Swobodin v Brně

When talking of the etymology of the word “fuck”, people refer to acronyms:
“Fornication Under Consent of the King”, because “in ancient England single people could not have sex unless they had consent of the king. When people wanted to have a baby, they had to get the consent of the king, and the king gave them a placard that they hung on their door while they were having sex”.
“For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”, a label supposedly applied to the crime of rape.
However, none of these acronyms is true, because the word itself is not an acronym, but derives from middle English.
 

[Fuck] is a very old word, recorded in English since the 15th century (few acronyms predate the 20th century), with cognates in other Germanic languages. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Random House, 1994, ISBN 0-394-54427-7) cites Middle Dutch fokken = “to thrust, copulate with”; Norwegian dialect fukka = “to copulate”; and Swedish dialect focka = “to strike, push, copulate” and fock = “penis”. Although German ficken may enter the picture somehow, it is problematic in having e-grade, or umlaut, where all the others have o-grade or zero-grade of the vowel.
 
AHD1, following Pokorny, derived “feud”, “fey”, “fickle”, “foe”, and “fuck” from an Indo-European root peig2 = “hostile”; but AHD2 and AHD3 have dropped this connection for “fuck” and give no pre-Germanic etymon for it. Eric Partridge, in the 7th edition of Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Macmillan, 1970), said that “fuck” “almost certainly” comes from the Indo-European root *peuk- = “to prick” (which is the source of the English words “compunction”, “expunge”, “impugn”, “poignant”, “point”, “pounce”, “pugilist”, “punctuate”, “puncture”, “pungent”, and “pygmy”). Robert Claiborne, in The Roots of English: A Reader’s Handbook of Word Origin (Times, 1989) agrees that this is “probably” the etymon. Problems with such theories include a distribution that suggests a North-Sea Germanic areal form rather than an inherited one; the murkiness of the phonetic relations; and the fact that no alleged cognate outside Germanic has sexual connotations.

 
 
A funny note, 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 (in reference to 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).
 
Sources:
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/alt-usage-english-faq/faq.html
http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/fuck.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 1:47 pm and is filed under General, Fun, Offensive, English, History, Etymology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.