For Fuck’s Sake is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Thursday, January 10, 2008. It is part of Ideas, Big and Small.
All words are equal, but some are more equal than others.
This essay was originally published March 24th, 2004. I have re-worked it because it is one of the most popular landing pages on this site.
There are words that can be said on television and in polite company, like anus, that are identical in meaning to other words, like asshole, that cannot. The rules governing which words are appropriate to which situations are so well known that few bother to contemplate the origins of those rules: some words are simply bad words, curses, expletives used to shock offend.
The history of profanity in the English language is part of the history of social class in England. Most vulgar — literally meaning common — words, such as cock and shit, have old Anglic, Gaelic or Saxonic roots, whereas their genteel counterparts, penis and defecate, are Latinate words borrowed from French after William the Conqueror installed the Norman language as the official tongue of England.
1. Let it be sent to the Commons.
2. To this Bill (with an amendment/with amendments) the Commons have assented.
3. The King/Queen wills it.
A hundred years or so after the Norman Conquest, the French spoken at the English court came to resemble contemporary Parisian French, and eventually mutated into the language that gives the Parliament of the United Kingdom such procedural phrases as Soit baille aux Communes1, A ceste Bille (avecque une amendement/avecque des amendemens) les Communes sont assentus2, Le Roy/La Reyne le veult3, and so on.
All of this to say that long before children were scolded for using “dirty” or “immoral” words, they were discouraged by mothers who simply wished their children to be more effective social climbers.
The Act of Love, Egon Schiele.
4. It appears to have once been fairly inoffensive in English; up until the late seventeenth century, the common Kestrel was called a “windfucker” in the English of the time.
Fuck — such a boogeyman in English that it didn’t appear in a single dictionary from 1795 to 1965 — is a word of great antiquity. It has cognates in many Germanic languages, including German (ficken, to copulate), Dutch (fokken, to breed), dialectical Norwegian (fukka, to copulate), and dialectical Swedish (focka, to strike/copulate) and fock (penis), but does not carry the weight of profanity in many of them4.
The OED cites the earliest clear use of fuck as William Dunbar's 1503 poem Brash of Wowing, which includes the couplet “Yit be his feiris he wald haue fukkit: / Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane” (ll. 13–14). The first appearance of the current spelling is the phrase “Bischops ... may fuck thair fill and be unmaryit” from a 1535 poem by Sir David Lyndesay.
5. In Latin, copulare was used more in the sense of hitching a mule to a cart, only later gaining the euphemistic meaning it has in English.
Copulate, on the other hand, is taken from copulatus, the past participle of the Latin verb copulare (to couple)5. The OED informs us that the earliest attestation of the term in the context of sexual congress is from a poem written in 1483 by William Caxton that speaks of a couple “made one flesshe by carnal copulacyon or bodily felawshyp.”
Leaving aside the origins of these two words, consider the sonic differences, the mouth feel. Cop-u-late. Fuck. The vigor of fuck is unmistakable. It’s hard to imagine a woman shouting something as awkward and polysyllabic as “copulate with me!” in any language.