Fuck: Difference between revisions

Fuck is a strong and generally provocative expletive in Modern English and is one of the most well-known vulgarisms in the English-speaking world.

It is unclear whether the word has always been considered impolite and, if not, when it was initially considered to be profane. Some evidence indicates that in some English-speaking locales it was considered acceptable as late as the 17th century meaning "to strike" or "to penetrate" [1]. Other evidence indicates that it may have become vulgar as early as the 16th century in England; thus other reputable sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary contend the true etymology is still uncertain, but appears to point to an Anglo-Saxon origin that in later times spread to the British colonies and worldwide.

The two seemingly contradictory hypotheses may reflect cultural and/or regional English dialects. See the etymology for further discussion.

The following anecdote appears in one of Niall Ferguson's absorbing studies of the British Empire. On the eve of independence for the colony of South Yemen, the last British governor hosted a dinner party attended by Denis Healey, then the minister for defense. Over the final sundown cocktail, as the flag was about to be lowered over the capital of Aden, the governor turned to Healey and said, "You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things." What, Healey was interested to know, were these imperishable aspects? "The game of soccer. And the expression 'fuck off.' "

Modern status

In the modern English-speaking world, the word is often considered highly offensive. Most English-speaking countries often censor it on television and radio. A study of the attitudes of the British public found that fuck was considered the third most severe profanity and its derivative motherfucker second. Cunt was considered the most severe (Hargrave, 2000). Some have argued that the prolific usage of the word fuck has de-vulgarized it, an example of the "dysphemism treadmill."

Despite its offensive nature, the word is common in popular usage.

Non-English-speaking cultures tend to recognize the word's vulgarity within many cultures. However, because the "foreign language" word has less impact, or because there are no rules requiring it, they generally do not censor it. For example, American rap songs are frequently played on European radio without censoring the word "fuck". In one case, the album 97BT99 by Japanese rock group BUCK-TICK contains an errata sheet which includes correcting a song title from "My Facking Valentine" to "My Fucking Valentine." It is clear that the misspelling was a typo and not censorship since the song appears twice on the album and is spelled correctly on the package one of the two times it appears.

Proof of the more relaxed attitude about this English word in non-English countries was very publicly visible on billboards around the downtown of Paris, France in the early 1990s. They featured a woman sticking her tongue out in defiance, along with the slogan "Préservatifs Fuck le SIDA" ("Condoms fuck AIDS").

The Canadian Press now considers the word to be commonplace and has added usage advice to the Canadian Press Caps and Spelling guide. [2]

Modern usage

Most literally, to fuck is to copulate, but it is also used as a more general expletive or intensifier. Some instances of the word can be taken at face value, such as "Let's fuck," or "I'd fuck her/him".

Other uses are dysphemistic: The sexual connotation, usually connected to masturbation (in the case of "fuck yourself"), is invoked to incite additional disgust, but has nothing to do with the matter of discussion. For example, "Fuck that!" or "Fuck no!"

By itself, fuck is usually used as an exclamation, indicating surprise, pain, fear, disgust, disappointment, or anger. In this usage, there is no connection to the sexual meaning of the word implied, and it used purely for its "strength" as a vulgarity. Additionally, other uses are similarly vacuous; fuck (or variations such as "the fuck" or "fucking") could be removed and leave a sentence of identical syntactical meaning. For example, rap music often uses the word fucking as a emphatic adjective ("I'm the fucking man") for the word's (rhythmic) properties. Insertion of the trochaic word fucking can also be used as an exercise for diagnosing the cadence of an English-language word. For example, the word in-fucking-credible sounds acceptable to the English ear, and is in fairly common use, while incred-fucking-ible is very clumsy and never used. While neither dysphemistic nor connected to the sexual connotations of the word, even the vacuous usages are considered offensive and gratuitous, and censored in some media. For example "None of your fucking business!" or "Shut the fuck up!".

In the last usage, the word fucker is used as a term of endearment rather than antipathy. This usage is not uncommon; to say "you're one smart fucker" is often a term of affection. However, because of its ambiguity and vulgarity, use of the word fucker in reference to another person can easily be misinterpreted. Though fuck can serve as a noun, the fucker form is used when used in a context that refers to an individual. Normally in these cases, if fuck is used instead of fucker, the sentence refers to the sexual ability of the subject (for example, "He's a great fuck!"), although confusingly in a minority of occasions the word fuck can hold the exact same meaning as fucker (e.g. "You're a pretty clever fuck.")

