Title: The F-Word (IV Edition)

Author: Jesse Sheidlower

Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: In May, I was listening to an episode of The Allusionist podcast. Helen Zaltzman is great and her interview with Jesse Sheidlower about this book was fascinating. They discussed how versatile this word is in our language. There are very few words that are able to act as a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb and basically none that are insertion words in a tmesis. While other languages often allow words to be combined, English rarely places a word inside another.

Much of this book is a dictionary of usage, but the first part tells the history of usage and our changing relationship with vulgar words over time. Seeing what words are allowable and which are unspeakable says a lot about the norms and values of society. It’s informative to look back at the last 50-100 years to see how our opinions of words morphed. I’m curious what word/book will replace this in another 30-50 years.

Highlights:

• The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think. Acronyms are extremely rare before the 1930s, and etymologies of this sort—especially for older words—are almost always false. (The word posh does not come from “Port Outward, Starboard Home,” cop is not from “Constable On Patrol,” and tip is not from “To Insure Promptness.”)
• Since many of the earliest examples of the F-word come from Scottish sources, some scholars have suggested that it is a Norse borrowing, Norse having a much greater influence on the northern and Scottish varieties of English than on southern dialects.
• Different kinds of language have been considered incendiary at different times. Several hundred years ago, for example, religious profanity was the most unforgivable type of expression. In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking: in nineteenth-century America even the word leg was sometimes considered indecent; the proper substitute was limb.
• In other media, the word has slipped in on occasion, but it seems that in the movie world, no one even tried to have fuck uttered on the screen until people were ready for it. The abandonment of the Hays Code, the censorship guidelines agreed to by major motion picture studios, in 1968, effectively allowed the word to be used in studio films, and its first appearance in mainstream movies was in 1970. During a football game in the antiwar black comedy MASH, one of the MASH linemen says to an opponent, “All right, bud, your fucking head is coming right off.”
• Still, the word’s omission provided one of the great dirty-words-in-dictionaries anecdotes: when complimented by a lady for having left out this and other offensive words, Johnson is said to have replied, “No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers. I find, however, that you have been looking for them.”