The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  Now, some of you will doubtless say that this sentence is not English but Latin, until you reach the fifth word, where the whole thing dissolves into gobbledegook. Up till then, we have a perfectly reasonable piece of Latin which translates as “They [that is, the monks] are not in heaven, because . . .” In fact, it does not dissolve into gobbledegook (American English, 1944, possibly meaning to represent a turkey’s meaningless gobble—well, meaningless to us, but maybe not to another turkey). Rather, it turns into cipher, and probably into a “Caesar cipher,” so called because Julius Caesar used this type of code in his private communications. The trick is systematically to replace each letter by another one a certain number of letters away in the alphabet: in this case, just one place after it. So, in writing “gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk,” the late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century cryptographer really meant “fuccant uuiuys of heli” (-ant is a Latin third-person plural ending added to an English word), or, “they are enjoying sexual intercourse,” as we might say, “with the wives of Ely” (in Cambridgeshire). Ely was then, as now, a religious centre in East Anglia, and apparently in those days—at least in the minds of the local monks—home to numerous compliant housewives. It seems likely—from the fact that the whole expression was encrypted—that it wasn’t the word itself that had to be hidden from public view, but rather the insalubrious activities of the monks. Other evidence from slightly later suggests that fuck was boisterous but not yet taboo, as it became in subsequent centuries.

  If fuck can be used unselfconsciously in a manuscript from around 1500, then the word must occur earlier—but how much earlier? Is it early Middle English, or does it perhaps date from before the Conquest, in Anglo-Saxon times? At present we can’t tell.

  The entry demonstrates changes in how we handled various components. Firstly, we can look at etymologies (word derivations). The First Edition of the dictionary had been rather cryptic in the construction of its etymologies. It wasn’t that they were only written for etymological scholars (though there may have been an element of that), but that the editors were constrained to abbreviate whatever they could in order to keep the dictionary within reasonable bounds. But with the dictionary on computer, our boundaries had relaxed—though I always wanted to retain a tight structure and elegance to the entries—and we could expand many of these contractions in the interests of comprehensibility to the reader. So, as well as drawing on much better, more recent information about our words, we standardised and expanded the names of languages and other aspects of the scholarly apparatus mentioned in these etymologies in full. The First Edition’s etymology for fuck ran, almost in its entirety: “Early mod.E fuck, fuk, answering to a ME. type *fuken (wk. vb.) not found; ulterior etym. Unknown.” It was almost telling you that this was going to be too difficult for you to understand—that if you wanted to venture into the etymology of old words, then you generally needed to obtain specialist training and gloves.

  We were dealing with complex data, but the old editors had embedded it in another layer of cryptic complexity. Our new etymology was much longer, and more informative, but reads as natural—though scholarly—English. We also wanted to help readers understand the passage of the word from the Germanic precursors of English through to our language, so the new policy permitted us to specify in detail (where we could) the meaning and approximate dating of the meanings of these precursors in the old Germanic languages. That’s very important if you want to gain a 3D picture of the word through time. We also included discussions to interpret spelling and grammatical points, shifting the concept of a dictionary slightly towards that of an encyclopaedia. We wanted to make the text readable and (as far as possible) understandable. And the fractured contractions of old etymology-speak were a good place to start.

  As regards fuck, we looked in the Germanic languages first of all, because they seemed to have echoes of our word. Since the publication of the First Edition of the dictionary, many scholarly dictionaries of the Continental languages had been prepared, and the modern OED could benefit from all of these. There isn’t a direct line of descent for fuck: the Dutch (from the fifteenth century) had a word fokken, which is recorded at that time as meaning “to mock,” and later “to strike,” “to outwit,” and “to have children,” and finally, in 1657, “to have sexual intercourse with.” But this Dutch use occurs considerably later in time than our meaning in English, so maybe they just borrowed it back from us. You always need to check which way the influence is going. We can find similar verbs in the Scandinavian dialects—but they are late in time too. Ultimately we and others don’t really know, but we think it’s Germanic, and maybe goes back a step further, to Indo-European (no written records of this, sadly), in the general meaning “to strike.” After all that, comparative philologists will then tap you on the shoulder to remind you that the Germanic form fuck parallels the type of word evidenced by Latin pugnus, “a fist” (for f/p, compare Germanic fish / Latin piscis). There are numerous other suggestions, but they do not help the story forward.

  The changes we made to the dictionary’s illustrative quotations were equally about openness and readability, about broadening the scope of the dictionary by drawing in less formal sources and therefore trying to reach a new level of vocabulary in the present and in the past, and about imposing modern critical standards to the way in which texts were cited. In the revised fuck entry, for example, we now cite a Sopranos script, and a reference to the magazine Sniffin’ Glue, one of those punk mags I had so proudly read in the 1970s. Previously, various short titles (abbreviations) had been used for the names of some of the texts cited—Robert Louis Stevenson’s title Treasure Island had famously existed in numerous abbreviated manifestations—and we standardised these, so as not to confuse the reader and the searching computer. The online text even allows us to link titles to online bibliographies (for more information) and, for many authors, to their own biographies in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The concept of the dictionary is already changed, just by this. It becomes the starting point of a voyage of exploration through the language.