Related to fucker is the word motherfucker. Sometimes used as an extreme insult—an accusation of incest— this term is also occasionally used to connote respectful awe. For example, "He's a mean motherfucker" does not mean "He's abusive, filthy and copulates with his mother," but "He's someone to be afraid of." In this context, some gang members even describe themselves as "motherfuckers." The word motherfucker, unlike fuck, has not become more accepted in English usage: it is uncommonly used, and still considered highly offensive.

An example of the flexibility of use of the word is the song "Mercyfuck" (1998) by the singer/songwriter Mary Prankster:

I wish I could fuck all my sorrow away

And fuck 'til the dawn of the next fucking day

Fuck the chorus and verse, fuck the pain getting worse

Fuck it all 'til I burn

I wish I could fuck all of you 'til you see

I'm the worst fuck-up in all history

Fuck your image and mine, fuck your limp valentine

Fuck it all 'til I learn

Because of its vulgar status, the word fuck is usually restricted in mass media and barred from titles in the United States. In 2002, when the controversial French film Baise-moi (2000) was released in the USA, its title was changed to Rape Me, rather than the literal Fuck Me, though this may have been for effect. Similarly, the Swedish film Fucking Åmål was retitled Show Me Love.

Online forums and public blogs may censor the word by use of automatic filters. For example, Fark.com replaces the word fuck with fark. Others replace the word with asterisks (****) to censor it (and other profanities) entirely. To avert these filters, many online posters will use the word fvck. This particular alteration is in common usage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where students use it in reference to the inscriptions on MIT's neoclassical buildings, in which the letter U is replaced by V. A typical coinage in this idiom would be "I'm fvcked by the Institvte".

The word fuck is a component of many acronyms, some of which—like SNAFU and FUBAR—date as far back as World War II. Many more recent coinages, such as the shorthand "WTF?" for "what the fuck?", have been widely extant on the Internet, and may count as examples of memes. See the list of acronyms involving the word fuck for a more extensive list of examples.

Despite the proclaimed vulgarity of the word, several comedians rely on fuck for comedic routines. George Carlin has created several literary works based upon the word, such as "The History of the word Fuck" among others. Other comedians who use the word consistently in their routines include Denis Leary, Chris Rock, and Sam Kinison.

Euphemisms

In situations where using or mentioning the word directly may be considered inappropriate, people often bowdlerize it, either referring to it with terms such as the f-word. In software contexts, fsck, fuk, fark and f2k are also used. In the formerly British Caribbean nations it is sometimes spelled fock. Fark is a bowdlerization which originated in the British Commonwealth countries, derived from exaggerated pronunciation in, for example, the Australian accent (but see also fark.com).

In such circumstance, initialisms or acronyms derived from phrases including fuck may be expanded substituting another word beginning with F, such as euphemising "FUBAR" as "Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition" or translating "RTFM" as "Read The Friendly/Fine Manual".

The fashion house French Connection United Kingdom controversially uses its initials, usually in lower case, fcuk, as a trademark symbol. The word appears on some clothing sold by French Connection, including clothes marketed to teenagers.

In the Irish sitcom Father Ted the word fuck was replaced with feck, a common slang word in Ireland that was acceptable to audiences in other countries, although in one famous episode ' Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep ' the word fuck is heard for the one and only time. Similarly, people sometimes replace fuck with bloody, a British expletive similar in function but relatively inoffensive.

One of the first best-selling novels to use the word dozens of times, Norman Mailer's 1948 The Naked and the Dead, was bowdlerized by its publisher to render the word as "fug."

Both versions of Battlestar Galactica use the fictitious expletive frak (also spelled frack or fraq) in the same contexts that fuck would be normally expected. Similarly, Farscape uses the term frell. The various versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy often use photon or zark in place of fuck; the 2005 movie features the character Zaphod Beeblebrox saying "zarking-A". The Legion of Superheroes use "sprock" as one of their many substitute swear words.

An online fantasy play-by-post site, Alleria employs the ficticious word "feth", which is used both as an in-game expletive and also as a convenient replacement for out-of-game conversation (the site being PG-13 rated).

