Today’s new entry:
XXXX noun British. = fuck noun definition 2.a. [After an advertising campaign for Castlemaine XXXX beer, having the tagline “Australians couldn’t give a XXXX for any other lager.”]
An exclusively British term (despite the Australian heritage of the beer), this is used euphemistically in constructions of the sort “don’t give a XXXX”. Dating from the mid-1980s, right around the time the advertising campaign began, this is still fully current in Britain.
Curiously there is an example of “not give a xxxx” from a soldier’s letter from World War II, but in this case it’s solely euphemistic; that is, the x’s are not being pronounced or used in their own right. I’ve given this quotation in brackets in this entry.
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!