“If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I will die with a certain measure of satisfaction knowing that I put the sentence ‘Butch fucked the mannikin through the hole he drilled in its crotch’ into the Oxford English Dictionary.”

In Slate.

Jonathon Green’s review in World Wide Words

Justine Elias’s review in the Boston Phoenix

That doesn’t mean all that much, to be honest—for most books at a sub-Harry Potter level, the publication date is mostly arbitrary, used as a basis for publicity. As we know, The F-Word has been available for some time.

But we are now officially published. Thus, the FWOTD feature is no more, so if you want to see the other 80 or so new entries that I haven’t blogged, you’ll have to get your hands on the book.

I’ll continue to update this site as necessary, and by all means, if you have questions, send them in! Meanwhile, thanks for your interest in the book.

artfuck noun

1. an artistic person, especially one who is elitist or pretentious.

2. something (especially a piece or style of music) that is pretentiously artistic. Often as adjective.

A twofer today, as these new senses are closely related. The earliest example I could find for sense 1 was from the 1980s, from Bret Easton Ellis. Sense 2 apparently first appears as the title of an album by the Virgin Prunes in 1993, and was common throughout the 1990s and remains so today.

DILLIGAF interjection “do I look like I give a fuck?”

One that I had never heard of before, DILLIGAF dates from the early 1970s, though I did uncover a late-60s precursor in DILLIGAD (“…a damn”). It remains fairly widespread, and while it is not frequently found in fiction, it appears to be good T-shirt material.

¶ fuck this shit (used to dismiss a situation); “to hell with this.”

Dating back to the late 1960s, I did have an example of this in the previous editions, but realized that it was common enough at a set phrase that it should be included in its own right. Some of the notables quoted are J. P. Donleavy and David Mamet, both of whom are repeated quotees in the pages of this book.

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.

fuckability noun ability to be copulated with; (specifically) sexual attractiveness.

While fuckable has been around—in two senses!—since the 1880s, its partner fuckability, while predictable, seems to be a relatively new term. My first example is from the late 1960s, but in reference to a sex toy; the usual meaning, referring to a person’s sexual attractiveness, doesn’t show up until the early 1990s.