Etymology

The etymology of fuck has given rise to a great deal of speculation, which should be regarded skeptically. The authoritative Oxford English Dictionary is quite cautious in providing an etymology for this word. In the quotation below, the dictionary's usual abbreviations are spelled out for clarity:

Early modern English fuck, fuk, answering to a Middle English type *fuken (weak verb) [which is] not found; ulterior etymology unknown. Synonymous German ficken can be shown to be related.

The first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, "Flen flyys," from the first words of its opening line, "Flen, flyys, and freris"; that is, "Fleas, flies, and friars". The line that contains fuck reads "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk." The Latin words "Non sunt in coeli, quia," mean "They [the friars] are not in heaven, since." The code "gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk" is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and two v's were used for w. This yields "fvccant (a fake Latin form) vvivys of heli." The whole thus reads in translation: "They are not in heaven since they fuck wives of Ely (a town near Cambridge)." From The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition.

As the OED notes, some have attempted to draw a connection to the German word ficken (to fuck, in dialects: to rub, to scratch, and historically to strike).

Other possible connections are to Latin futuere (hence the French foutre, the Italian fottere, the vulgar peninsular Spanish follar and joder, and the Portuguese foder). However, there is considerable doubt and no clear lineage for these derivations. These roots, even if cognate, are not the original Indo-European word for to fuck; that root is likely *h³yebh-, ("h³" is the H3 laryngeal) which is attested in Sanskrit (yabhati) and the Slavic languages (Russian yebat`), among others: compare Greek "oiphô" (verb), and Greek "zephyros" (noun, ref. a Greek belief that the west wind caused pregnancy). However, Wayland Young (who agrees that these words are related) argues that they derive from the Indo-European *bhu- or *bhug-, believed to be the root of "to be", "to grow", and "to build". [Young, 1964]

Spanish follar has a different root; according to Spanish etymologists, the Spanish verb "follar" (attested in the 19th century) derives from "fuelle" (bellows) from Latin "folle(m)" < Indo-European "bhel-"; ancient Spanish verb folgar (attested in the 15th century) derived from Latin "follicare", ultimately from follem/follis too.

A possible etymology is suggested by the fact that the Common Germanic fuk-, by an application of Grimm's law, would have as its most likely Indo-European ancestor *pug-, which appears in Latin and Greek words meaning "fight" and "fist". In early Common Germanic the word was likely used at first as a slang or euphemistic replacement for an older word for "intercourse", and then became the usual word for "intercourse". Then, fuck has cognates in other Germanic languages, such as Middle Dutch fokken (to thrust, to copulate), dialectical Norwegian fukka (to copulate), and dialectical Swedish focka (to strike, copulate) and fock (penis). A very similar set of Latin words that have not yet been related to these are those for hearth or fire, "focus/focum" (with a short o), fiery, "focilis", Latin and Italian for hearthly/hearthling, "foc[c]ia/focac[c]ia", and fire, "focca", and the Italian for bonfire, "focere". But these words came from New Latin, centuries after Middle Dutch.

There is perhaps even an original Celtic derivation; futuere being related to battuere (to strike, to copulate); which may be related to Irish bot and Manx bwoid (penis). The argument is that battuere and futuere (like the Irish and Manx words) comes from the Celtic *bactuere (to pierce), from the root buc- (a point). An even earlier root may be the Egyptian petcha (to copulate), which has a highly suggestive hieroglyph. Or perhaps Latin "futuere" came from the root "fu", Common Indo-European "bhu", meaning "be, become" and originally referred to procreation.

Fake etymologies

There are several urban-legend fake etymologies postulating an acronymic origin for the word. In the most popular version, it is said that the word "fuck" came from Irish law. If a couple committing adultery were "Found Under Carnal Knowledge" they would be penalized, with "FUCK" written on the stocks above them to denote the crime. Variants of this include "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", "Felonius Use of Carnal Knowledge", "Fornication Under Carnal Knowledge", and "Forced Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", a label supposedly applied to the crime of rape. In another story, a sign reading "Fornication Under Consent of the King" was supposedly placed on signs above houses in medieval England during times of population control. All these acronyms were never heard before the 1960s, according to the authoritative lexicographical work, The F-Word, and so are backronyms.

Another prominent fake etymology references a medieval battle between the French and the English, in which English archers were taken prisoner. The archers were said to have had their middle fingers cut off, effectively preventing them from being able to "pluck" the bowstring after escaping or being released. The English longbows were made from yew (species Taxus Baccata). The story follows that after seizing the French town where the prisoners were being held and learning of the act, the English archers who hadn't been captured began raising middle fingers to the captured French and uttering the curse, "We can still pluck yew," in remembrance of the act. Over time the phrase is said to have evolved into the modern "Fuck you."

