posted August 11, 2004 02:43 PM         

(teasing of course!)

posted August 13, 2004 09:08 AM         

For instance, some believe the word originated in England, an abbreviation of For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Carnal Knowledge is sex.

So...back to the feckin' drawing board.

posted August 13, 2004 01:21 PM         

Back in the day....a long time ago, in a land far from here, there lived a king who had some sort of weinie disfunction, and he would get extremely annoyed at the thought of his subjects having sex (jealous I guess). But he did realized that they had to have sex in order to make to babies, and the more babies his subjects had, the more subjects he would have...So, he made a law that married couples could only have sex if he pre-approved it first, and it would only be allowed for a day at a time. When they had permission to have sex, they would get an official document to post on their front door, so that any passers by who might hear some moans and groans and whatever other sex noises, would know that they were lawfully allowed to fornicate at that time. The sign that they were given to post on their door would say

Fornication Under Consent of the King
(which then became reduced to an acronym)

That's what I heard. Don't know if it's true, but it's a feckin amusing story isn't it?!

posted August 13, 2004 01:34 PM         

Popular etymologies agree, unfortunately incorrectly, that this is an acronym meaning either Fornication Under Consent of the King or For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, the latter usually accompanying a story about how medieval prisoners were forced to wear this word on their clothing.

Deriving the etymology of this word is difficult, as it has been under a taboo for most of its existence and citations are rare. The earliest known use, according to American Heritage and Lighter, predates 1500 and is from a poem written in a mix of Latin and English and entitled Flen flyys. The relevant line reads:

Non sunt in celi quia fuccant uuiuys of heli.
Translated:

They [the monks] are not in heaven because they **** the wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].
Fuccant is a pseudo-Latin word and in the original it is written in cipher to further disguise it.

Some sources cite an alleged use from 1278 as a personal name, John le F@cker , but this citation is questionable. No one has properly identified the document this name supposedly appears in and even if it is real, the name is likely a variant of fuker, a maker of cloth, fulcher, a soldier, or another similar word.

The earliest usage cite in the OED2 dates from 1503 and is in the form fukkit. The earliest cite of the current spelling is from 1535.

The word was not in common (published) use prior to the 1960s. Shakespeare did not use it, although he did hint at it for comic effect. In Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) he gives us the pun "focative case." In Henry V (IV.iv), the character Pistol threatens to "firk" a French soldier, a word meaning to strike, but commonly used as an Elizabethan euphemism for **** . In the same play (III.iv), Princess Katherine confuses the English words foot and gown for the French foutre and coun (**** and **** [c-word used to refer to female sex organ], respectively) with comic results. Other poets did use the word, although it was far from common. Robert Burns, for example, used it in an unpublished manuscript.

The taboo was so strong that for 170 years, from 1795 to 1965, **** did not appear in a single dictionary of the English language. In 1948, the publishers of The Naked and the Dead persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism "fug" instead, resulting in Dorothy Parker's comment upon meeting Mailer: "So you're the man who can't spell **** ."

The root is undoubtedly Germanic, as it has cognates in other Northern European languages: Middle Dutch fokken meaning to thrust, to copulate with; dialectical Norwegian fukka meaning to copulate; and dialectical Swedish focka meaning to strike, push, copulate, and fock meaning penis. Both French and Italian have similar words, foutre and fottere respectively. These derive from the Latin futuere.

While these cognates exist, they are probably not the source of **** , rather all these words probably come from a common root. Most of the early known usages of the English word come from Scotland, leading some scholars to believe that the word comes from Scandinavian sources. Others disagree, believing that the number of northern citations reflects that the taboo was weaker in Scotland and the north, resulting in more surviving usages. The fact that there are citations, albeit fewer of them, from southern England dating from the same period seems to bear out this latter theory.

There is also an elaborate explanation that has been circulating on the internet for some years regarding English archers, the Battle of Agincourt, and the phrase Pluck Yew! This explanation is a modern jest--a play on words. However, there may be a bit of truth to it. The British (it is virtually unknown in America) gesture of displaying the index and middle fingers with the back of the hand outwards (a reverse peace sign)--meaning the same as displaying the middle finger alone--may derive from the French practice of cutting the fingers off captured English archers. Archers would taunt the French on the battlefield with this gesture, showing they were intact and still dangerous. The pluck yew part is fancifully absurd. This is not the origin of the middle finger gesture, which is truly ancient, being referred to in classical Greek and Roman texts.

posted August 13, 2004 06:24 PM         

Isis, thanks for the in depth info.