Fuck
It is unclear whether the word has always been considered a pejorative or, if not, when it first came to be used to describe (often in an extremely angry, hostile, or belligerent manner) unpleasant circumstances or people in an intentionally offensive way, such as in the term motherfucker, one of its more common usages in some parts of the English-speaking world.
Andrea Millwood Hargrave's 2000 study of the attitudes of the British public found that fuck was considered the third-most-severe profanity, and its derivative motherfucker second.
If a couple was caught committing adultery, the two would be punished "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge In the Nude", with "FUCKIN" written on the stocks above to denote the crime.
Due to the Black Death and the consequent scarcity of resources, villages and towns supposedly attempted to control population growth by requiring permission to engage in intercourse.
Royal permission (usually from a local magistrate or lord) is said to have required placing a sign visible from the road reading: "Fornicating/Fornication Under Consent of King", later shortened to FUCK.
[13] Another legendary etymology, first made popular by the American radio show Car Talk, says that the phrase fuck you derives from pluck yew in connection with a misconception regarding the origins of the V sign.
[14] In terms of its parts of speech, fuck has a very flexible role in English grammar, functioning as both a transitive and intransitive verb, and as an adjective, adverb, noun, and interjection.
[7][15] Although the word itself is used in its literal sense to refer to sexual intercourse, its most common usage is figurative—to indicate the speaker's strong sentiment and to offend or shock the listener.
[8] In 2015, Paul Booth argued he had found "(possibly) the earliest known use of the word 'fuck' that clearly has a sexual connotation": in English court records of 1310–11, a man local to Chester is referred to as "Roger Fuckebythenavele", probably a nickname.
The phrase was probably encoded because it accused monks of breaking their vows of celibacy;[12] it is uncertain to what extent the word fuck was considered acceptable at the time.
[‡ 1] William Dunbar's 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" includes the lines: "Yit be his feiris he wald haue fukkit: / Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane" (ll.
[24] The oldest known occurrence of the word in adjectival form (which implies use of the verb) in English comes from the margins of a 1528 manuscript copy of Cicero's De Officiis.
Whether the monk meant the word literally, to accuse this abbot of "questionable monastic morals", or whether he used it "as an intensifier, to convey his extreme dismay" is unclear.
[25] John Florio's 1598 Italian–English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, included the term, along with several now-archaic, but then-vulgar synonyms, in this definition: Of these, "occupy" and "jape" still survive as verbs, though with less profane meanings, while "sard" was a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon verb seordan (or seorðan, ON serða), to copulate; and "swive" had derived from earlier swīfan, to revolve i.e. to swivel (compare modern-day "screw").
[27] Farmer and Henley's 1893 dictionary of slang notes both the adverbial and adjectival forms of fuck as similar to but "more violent" than bloody and indicating extreme insult, respectively.
[16] According to an article in the journal Science, research shows that when humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth, leading to an overbite in adults.
First published in the United States in 1951, the novel remains controversial to this day due in part to its use of the word,[37] standing at number 13 for the most banned books from 1990 to 2000 according to the American Library Association.
[38] The first documented use of the word fuck on live British television has been attributed to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan in 1965, though it has been claimed Irish playwright Brendan Behan used the word on Panorama in 1956 or the man who painted the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the River Lagan in Belfast, who in 1959 told Ulster TV's teatime magazine programme Roundabout that his job was "fucking boring".
[72] In 2009, the European Union's OHIM trade marks agency disallowed a German brewery to market a beer called "Fucking Hell".
The company argued that it was actually named after the Austrian village of Fucking (now spelled Fugging) and the German term for light beer, hell (which is simply the word for "light-coloured").
In 1968, Paul Robert Cohen had been convicted of disturbing the peace for wearing a jacket with the slogan "Fuck the Draft" (in a reference to conscription in the Vietnam War).
Also, there are many commonly used substitutes, such as flipping, frigging, fricking, freaking, feck, fudge, flaming, forget or any of a number of similar-sounding nonsense words.