History of usage and censorship

Early usage

The earliest reference appears to be the name "John Le Fucker", which John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins dates to 1278. What John did to earn this name is unknown.

Its first known use as a verb meaning to have sexual intercourse is in a poem titled "Flen flyys" some time before 1500. Written half in English and half in Latin, the poem includes the word fuccant, a hybrid of English root with Latin conjugation, disguised in the text by a simple code. It was originally written as gxddbov, and is decrypted by substituting each letter with the letter which precedes it in the alphabet (keep in mind the alphabet that was used at the time).

William Dunbar's 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" includes the lines: "Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit:/ Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."

Some time around 1600, before the term acquired its current meaning, "windfucker" was an acceptable name for the bird now known as the kestrel.

While Shakespeare never used the term explicitly, he hinted at it in comic scenes in several plays. The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) contains focative case (see vocative case). In Henry V (IV.iv), Pistol threatens to firk (strike) a soldier, a euphemism for fuck.

Rise of modern usage

Fuck did not appear in any widely-consulted dictionary of the English language from 1795 to 1965. Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary (along with the word cunt) was in 1972.

In 1900, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales said, "Fuck it, I've taken a bullet" when he was shot by an anarchist while standing on a Brussels railway station.

The liberal usage of the word (and other vulgarisms) by certain artists (such as James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Lenny Bruce) has led to the banning of their works and criminal charges of obscenity.

After Norman Mailer's publishers convinced him to bowdlerize fuck as fug in his work The Naked and the Dead (1948), Tallulah Bankhead supposedly greeted him with the quip, "So you're the young man who can't spell fuck." (In fact, according to Mailer, the quip was devised by Bankhead's PR man. He and Bankhead never met until 1966 and did not discuss the word then.) The rock group The Fugs named themselves after the Mailer euphemism.

The first short story to include fuck in its title was probably Kurt Vonnegut's "The Big Space Fuck", originally published in 1972. Exhibiting Vonnegut's characteristic blend of pessimism and humor, this story tells of a polluted and overpopulated Earth. On midnight, 4 July 1989, the United States fires the Arthur C. Clarke, a missile whose warhead contains eight hundred pounds of freeze-dried semen, aiming at the Andromeda Galaxy. This story, which contains many allusions to earlier Vonnegut works (such as character names and the "chrono-synclastic infundibula"), was written as a personal favor to Harlan Ellison. First published in Ellison's anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, it is reprinted in Palm Sunday.

George Carlin once commented that the word fuck ought to be considered more appropriate, because of its implications of love and reproduction, than the violence exhibited in many movies. He suggested the replacement of "kill" in old western movies to "fuck," such as "Okay, sheriff, we're gonna fuck ya now. But we're gonna fuck ya slow..."

Incidents on British Television

In 1965, the critic Kenneth Tynan was the first person to say fuck on BBC television, during BBC-3, a late-night live satirical talk show hosted by Robert Robinson, causing a furor and a short TV career for Tynan. The second person to use the word on British television was the commentator Peregrine Worsthorne in replying to a question over whether the public would care if a Government minister had shared a bed with two call girls.[3]

The words most infamous use was probably in 1976 when the word was pointedly used in an early evening show, during a live interview with the Sex Pistols. The presenter Bill Grundy, who it was claimed had encouraged the incident, was suspended as a result.

Censorship

The films Ulysses and I'll Never Forget What's'isname (both 1967) are contenders for being the first film to use the word. Since the U.S. adoption of the MPAA film rating system, use of the word has been accepted in R-rated movies, and under the older rules, use of the word would automatically cause the film to be given an R rating. Later rule changes permit three, non-sexual, strictly exclamatory uses of the word in PG-13 movies.

