The F-Word

by Jesse Sheidlower

  Certainly the word was considered literally unprintable except in obscure, secret, or privately printed publications throughout the nineteenth century. Important early authors known to have used the word include Lord Rochester in the seventeenth century and Robert Burns in the late eighteenth century; Burns was probably the latest important author known to use the word before the twentieth century, and he uses it only in Merry Muses of Caledonia, a bawdy manuscript intended for private circulation only. Even Captain Francis Grose—a friend of Burns—in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785 and later editions; the word was expunged from the 1811 edition by a different compiler) felt compelled to spell it f–k.

  In a striking example of the unfamiliarity of some Victorians with bawdy vocabulary, we see that the poet Robert Browning egregiously misunderstood one common word. He encountered the couplet “They talked of his having a Cardinal’s hat,/They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat,” in a seventeenth-century poem. Erroneously believing from this passage that the word referred to a part of a nun’s habit, Browning wrote of “Cowls and twats” in his 1848 poem Pippa Passes.

  This does not imply that fuck was unused, of course. John Farmer and W. E. Henley’s monumental Slang and Its Analogues (privately printed; the volume with fuck appeared in 1893) included the use of fucking as both an adjective and an adverb, described respectively as “A qualification of extreme contumely” and “a more violent form of bloody.” These are labeled “common,” despite the fact that this editor has been able to discover hardly any earlier examples of this sense outside Farmer and Henley’s dictionary. No doubt this and various other senses were common but unprinted for some time previously. While there seem to be a large number of new senses that are first found around World War I, it seems likely that these were in use earlier, and their appearance in the 1910s is more a result of weakening taboos than of an actual increase in the number of words coined in that era.

  For although fuck may have been strictly taboo in mainstream usage in the nineteenth century, it was extremely common in the flourishing world of Victorian pornography. Many explicit F-words are found in such sources from the 1860s onward, often in ways that are scarcely different from the hard-core pornography of the present day. And research in the past ten years has shown that various forms or senses that were thought to have come later were indeed in use in the nineteenth century.

  In two remarkable incidents, fuck even found its way into the very proper London Times in that prudish era. Reporting a speech delivered by Attorney General Sir William Harcourt, the Times printed on January 13, 1882:

  I saw in a Tory journal the other day a note of alarm, in which they said, “Why, if a tenant-farmer is elected for the North Riding of Yorkshire the farmers will be a political power who will have to be reckoned with.” The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking. I think that is very likely.

  It took the stunned editors four days to run an apology for what must have been a bit of mischief at the typesetter:

  No pains have been spared by the management of this journal to discover the author of a gross outrage committed by the interpolation of a line in the speech of Sir William Harcourt reported in our issue of Monday last. This malicious fabrication was surreptitiously introduced before the paper went to press. The matter is now under legal investigation, and it is hoped that the perpetrator of the outrage will be brought to punishment.

  And later that year, on June 12, 1882, the following advertisement appeared: “Every-day Life in our Public Schools. Sketched by Head Scholars. With a Glossary of Some Words used by Henry Irving in his disquisition upon fucking, which is in Common Use in those Schools.”

  Changing Standards

  Different kinds of language have been considered incendiary at different times. Several hundred years ago, for example, religious profanity was the most unforgivable type of expression. In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking: in nineteenth-century America even the word leg was sometimes considered indecent; the proper substitute was limb. Now racial or ethnic epithets are the scourge; one prominent professor told U.S. News & World Report in 1994 that if she used fuck in class, no one would bat an eye, but that she would never dare to use any racial epithet in any context.

  Today it seems that the taboos against the F-word are weaker than ever. While a few publications still refuse to print fuck regardless of the circumstances, the word can be found quite easily in most places. The more literary magazines have printed fuck for some time, but now even Newsweek and Time have used the un-censored word; the publication of the Starr Report in the New York Times, and a notable comment from Vice President Cheney in the Washington Post, has meant that even the proper papers consider fuck fit to print. Even commercial television, though still subject to FCC regulations, is becoming more open in its use.

  The unpredictable nature of live television has allowed fuck to slip past would-be censors. Kenneth Tynan, then the Director of the National Theatre, was the first to manage this in England, in a November 13, 1965, appearance on the late-night satirical talk show “BBC-3.” Asked whether he would stage a play where sexual intercourse was depicted on stage, he replied, “Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be be printed or said can also be seen.” This provoked a huge reaction in England, with the BBC being forced to apologize and politicians attempting to remove Tynan from his post, remove the head of the BBC from his post, and to prosecute Tynan for using obscene words in public. Tynan quickly made a less-than-conciliatory public statement that he “used an old English word in a completely neutral way to illustrate a serious point, just as I would have used it in similar conversation with any group of grown-up people.”

