Today’s new entry:
fug (a written euphemism for fuck in various senses and parts of speech; see fuck for examples). [Associated chiefly with Norman Mailer, who was required by his publishers to use the euphemism in The Naked and the Dead (1948).]
Solely a cross-reference entry, I put this in because of constant questions about its absence. The original editions did include it as a variant, but you couldn’t actually look it up.
In most case, with common euphemisms, I entered them as separate words. The difference with fug is that it was never intended as anything other than a written euphemism; in other words, no one actually used the pronunciation. The famous fug story is that Dorothy Parker (or, in some versions, Tallulah Bankhead) approached Norman Mailer at a party after the publication of The Naked and the Dead and said, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.”
The heyday of fug didn’t last long at all; a mere four years after Mailer’s book was published, James Jones used a properly-spelled fuck over fifty times in his National Book Award-winning From Here to Eternity (although, we must observe, this was cut down from a supposed 258 examples in the manuscript). Still, the spelling has a life of its own, even giving rise to the name of the band The Fugs.
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!