In 1968, The Beatles' "White Album" had the word censored in their track "Revolution 9" in which band member George Harrison exclaims "So I joined the fucking navy and sailed to sea." No audio is present during the offending phrase. Just two years later in 1970 fellow Beatle John Lennon successfully got the word past the censors on his song "Working Class Hero" with the line "You think you're so clever and classless and free, but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

Since the 1970s, the use of the word fuck in R-rated movies has become so commonplace in mainstream American movies that it is rarely noticed by most audiences. Nonetheless, a few movies have made exceptional use of the word, to the point where such films as Scarface (1983), Pulp Fiction, Blue Velvet, The Big Lebowski, Shaun of the Dead, South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut, Boondock Saints, and Goodfellas are known for its extensive use. The main character's last name of "Focker" is a running joke in the movie Meet the Parents and its sequel Meet the Fockers. In the popular comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, it is the chief word, repeatedly uttered, during the opening five minutes. To many, one of the most humorous tirades demonstrating various usages of the word appears in the comedy, Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), where Steve Martin expresses his dissatisfaction in his treatment by a rental car agency.

In several PG-rated movies, however, the word is used, mainly because at the time there was no PG-13 rating and the MPAA did not want to give the films R ratings; for instance, All the President's Men (1976), where it is used seven times; The Kids Are Alright (1979), where it is used twice; and The Right Stuff (1983), where it is used five times. Spaceballs (1987) is an anomaly in that it was rated PG after the 1984 introduction of the PG-13 rating, yet it includes the line, "'Out of order'?! Fuck! Even in the future nothing works!" In the PG-13 rated movie Soapdish (1991), Sally Field, played an aging soap opera actress. Appalled that her costume included a turban, she complained to her show's producer "What I feel like is Gloria fucking Swanson!"

Films edited for broadcast use matching euphemisms so that lip synching will not be thrown off. One televised version of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, for instance, had the actors dub in the words frick, Nubian, and melon farmer for fuck, nigger, and motherfucker, respectively. In similarly dubbed versions of Die Hard and Die Hard 2, Bruce Willis' catchphrase "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" is replaced by "Yippee-ki-yay, Mister Falcon" or "Yippee-ki-yay, Kemo Sabe."

In a similar vein, many stand-up comedians who perform for adult audiences make liberal use of the word fuck. While George Carlin's use of the word is an important part of his stage persona, other comedians (such as Andrew Dice Clay) have been accused of substituting vulgarity and offensiveness for genuine creativity through overuse of the word. Billy Connolly and Lenny Bruce were pioneers of the use of the word in their shows for general audiences.

Recently, the hip-hop group Black-Eyed Peas' hit song "Don't Phunk With My Heart" was censored on many radio stations to "Don't Mess With My Heart", establishing a new trend toward eliminating all euphemisms for "fuck" as well as the word itself.

Usage in politics

Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau caused a minor scandal when opposition MPs stated he had told them to "fuck off" in the House of Commons in February 1971. Pressed by journalists, Trudeau later unconvincingly stated he may have said (or mouthed) "'fuddle duddle' or something like that"[4], a phrase which then took on a humorous connotation of that event for Canadians.

During the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, during a speech in which he nominated the anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern, departed from his written text to say, "If George McGovern were president, we wouldn't have these Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." Many conventioneers, having been appalled by the response of the Chicago police to the simultaneously occurring anti-war demonstrations, promptly broke into ecstatic applause. As television cameras focused on an indignant Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, lip-readers throughout America claimed to have observed him shouting, "Fuck you, you Jew motherfucker." Defenders of the mayor would later claim that he was calling Senator Ribicoff a "faker" or a "fink." (When queried later by reporters as to what it was Daley had said, Ribicoff said it was "a four-letter word beginning with 'mother'".)

In a widely-publicized June 2004 incident, US Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly told Senator Patrick Leahy to either "fuck off" or "go fuck" himself during an exchange on the floor of the Senate. [5] The Washington Times, in a spat of journalistic prudence, reported that the Vice President "urged Mr. Leahy to perform an anatomical sexual impossibility." [6] Cheney's words came back to haunt him on September 8, 2005, when he was touring Gulfport, Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Ben Marble, an emergency room physician who had lost his home in the hurricane, shouted, "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney. Go fuck yourself, asshole." [7] [8]

A famous British usage of fuck comes from the 2001/2002 scandal at the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions, while Stephen Byers was the Minister. His press officer, Jo Moore, sent an email after the attack on the WTC suggesting it would be "a good day to bury bad news". As the scandal unravelled, Permanent Secretary to the Department, Sir Richard Mottram was widely reported to have said "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked." To British ears this was particularly shocking (or amusing) coming from someone so senior in the civil service.