  What did these changes in style and policy tell us about fuck? We start off—unusually, as we have seen—with cipher evidence, but also with clear Early Modern quotations of the word in unembarrassed use: unabashed, straight up, in full. Here’s a mid-sixteenth-century use from the Scottish poet David Lindsay: “Ay fukkand lyke ane furious Fornicatour.” Lindsay wasn’t just a poet, but an official Herald, and the Lyon King of Arms at that. If society was squeamish about the word, he would have known. We normally think that many words sometimes considered offensive today (fuck, arse—I could continue) were not—or were much less—loaded terms in the Middle and Early Modern English period.

  Then, following the evidence trail, when we reach the eighteenth century the forces of darkness start to frown at occurrences of the word in public, and the typographer’s granny, the hyphen (or sometimes the dash), crops up. A new edition of the Frisky Songster of 1776 has: “O, says the breeches, I shall be duck’d, / Aye, says the petticoat, I shall be f—d.,” following a tradition that had afflicted the word since the start of the century. Society in the eighteenth century was split in several ways. On the one hand, authoritarians came to want their language and their society to mirror the perfect elegance of the classical world. On the other, rakes sought more colourful expressions for their thoughts and actions. At the same time, society’s poverty concentrated many people’s lives around the business of keeping healthy and out of trouble, rather than worrying about the propriety or impropriety of language. There was room for canting orthodoxy and extravagant activity. In the case of fuck, the word was enthusiastically used but often formally obscured in print.

  If a word is printed with letters omitted, the cautious lexicographer is not always happy to assume that it is his or her word. It might be some other word that the reader desperately wants to interpret as fuck. The danger is always that you interpret something as what you want it to be, rather than what it
is. But with the Frisky Songster, we (the editors) were prepared to accept that “f—d” was our word fuck because of the fact that it rhymes in the 1776 text (as fellow detectives will note) with “duck’d.” We always had to go right back to the earliest edition of these texts to ensure that the word was really there, and didn’t start off as some euphemism or ambiguous collection of punctuation marks. By examining different levels of sources, we were now able to pinpoint much more precisely, and with far greater confidence, the life that this lively entrant to the language led in its early days.

  By the mid-eighteenth century, as the search for a model of classical refinement and style in society and language gained ground, society began to impose a growing sense of taboo on printed matter. The more lusty dictionaries of Nathan Bailey had included entries for fuck in the early part of the eighteenth century, before the sense of refined politeness struck hard into civilised society. The Great Cham, Dr Johnson, however, avoided entering the word in his touchstone dictionary of 1755. To be truthful, he was a bit squeamish of “low” speech, and hoped to offer more of a polite model to his elegant readership.

  The word fuck disappeared all but completely from the print media during the reign of Queen Victoria, when anything thought to promote social disorder was suppressed. The word went underground, appearing only in privately printed publications that members of polite society would not be able to purchase without a subscription and a business address for discreet mail-order acquisitions, in the manner of the day.

  The Pearl and My Secret Life were two such gentleman’s resources which the OED cites when all else fails, and sure enough, there they are in this entry. The Pearl, subtitled “a Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading,” was a pornographic magazine published in 1879 and 1880, after which it was banned; it contained erotic serials, parodies, and poetry; My Secret Life was an erotic memoir of over 1 million words, written by the anonymous “Walter,” and published privately in eleven volumes in the late 1880s. It documents the supposed sexual adventures of the writer. Both works use the vocabulary of sex to describe their subject. I could list the other entries in the OED which cite words included in My Secret Life, but I think I’ll leave them for you to discover: forty-three entries from cock to spunk, showing the Victorians in full flow.

  Fuck starts to see the light of day again in texts soon after the First World War. In his novel Kangaroo, D. H. Lawrence stated that “it was in 1915 the old world ended,” and certainly people started wanting at that time to be freer in their published articulation of coarse slang and taboo words. Printers were subject to the regular censorship laws and could be imprisoned for publishing obscene or pornographic material. In the early twentieth century they seem to show a predilection for using the asterisk (covering a single letter like a fig-leaf) rather than employing the carpet-bombing hyphen, but the effect is the same and they remained out of prison. James Joyce’s Ulysses was published and banned in Britain and America in the early 1920s for its excessive sexual content. But Joyce, too, was a sign of the times—he wanted to write what people really said, and others did, too. D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley, Philip Larkin, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, all squeezed the word into print. But the secret in the early twentieth century was not to publish in the United Kingdom. Larkin kept his profanities to his private letters; and Joyce and Miller published in Paris, while Lawrence published in Italy, to avoid the British censorship laws. The literary set published abroad unfettered, and the OED needed to look abroad for its English evidence of a word which was thriving in the 1920s and those other decades before the Lady Chatterley trial. The dictionary’s editors now had to call in all of their resources to ensure that those non-British publications were checked for the word—it wasn’t enough to rely on later British editions.

  We also made changes to the presentation of meaning in the dictionary, and we used our new policies to explain and display the meaning for the word fuck in our entry over its five centuries of use. And how did fuck move semantically over those five centuries?

