Fuck
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Fuck is an English word that, as a verb, fundamentally means "to have sexual intercourse with". Its use is generally considered censurable and offensive in most formal circles, but may also be rather common or expected in certain situations or social groups.
It is unclear whether the word has always been considered vulgar, and if not, when it first came to be used to describe (often in an extremely angry, hostile or belligerent manner) negative or unpleasant circumstances or people in an intentionally offensive way, such as in the term "motherfucker", one of its more common usages.
Rise of Modern Usage
Though it appeared in John Ash's 1775 A New and Complete Dictionary, listed as "low" and "vulgar", and appearing with several definitions, 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 1928, D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover gained notoriety for its frequent use of the words fuck, fucked, and fucking.
Perhaps the earliest usage of the word in popular music was the 1938 Eddy Duchin release of the Louis Armstrong song "Ol' Man Mose". The words created a scandal at the time, resulting in sales of 170,000 copies during the Great Depression years when sales of 20,000 were considered blockbuster. The verse reads:
We believe) He kicked the bucket,
(We believe) Yeah man, buck-buck-bucket,
(We believe) He kicked the bucket and ol' man mose is dead,
(We believe) Ahh, fuck it!
(We believe) Buck-buck-bucket,
(We believe) He kicked the bucket and ol' man mose is dead.
The liberal usage of the word (and other vulgarisms) by certain artists (such as James Joyce, Henry Miller, Lenny Bruce, and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, in their Derek and Clive personas) 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 didn't meet until 1966 and did not discuss the word then. The rock group The Fugs named themselves after the Mailer euphemism.
The science fiction novel That Hideous Strength (1945), by C.S. Lewis, includes lines of dialog with the word bucking used the same way as fugging would be in Mailer's novel, published three years later.
In his novel Ulysses (1922), James Joyce used a sly spelling pun for fuck (and cunt as well) with the doggerel verse:
If you see Kay,
Tell him he may.
See you in tea,
Tell him from me.
Memphis Slim had a melancholy blues about lost love entitled "If You See Kay".
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger featured an early use of fuck you in print. First published in the United States in 1951, the novel remains controversial to this day due to its use of the word, and offers a blunt portrayal of the main character's reaction to the existence of the word, and all that it means.
The Australian vaudeville comedian Roy Rene once had a comedy 'skit' where he would act with another person and would write the letter 'F' on a blackboard (on stage) and then ask his co-actor: 'What letter do you see' to which he would reply: 'K'. Mo would then say: 'Why is it that whenever I write F you see K?'
The first use of the word fuck on British television came on November 13, 1965 on the satirical show BBC-3 (no relation to the present channel of that name). The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan declared, apropos of nothing, that "I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word 'fuck' would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden." Kenneth Tynan was soon-after fired for his free use of the word.
One of the earliest mainstream Hollywood movies to use the word fuck was director Robert Altman's irreverent antiwar film, MASH, released in 1970 at the height of the Vietnam War. During the football game sequence about three-quarters of the way through the film, one of the MASH linemen says to an 8063rd offensive player, "All right, bud, your fuckin' head is coming right off." Also, former Beatle John Lennon's 1971 release "Working Class Hero" featured use of the word, which was rare in music at the time and caused it to, at most, be played only in segments on the radio. In 2007, some 36 years later, Green Day did a cover of Lennon's song, which was censored for radio airplay, with the "Ph.." sound being audible but then phased out.
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Charles Rocket uttered the vulgarity in one of the earliest instances of its use on television, during a 1980 episode of the show, for which he was subsequently fired.
Comedian 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 humorously suggested replacing the word kill with the word fuck in his comedy routine, such as in an old movie western: "Okay, sheriff, we're gonna fuck you, now. But we're gonna fuck you slow..." Or, perhaps at a baseball game: "Fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump!" More popularly published is his famous "Filthy Words" routine, better known as "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television."