Notable fuck bands

Aside from various older blues and novelty artists, such as Louise Bogan, who used virtually every obscenity imaginable in her 1920's classic "Shave 'Em Dry," The MC5 appears to hold the honor of being the first band to utter fuck in a widely-distributed recorded song. "Kick Out the Jams" opened with the scream "Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!", which was seen as radical at the time of its recording in 1968. The song was censored on later pressings of the vinyl album with a far milder "Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters!" The censored passage has since been restored on CD.

Country Joe and the Fish were notorious for an audience participation ritual known as 'The Fish Cheer' which involved chanting "Give Me an F... Give me a U... Give me a C... Give me a K... What's that spell?" with the last query repeated multiple times (In its original form the word 'fish' was spelt instead). Although they had been performing this live since around 1965 it first appeared on record in 1968 on the album I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixing-to-Die and was most famously performed at Woodstock. In 1970 Joe McDonald was convicted and fined $500 for obscenity and inciting anti-social crowd behaviour.

The quasi-rock musical Hair (1968) included several uses of the word, most memorably a description in song of Abraham Lincoln as "Emanci-motherfuckin-pator of the slaves."

In 1969 Jefferson Airplane released the politically-charged live album Volunteers. In the song "We Could Be Together," singer Grace Slick sings "Up against the wall, motherfuckers."

As previously mentioned, in John Lennon's 1970 song "Working Class Hero" from his Plastic Ono Band album, the word is used twice to express contempt for the smugness of the masses, as in "you're still fucking peasants, as far as I can see." The song became a flash-point for censorship on the still-young medium of College Radio.

The late-seventies punk rock explosion saw the word forced into the musical mainstream. The Sex Pistols song "Bodies" from Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977) described an illegal abortion as a "screaming fucking bloody mess," while The Stranglers won notoriety for their song "Bring on the Nubiles," which contained the chorus "Let me let me, fuck you fuck you." The same year rock veterans Pink Floyd used the line "you fucked up old hag" in their song "Pigs," from the album Animals.

The song "Precious" on the 1980 self-titled Pretenders album has the following lyric "Trapped in a world that they never made, but not me baby, I'm too precious, I had to fuck off."

Rage Against the Machine was a band who seemed to take fuck to the limits. Most notably, in the song "Killing in the Name" Zack de la Rocha said fuck 17 times, in the form of "fuck you, I won't do what ya tell me" 16 times and then ending with a "muthafucka." However, Limp Bizkit pushed the limits more: in the song "Hot Dog," the lead singer Fred Durst uttered fuck around 50 times.

Nine Inch Nails' breakout single, "Closer" features the chorus, "I want to fuck you like an animal"". The use of the word sparked a furor of controversy which sent the song to the top of the charts. Ironically, the song grew popularly misinterpreted as the song portrays the self-disgust of the protagonist rather than a teen sex anthem. The Nine Inch Nails song "Starfuckers, Inc." has a rousing chorus of "Starfuckers! Starfuckers! Starfuckers! Starfuckers Incorporated! Starfuckers!"; their more recent song "Only" features the line "There is no fucking you, there is only me!" three times in each chorus'; "You Know What You Are" includes the line "Don't you fucking know what you are?" three times in the chorus

The Insane Clown Posse is also known for their excessive use of the word, as their song "Fuck the World" demonstrates, in which Violent J says fuck 93 times.

In 2005 the special edition of the Murderdolls album Beyond the Valley of the Murderdolls extended the upper limit to 95 with the song called "I Love to Say Fuck," which features the expletive in almost every line. The Dresden Dolls, in a live version of their notable single "Coin-Operated Boy," in describing an ideal but mechanical lover, sang the line "I can even take him in the bath," as "I can even fuck him in the ass," much to the shock and delight of first-time audiences. A similar approach to the word was taken by Fatboy Slim in the song "Fucking In Heaven" (off the album You've Come a Long Way, Baby), in which 'fuck' was repeated 105 times. Given the song is only 3 minutes and 54 seconds, this makes a mean of one 'fuck' every 2.23 seconds, a world record for density of profanity in music.

Japanese rock trio Electric Eel Shock have an ironic take on the overuse of the word fuck in music in their song "Don't Say Fuck" which instructs the listener not to say it over 40 times. "The Man Don't Give a Fuck" by the Welsh band Super Furry Animals is similarly prolific in its use of the word.

The Fuck Fucks were a long-lived band from Melbourne, Australia.

