Wtf?

[Rain Monkey]

I found this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fuck) very interesting article on the history of "fuck" on Wikipedia. I was just doing sort of a random google search for usage of the quotation "Fuck you, you fucking fuck!" I had thought it originated in "A Fish Called Wanda" but apparently it goes way back.

[Holmgang]

Interestingly Wikipedia's "history" of the word doens't go into the slightest speculation of the etymology. I recall a priest (of all people) telling my class that the word 'fuck' came from the pommie military acronym for "Forbidden Under Carnal Knowledge" that was stamped on papers relating to a soldier's illegal sexual congress with the locals. However, I'm quite certain that this story, while creative and compelling, is ficticious.

My dictionary claims that it is Middle English, "attested in pseudo-Latin, fuccant, (they) fuck, deciphered < the coded form gxddbov".

Or whatever the fuck that means.

[Rain Monkey]

I didn't notice that missing. I also heard a similar story of the acronym of "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." I heard it from my dad who was schooled by the nuns, so maybe it's a Catholic urban myth.

[Marion Zioncheck]

All these legends and acronyms are bogus. My college Medieval Lit prof, who also taught at Cambridge and edited several major anthologies, explained that the reason words like 'fuck' and 'shit' are considered vulgar (vulgar originally meaning 'of the people' or something like that) is that they were native English words and that the Normans brought in latin words like 'fornicate' and 'defecate', which are only proper by virtue of being spoken by an upper, colonizing class. Chaucer is full of four-letter words but by the time Shakespeare came around that was officially a no-no, though obviously people kept saying them.
History is the same story repeated again and again. So fuck shit up.

[keshmeshi]

My anthropology professor, while making a point that many human references to sex involve violence, claimed that the origin of the word "fuck" comes from an ancient Saxon word meaning "to strike."