  There were other such incidents, but the most notorious took place in an interview with the seminal punk band the Sex Pistols on December 1, 1976, conducted by Bill Grundy on Thames Television’s Today program. First, referring to a large advance the band had received from their record company, guitarist Steve Jones said, “We’ve fuckin’ spent it, ain’t we?” As the interview was winding down, Grundy encouraged the band to “say something outrageous.” Jones obliged with “You dirty fucker!” to which Grundy replied, “What a clever boy,” and Jones casually replied, “What a fucking rotter.” Of the next-day newspaper reaction, the singer Elvis Costello later said, “It was a great morning—just to hear people’s blood pressure going up and down over it.” Grundy was suspended and EMI threatened to drop the band, though others, including Vivienne Westwood, complained of hypocrisy, arguing that it was only the band’s image that provoked such a strong response to a word that was in wide use.

  The NBC live comedy show “Saturday Night Live” has seen the word used on a number of occasions, perhaps most notably on February 21, 1981. Charles Rocket, playing J. R. Ewing in a sketch based on the TV show “Dallas,” said “It’s the first time I’ve ever been shot in my life. I’d like to know who the fuck did it.” (Three weeks later, Rocket was fired, though with the show slumping at the time, others in the cast were let go as well.) And on the same show, the musical guest Prince sang “fighting war is such a fucking bore.” In 1993 Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2, used the word during a live broadcast of the Grammy Awards. In sports, powerful microphones have picked up and transmitted various examples, and players have used the word in televised interviews, with differing reactions. In the celebratory rally after the Philadelphia Phillies won the 2008 World Series, second baseman Chase Utley said in front of a packed stadium, “World Champions. World fucking Champions!” But follow-up interviews with viewers—many of them with their children—revealed that most people were excited rather than upset by this.

  Fuck in Print

  The earliest known publication of fuck in the United States appears to be in a legal case, in a fascin
ating decision. The case, heard in the Supreme Court of Missouri in 1846, concerned a man who had been accused of having sex with a mare, and who successfully sued for slander. The verdict was appealed, and in its rejection of the appeal, the court wrote:

  The slanderous charge was carnal knowledge of a mare, and the word “fuck” was used to convey the imputation. After the verdict for the plaintiff, a motion made in arrest of judgment, for the reason that the word used to convey the slander, was unknown to the English language, and was not understood by those to whom it was spoken.… The motion was overruled, and Edgar appealed.

  Because the modesty of our lexicographers restrains them from publishing obscene words, or from giving the obscene signification to words that may be used without conveying any obscenity, it does not follow that they are not English words, and not understood by those who hear them; or that chaste words may not be applied so as to be understood in an obscene sense by every one who hears them.

  In other words, fuck was well known and understood, so the fact that it wasn’t in dictionaries was irrelevant.

  Curiously, this same tack was attempted in another slander case, in one of the very few other examples of fuck in nineteenth-century U.S. legal sources, and with the exact same outcome. In an 1865 case in the Supreme Court of Indiana, the court wrote:

  Rebecca Kelley sued the appellant in the court below for slander. The words charged are, “I have f--ked Rebecca Kelley one hundred times.” “I have screwed Beck Kelley one hundred times.” It is claimed that the words charged do not import whoredom, and are not actionable per se. We think otherwise. The word “f--ked,” although not to be found in any vocabulary of the English language, is as well understood as any other English word.

  Despite these legal examples—and there are really very few in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—it seems that the word may not have been openly printed in a literary source in the United States until 1926, when it appeared once, and seemingly without generating any controversy (the word is still included in the book’s tenth printing), in Howard Vincent O’Brien’s anonymously published Wine, Women and War, his diary of the years 1917–19. It is worth noting that he used it in a figurative sense and was explicitly quoting an Australian soldier (see the 1918 quote at FUCKING adj. sense 2).

  Fuck is found repeatedly in James Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in book form in 1922 and circulated through clandestine copies in the United States for some time before a court decision in 1933 allowed the book’s legal entry. Judge John Woolsey specifically addressed the obscene words in his verdict: “The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe.”

  It took far longer for D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be approved by the courts, partly because of its more frequent use of obscene words, and partly (particularly in England) because of its depiction of an affair between a working-class man and an aristocratic woman. When an American court finally approved its publication in 1959, the judge also discussed the dangerous words. Federal Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan wrote in his decision: “Four-letter Anglo-Saxon words are used with some frequency…this language understandably will shock the sensitive minded. Be that as it may…the language which shocks, except in a rare instance or two, is not inconsistent with character, situation or theme.” The decision was upheld by an appellate court in 1960. At the same time, the English had created a new law, the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which strengthened the law against pornography, at the same time allowing a publisher to escape prosecution by proving that a given work had literary merit. Penguin published the book in 1960, and the five-day trial, featuring testimony from a number of prominent academic critics, produced a not-guilty verdict. The Guardian and The Observer, in their coverage, printed “fuck” with no asterisks or dashes.