In 1994, an inoccuous indie band on the Matador Records label debuted. Their name was simply "Fuck" and their album cover had fluffy bunnies on the front.

Freedom of expression

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the mere public display of fuck is protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and cannot be made a criminal offense. In 1968, Paul Robert Cohen had been convicted of "disturbing the peace" for wearing a jacket with "FUCK THE DRAFT" on it (which was to do with conscription in the Vietnam War.) The conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeals and overturned by the Supreme Court. Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971).

Pornographer Larry Flynt, representing himself before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983 in a libel case, shouted, "Fuck this court!" during the proceedings and called the justices "nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt". Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had him arrested for contempt of court but the charge was later dismissed.

In Colorado Springs, tavern owner Leonard Carlo had over 29 signs containing the word fuck, including the slogans "Leonard's II Fucking Much," "No Fucking Children, Animals, Tabs or Checks!", and "No fucking tap or draw beer." Signs on the restroom doors read "Fucking Men" and "Fucking Women." Also, the top of Leonard's bald head was tattooed with the words "Fuck U. Leave Me the FUCK Alone." A state liquor agent removed all 29 signs from Leonard's Bar on August 31, 1999 because he believed the signs violated a state regulation that prohibits profanity in bars.

Popular usage

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission fines stations for the broadcast of "indecent language", but in 2003 the agency's enforcement bureau ruled that the airing of the statement "This is really, really fucking brilliant!" by U2 member Bono after receiving a Golden Globe Award was neither obscene nor indecent. As U.S. broadcast indecency regulation only extends to depictions or descriptions of sexual or excretory functions, Bono's use of the word as a mere intensifier was not covered. In early 2004, the full Commission reversed the bureau ruling, in an order that stated that "the F-word is one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language"; a fine, however, has yet to result. Notwithstanding widespread usage and linguistic analysis to the contrary, the reversal was premised on the conclusion that the word fuck has always referred to sexual activity, a claim that the FCC neither explained nor supported with evidence.

Most United States broadcasters replace fuck (and other so-called four-letter words) on broadcast television and radio with a beep "at times of day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience," or have the word silenced out, or a reverse of the sound of the word when the word in question is used.

Following the death of Monty Python legend Graham Chapman in 1989, a speech at his memorial was read by fellow Monty Python actor John Cleese, which claims to be the first time someone has said the word fuck in a British memorial service.

Further reference

• Hargrave, Andrea Millwood (2000). Delete Expletives? London: Advertising Standards Authority, British Broadcasting Corporation, Broadcasting Standards Commission, Independent Television Commission.
• Jesse Sheidlower, The F Word (1999) ISBN 0375706348. Presents hundreds of uses of fuck and related words.
• Michael Swan, Practical English Usage, OUP, 1995, ISBN 019431197X
• Philip J. Cunningham, Zakennayo!: The Real Japanese You Were Never Taught in School, Plume (1995) ISBN 0452275067
• Wayland Young, Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society. Grove Press/Zebra Books, New York 1964.

See also

• Cocksucker
• Euphemism
• fcuk
• Feck
• Four-letter word
• Fucking, Austria
• Fuddle duddle
• List of translations of Fuck
• List of acronyms involving the word fuck
• List of films ordered by uses of the word fuck
• Motherfucker
• Nil by Mouth
• Profanity
• Ratfucking
• Seven dirty words
• Sexual slang
• This Be The Verse
• Fuckwit

External links

• An article from The Straight Dope on the etymology of the word
• A thorough and amusing legal brief on the history and constitutionality of "Fuck". All relevant cases are cited.
• Christopher Hitchens on fuck
• American Heritage Dictionary, see "Word History" for an enciphered(!) usage of the word in the ribald sixteenth-century poem, Flen flyys.
• "Cheney Dismisses Critic With Obscenity." Washington Post article on the 2004 Cheney-Leahy incident.
• Re: the Cheney-Leahy incident, slate.com discusses how newspapers decide whether or not to print "fuck."
• "Online Etymology Dictionary." Some Emtomology Research
• The Fuck You Website Various pornstars giving the F-Finger
• "Urban Dictionary." Peer-Reviewed Definitions of Fuck
• History of the "F-Word" A humorous flash video explaining the word "Fuck."
• [9] "English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects", by Quang Phuc Dong, discusses the syntax of "fuck."
• [10] A hilarious news article about an Austrian village called Fucking and its being the butt of British humour.