?s a humorous fake?****** is actually Germanic, related to Middle Dutch fokken, Norwegian fukka and Swedish focka.
The word seems from the start to have been regarded as unacceptable in polite company. It remained almost entirely unprintable other than in privately circulated material until the 1960s, though it has been in sustained and constant use in coarse speech, of course. In 1948, the publishers of Norman Mailer?s The Naked and the Dead forced him to bowdlerise it as fug, leading to the (surely apocryphal) story that Dorothy Parker remarked on meeting him, ?So you?re the young man who can?t spell ******??
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