  The ride starts, as you now know, around 1500, with the basic senses “to have sexual intercourse” (intransitive, to the initiated) and “to have sexual intercourse with (someone)” (transitive, ditto). The Supplement had thrown these two meanings together, perhaps so as not to drag the reader down with excessive documentation in an entry over which it was still feeling nervous. But we disagreed. In the interests of openness and accessibility it was necessary to let both meanings stand independently, with their own supporting documentation. And so we did. I’ve mentioned that we’d moved away, in our definitions, from “copulation,” and we carried this policy out elsewhere in the entry.

  We spotted evidence for a meaning of fuck not in the earlier dictionary: it started off as a fairly crude meaning in the early eighteenth century, where the object of the verb was not a person but a part of the body (the backside, breasts, etc.). But it is still well-attested today. So we added this use to the formal record.

  After that, we were in the realm of phrases and exclamations. The Supplement had rather squeamishly rushed through these, piling them all into a single, short sense No. 3: “Const. with various adverbs: fuck about, to fool about, mess about; fuck off, to go away, make off; fuck up: (a) trans., to ruin, spoil, mess up; (b) intr., to blunder, to make a (serious) error; to fail; cf. screw v. 12c.” Apart from the contractions here, the structure requires all of the evidence for each of these usages to appear in a single sequence of quotations. Yet again, in the interests of openness, we broke these up into their component idioms, supplied a much more thorough level of documentation to the new subsections, and tried to accord each of the usages the full scholarly but transparent treatment that they demanded. We did exactly the same with the other phrasal uses of fuck, opening everything out for detailed forensic inspection—should the reader so want.

  We also watched the progress of fuck through the ages by way of its quotations. From the sexual usages at the head of the entry, we saw the eighteenth century—renowned for its classical posturings and secret naughtinesses—grab the word and shake it down. That Frisky Songster of 1776 contained the first example of an extended, non-sexual use (at least, not explicitly sexual), which had been allocated its own subsense: “to botch,” “to ruin,” “to spoil.” That meaning existed in the eighteenth century, but it is not particularly well recorded until into the twentieth century, as the forces of convention prevented printers from running away with themselves in the nineteenth century. It seems that American English is responsible for another development, in the mid-nineteenth century, when we find evidence for the meaning “to cheat” and “to betray.” In general the extended meanings are aggressive, tending towards disorder and chaos.

  There’s more of this exploding aggression in the oaths and swearing that hit print in the 1920s. It is quite noticeable that this decade experiences a loosening-up of sentiment with relation to fuck, at least along the borders of polite society. James Joyce leads off in Ulysses (“God fuck old Bennett!”), but once out there this broadening continues up to the present day. Phrases using adverbs build from the 1890s (to fuck about, in My Secret Life), but take a firmer hold from the 1920s (to fuck off, to fuck up), as the fringes of society become more verbally adventurous. The level of change and variation expands up to the 1960s, by which time we have most of the stock expletives and colourful expressions we know today (to fuck around, to fuck over), and a phrase with a preposition, to fuck with (someone). Our data collection had majored on phrases involving fuck which had evaded previous dictionary readers. We were at last able to approach more closely to a realistic picture of the word’s history.

  It’s a strong word. Not much dies away. By now we have four or five main strands of usage whirring away and showing no sign of fading: the basic sexual usages, extended meanings such as “to mess or botch (something) up,” phrasal verbs (to fuck about, etc.), exclamations and swearing (“go fuck a duck”), and examples where fuck is woven into existing oath
s as a stronger alternative to another word (“Fuck the expense” might be such an example).

  One contemporary issue with fuck is whether it has lost, or will lose, its taboo status. That, like most other language change, would be something that happens over several generations. For one tier of society (by age, gender, ethnic background, national economic power, geographical location, social class, etc.) it will retain its power to shock, whereas for others it will tend to lose this. Words can become taboo (as fuck once did), or they can go the other way and enter the mainstream. Which one wins out depends on how our cultures move. Often the significant vector is age, and so as the generations pass, the meanings that the older members of society know and have clung to will disappear, and the younger strains of the language will assert themselves. But it doesn’t have to be like that. The usage of a dominant economic power can influence the language of its less dominant cousins, and vice versa (Australians or others might be attracted to some American usages, such as the filler like, because of the attractions of the culture it represents, or the reverse may occur). Normally there’s some conflict between a number of vectors, so you can’t claim to know precisely what is going to happen. It’s too complex for that.

  The updated entry differs from the old one very considerably as a result of the policy changes we had introduced. The definitions were no longer shrouded in Victorian reserve, abbreviations were expanded, and more standardisation was introduced at many levels; the etymology brought in the latest information from other scholarly sources—such as Jonathan Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang—and tried to explain the progression of meaning before the term entered English. Critically, the quotations were found in a far broader range of sources than previously, and were tracked back to their first editions—often in libraries abroad—to ensure that we were not using corrupted secondary data. The structure of the entry was opened up, so that each possible subsense was separated out—and its “biography” could be seen and compared with that of other subsenses—and the range of informal expressions was extended to cover more of the real language with which English speakers are familiar.