FAQ
Jul 29th, 2009 by Jesse Sheidlower
Frequently Asked Questions
About the Book
Why did you write this book?
Because I could. Seriously. The fact that there is so much to say about a single word, a word that has elicited so much interest for so long, and one with such a long history in the language—if you can actually write a whole book about it, why wouldn’t you do so?
What does your mother think about it?
She thinks it’s fantastic.
About the Word fuck
How old is the word fuck?
The earliest known example is from the late fifteenth century, and there are a large number of examples from then on.
Does the word fuck come from an acronym, like “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” or “Fornication Under Consent of the King”?
No. Acronyms are extremely rare before the early 20th century, and the earliest suggestions of one of these acronyms appears only in the late 1960s. By that point, the word had been in frequent use for almost 500 years.
Isn’t fuck a bad word, that should be avoided?
Context is everything. There are certainly situations when the use of fuck—or many other words—is inappropriate. But there are also times when it is completely normal and expected. It is not possible to say “This is always right” or “This is always wrong.”
Thank you for this most illuminating work. The ‘clusterfuck’ excerpt seems incomplete to me. I’m certain that this word was a product of the Vietnam war. That war brought new technologies into the vernacular, for example, Napalm, carpet-bombing, and of relevance here, cluster bombs. Cluster bombs were much discussed at the time because of their novel and insidious mode of action. The term ‘cluster bomb’ in the hands of the anti-war movement quickly migrated to ‘cluster fuck’ as a way to express outrage at the horrendous damage caused by these weapons. Linking one obscenity with another obscenity was a natural etymology in the 1960’s to coerce awareness.
The earliest example of clusterfuck is from 1965, and not in a context where linguistic influence from the Vietnam war would be likely. Not to mention that cluster bomb itself isn’t attested until later than 1965.
It’s not unlikely that sense 2 was influenced by cluster bomb, but since there wasn’t any direct evidence, I didn’t think it was appropriate to mention this in an etymology.
Just finished reading (yes, reading from cover to cover) the latest edition of The F Word. Was surprised not to find JFDI as an entry, short for ‘just fucking do it’. A Google search reveals over 50,000 hits, though not necessarily all clearly having the ‘just fucking do it’ meaning.
I recall my then managing director, back in the year 2000, referring to a particular IT project being “a JFDI project” – in other words, “don’t bother with the formalities – just fucking do it”.
No sign of this in the online OED.
I think this was an unfortunate omission. I agree that it should be in, and I’m not sure why I missed it—I do have a good amount of evidence for it.
Whoops.