[Lexicography] REVISING THE F-WORD
<ital>From an essay by Jesse Sheidlower in the Fall issue of "Verbatim," a newsletter about the English language. Sheidlower is the project editor of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. He is the author of The F-Word and Jesse's Word of the Day, both published by Random House. The second edition of The F-Word will appear in May 1999.</ital>
The original edition of The F-Word was a successful project. It included almost all of the important uses of the word "fuck," and the introduction gave a good picture of the word's history, both etymological and social. But there is always room for improvement. So when Random House determined it was time to reprint, we decided that a major revision could be supported. The revision is in progress, and this is a preliminary report on where things stand.
Interest in the historical aspect of the word "fuck" has always been high. Accordingly, we have been trying to research and add any relevant or interesting story. We will give an extended discussion of the earliest example of "fuck," a description of monks fucking that appeared in a ciphered version in the fifteenthcentury poem "Flen Flyys." We will also note that acronymic etymologies such as "for unlawful carnal knowledge" are completely bogus and first appeared in 1967.
The date of 1926 for the first openly printed use of "fuck" in America provoked the question of the first use of "fuck" in the movies. We are still researching this, but it seems that "fuck" first appeared in mainstream movies around 1970 (M*A*S*H and Myra Breckinridge), though it had been used earlier in several avant-garde films. Unlike the literary world, where provocative books such as Ulysses or Lady Chatterley's Lover led to legal battles over obscenity issues, in the movies no one tried to place "fuck" onto film until the country was ready for it.
While "fuck" appeared in popular periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Playboy, and others by the 1960s, it took a bit more time for the word to penetrate the august pages of The New Yorker. The editorship of Tina Brown is usually creditedmore usually, faulted-with that magazine's frequent use of the word, and although writers did use it frequently under Brown, in fact "fuck" appeared there, spelled in full, in 1985, during the editorship of the puritanical William Shawn, in a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason: "Maybe you have to find out for yourself. Fuck. You can't learn from the past" (June 3, 1985, p. 81).
As most users of historical dictionaries know, the search for antedatings, citations earlier than those previously known for a word or sense, is a crucial effort. Early examples force us to rethink what we thought we knew about the historical development of language. The original work for The F-Word proved that "fuck" was used in a variety of figurative senses far earlier than had previously been believed, and that certain expressions were years or decades older than anyone had realized. The number of antedatings we have found in the last several years has been small, which is both good (in validating the quality of our original research) and bad (no breakthroughs). The insulting epithets "fuckface" and "fackhead" were originally first cited in 1961 and 1962, respectively. Several of our newfound citations referred to World War 11. Coincidentally, we found clear examples from 1945 in an article published in "Verbatim."
The compound adjective "fuck-me," "intended to invite sexual advances," chiefly exemplified by "fuck-me (shoes]" (with various specific types of shoes), was in our first edition only attested to 1989. Several reliable sources claimed familiarity to the 1960s and 1970s, and we were able to confirm this with a 1974 citation from the musician David Bowie. The second definition of "fuckable," meaning "sexually available," with a single 1977 example, was pushed back to 1972 in Bruce Rodgers's The Queens' Vernacular.
A moderate number of new words or phrases, and a smatter number of new senses, have been added to the new edition. One of these new senses has been split from the ultimate entry in the book, definition La. of "fuck," verb, "to copulate or copulate with. Also used in transferred senses." This simple and clear definition flew right over the heads of most nonlexicographers, who had no idea of what a "transferred sense" was and had no easy way to find out. A new definition Lb. will be "to make a sexual thrust into; to rub against in a sexual way," thus ensuring that citations for "fuck in the ass" and "fuck in the car" will be precisely defined and not marooned in a definitional netherworld of "transferred senses." Several readers suggested the addition of that '70s hit, "zipless fuck," "an act of intercourse without an emotional connection," coined by Erica Jong in Fear of Flying. We had originally decided to omit it, since "zipless" was often used on its own to mean "passionate but emotionally uninvolved," but it does appear often enough as a set phrase to deserve entry. The linguist Arnold Zwicky suggested "genderfuck," "in, stance of reversal of normal sex roles; (specifically) transvestism," a common term whose absence can only be explained by quoting Dr. Johnson, who when asked why he defined "pastern" as the "knee" of a horse, replied: "ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance." Additionally, the bizarre lesbian expression "fuckerware party," meaning "gathering for the group use of sex toys," seems, contrary to expectations, to be real. Other additions include a new sense of "ratfuck," to mean "a busy party marked by flagrant social climbing"; and insults such as "fuckball" and "fuckrag" (popularized in the movie Scream).
British and Australian terms, omitted on policy grounds from the first edition, are now being included. "Fuckpig""a disgusting person" - is a winner, as is "fuckwit" - "a fool""fuckwitted" - "stupid" - and the absolutely delightful contestant from Bridget Jones's Diary, "fuckwittage" - "stupidity." "Fucktruck," "a van or car in which people engage in sexual activity," had been mentioned in the introduction as being Australian (where it has been used since the 1960s), a statement rejected by numerous correspondents in the United States. Two people noted that the word was also used for "a bus on which one can meet prospective sexual partners" (both, curiously, referring to a shuttle between Wellesley College and the Harvard and M.I.T. campuses).