  In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that fuck could be protected political speech in Cohen v. California. This case overturned a 1968 conviction for “disturbing the peace” against an antiwar protestor who wore a jacket with the words “FUCK THE DRAFT” on it. John Marshall Harlan II noted in his decision that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” arguing that a state cannot censor its citizens merely for the sake of civility.

  The language writer Hugh Rawson observes that trials of this sort often avoid mentioning the words at issue. After Lenny Bruce’s 1963 obscenity trial in Chicago, Bruce described the prosecutor’s commenting, “I don’t think I have to tell you the term, I think that you recall it…as a word that started with a ‘F’ and ended with a ‘K’ and sounded like ‘truck.’ “ A 1981 indecency trial in Maine contained the ruling “that no obscene words should be uttered in court, and that the principal word in question should be referred to simply as ‘the word.’ “ Even in 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in FCC v. Fox referred only to “the F-Word or the S-Word” in its summary of the case.

  It was not until the 1950s and ’60s that fuck was frequently printed in full in mainstream fiction and nonfiction, usually in nonliteral senses. Norman Mailer was persuaded to substitute the invented spelling variant “fug” in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, published to great acclaim in 1948; on the other hand, a mere three years later, James Jones was able to use the correctly spelled fuck in 1951 in From Here to Eternity, for which he won the National Book Award, though the reported 258 examples of fuck in the manuscript were cut back to a mere 50 in the final book. Many Americans found both of these novels about World War II shocking, despite the fact that their dialogue accurately reflected the way soldiers really spoke.

  With the liberating attitudes toward personal freedom that developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the use of fuck grew still more. Though upholders of mainstream proprieties still largely frowned on the use of the word, the uninhibited behavior of many of the younger generation forced people to pay attention. Some notable examples of the time include the rise to popularity of the comedian Lenny Bruce, and his many trials for obscenity along the way; the inclusion of fuck in a general dictionary, for the first time since 1795; Country Joe leading the throngs at Woodstock in the “fuck cheer” (“Gimme an F!…”); and the inclusion of fuck, spelled out in full, in large-circulation periodicals. Harper’s first used the word— and in a sexual sense, no less—in its issue of April 1968 (cited in this dictionary at FUCK verb sense 1.b.).

  Fuck also began to appear in some popular music then. There had been occasional examples earlier—a number of surprisingly bawdy blues lyrics exist—but perhaps the most prominent by a major performer was in a cover of the Louis Armstrong song “Ol’ Man Mose” by the bandleader Eddy Duchin in 1938. The verse goes, “(We believe) He kicked the bucket and ol’ man Mose is dead, / (We believe) Ahh, fuck it! / (We believe) Buck-buck-bucket. / (We believe) He kicked the bucket and ol’ man Mose is dead.” The pronunciation is extremely clear.

  George Carlin’s famous “Seven Dirty Words” was not only one of the funniest comedy routines of the era, but it also led to an important Supreme Court decision about obscenity. The routine first appeared on his 1972 album Class Clown, in a track entitled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”; the words were fuck, shit, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, piss, and tits. (These words were not in fact banned at the time; the notion was merely a conceit of Carlin’s.) An extended version of this monologue, “Filthy Words,” appeared on his 1973 album Occupation: Foole, and this version was broadcast, uncensored, on the New York radio station WBAI, part of the Pacifica radio group. A man driving with his son heard the routine and complained to the FCC. The FCC, while not sanctioning Pacifica at that time, reserved the right to do so in the future. Pacifica successfully appealed this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals; the FCC appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the FCC in 1978. That decision, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, e
stablished the regulation of indecency in American broadcasting. Carlin’s routine was acknowledged to be indecent, though not obscene, yet the Court recognized that because of “the pervasive nature of broadcasting,” the medium deserved less First Amendment protection than other forms of communication. The FCC was therefore given broad discretion to determine in which contexts material was obscene, and to restrict the broadcasting of such material during hours when children were likely to be listening. In a follow-up case, FCC v. Fox, decided as this book was going to press in April 2009, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the FCC did have the authority to impose strong fines even for the “fleeting” use of unscripted expletives on TV. This case had been prompted by several large fines the FCC levied against live TV programs where the producers claimed that they could not have anticipated the language of the partipants.

  The major newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek, were also slow to get into the act of using fuck in print. Newsweek was earlier; the first appearance there was in the issue of October 8, 1984, in an excerpt from Lee Iacocca’s memoir in which he recalls a conversation with Henry Ford II: “We’ve just made a billion eight for the second year in a row. But mark my words, Henry. You may never see a billion eight again. And do you know why? Because you don’t know how the fuck we made it in the first place!”

  The word seems to have first appeared in Time on September 29, 2000, in a remembrance of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau: “One memorable afternoon in the House of Commons he sat at his desk while the Tories attacked him, and then, with exaggerated mouth movements, he responded almost silently: ‘Fuck off.’ “ (See the entry for FUDDLE-DUDDLE in this dictionary.)