Early Usage
Its first known use as a verb meaning to have sexual intercourse is in "Flen flyys," written around 1475.
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. 13–14).
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:
- Fottere: To jape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.
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,
While Shakespeare never used the term explicitly; he hinted at it in comic scenes in a few plays. The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) contains the expression focative case (see vocative case). In Henry V (IV.iv), Pistol threatens to firk (strike) a soldier, a euphemism for fuck, while Othello (I.i) uses an even stronger euphemism, "making the beast with two backs."
A 1790 poem by George Tucker has a father upset with his bookish son say "I'd not give for all you've read". Originally printed as "I'd not give ------ for all you've read", scholars agree that the words "a fuck" were removed, making the poem the first recorded instance of the now-common phrase "I don't give a fuck". In 1837, the first instance of the phrase "go fuck yourself" or its variants was recorded when a woman who told a group to "go fuck themselves" was charged with the crime of obscenity. Another common figurative use of fuck ("to cheat, victimize, or betray") was first recorded in 1866, when an unnamed court witness swore to hearing another man saying he would be "fucked out of his money" by another man. Farmer and Henley's 1893 dictionary of slang notes both the adverbial and adjectival forms of fuck as similar to bloody (but more "violent) and indicating extreme insult, respectively.
Read more about this topic: Effing
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or usage:
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