Today’s new entry:
F-word noun (used as a euphemism to refer to the word fuck or one of its derivatives or compounds).
and
F-word verb & interjection (used as a euphemism for fuck verb and interjection). Compare eff.
For some reason, in earlier editions I decided not to include an entry for the expression f-word itself, even though I discussed it at some length in the introduction. This time around, I not only added two entries for it, but I found some rather nice antedatings. For quite some time the earliest known example was from a letter published in 1972 in the New York Times Magazine, which was always mildly entertaining because the NYT has lately been squeamish about publishing even “f-word”, even though they were the first known source to use this.
While researching this edition, though, I first found a 1964 example in a government labor arbitration report (describing an incident of sexual harrassment), and then a 1956 example in an article by a British philologist in the Swedish linguistics journal Moderna Språk. The earliest example of the verb remains the one in that NYT letter.
This is a sample definition of one of the many (over 120) new entries from the third edition of The F-Word. In the time leading up to publication, I will be featuring one such entry a day. In the book itself, these definitions will be supplemented with a number of quotations showing the use of the word or phrase (which is the whole point of a historical dictionary of this sort). In other words, this is only a teaser!