For Uncommon Colloquial Knowledge, Read This

Glenn Thrope

          Moms hate it.  Teenagers love it.  Second graders use only its nickname.  It can be used to mean virtually anything.  Despite its educational and misunderstood history, society keeps it off television.  No one bothers to examine it because, frankly, no one wants to.  Most importantly, it serves as a coming-of-age gauge, an indicator of where a person is on their tortuous road toward adulthood.

          Many believe it is an acronym for “fornication under consent of the king.”  The understanding is that, in Old England, couples had to ask for the permission of the king before attempting to have children.  If they got this approbation, the couple would hang a sign with the abbreviation from their doorknob.  This illogical concept is also a fallacious one.  Another commonly held belief is that The Word abbreviates “for unlawful carnal knowledge.”  Supposedly, rapists, pedophiles, and adulterers were once punished by having to wear square signs around their necks with this acronym on them.  Again, this is only a myth.

          In truth, the origins of The Word remain very much a mystery.  Unsurprisingly, scholars have been reluctant to trace its etymological roots.  It is indisputably very old, first mentioned in The Oxford English Dictionary in 1503.  In John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, he claims that The Word descended from a comical epithet given to John le Fucker in 1250.  According to Barbara Mikkelson, an expert on the subject, this is “quite possibly proof [that] The Word we casually toss about today was being similarly tossed about 750 years ago” (5).

Today, the word is used incessantly in English and has a countless number of variations in other languages.  In Swedish, there is the word focka.  In French, there is foutre.  Italian has fottere, Middle Dutch has fokken, and Latin has future (Accipiter 2).  While The Word certainly implies dirtiness each of these contexts, it more importantly entails a certain degree of purification, of catharsis.  Just as people punch their younger sisters or yell at their husbands, simply uttering this strident syllable helps to discharge the strain of the daily grind.  Somehow, using The Word helps people all over the world release their human penchant for aggression.  Sigmund Freud wrote of this bellicose inclination in one of his books, Civilization and its Discontents:

The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbors and which forces civilization into such high expenditure [of energy]…Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man's aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations. (“Freud on Aggression” 1)

This suggests that the opprobrium associated with The Word is nothing more than society keeping its own feral, belligerent instincts in check.  While restrictions like this are necessary for atrocities like murder and rape, what’s so immoral about The Word?  If using it is an innocuous way of releasing aggression, why is society so compelled to prevent people from using it?

The answer to this question lies in basic human development.  And basic human development lies in the way The Word is used.  The first six to seven years of life are spent in the blissful shell of pre-The Word ignorance.  Not a care in the world – just mommy, daddy, food, and diapers.  The shell begins to disintegrate in the first or second grade, usually the time The Word is first heard.  At first, it sounds just like any other word.  But then comes the day the word becomes The Word, the day parents see that their children have put the shell of naiveté aside for good: the day The Word comes home.

Some get spanked, some get scolded, some get sent to their rooms.  Regardless, after the day The Word comes home, nothing will ever be the same.  Nothing ever can be the same.  Something changes about the way parents look at their children.  John is no longer “my little Johnny,” and Susan is no longer “poopsie-woopsie Suzy.”  In short, parents realize that their children have tasted the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  Parents see that their children are changing.  And parents don’t like it.

They try to suppress the changing for as long as they can.  They punish their children until The Word becomes the sacredly unutterable “f-word,” which is not to be used under any circumstances.  No exceptions.  But when hormones first start pumping through the bloodstream, parents can do nothing to stop their kids from using The Word more and more throughout adolescence.  Parents, desperately trying to push away the fact that one day their children will no longer need them, label the word evil and indefensible.  Teenagers, with their burgeoning egos and swelling libidos, embrace the whole concept of rebelling against their parents.  The generations grow farther and farther apart, the older reproaching The Word more and more and the younger using The Word more and more.  Later, when these teenagers become parents themselves, the day The Word comes home part two starts the whole cycle all over again.

Ironically, the infamy attached to The Word stems not from hate but from love.  Parents feel that if they can stop its use, they can keep their sweet little babies just that – sweet in little.  Parents fail to see that The Word itself does not cause people to develop into adults; it is simply an indicator as to where this maturation process stands.  Nonetheless, the infamy of The Word illustrates one of people’s most basic desires – the parental longing to keep children young forever.  It is why parents cry at graduation and why they goad their children to go to college close to home.  It is why parents discourage children from saying, thinking about, or writing essays on words like this.

Yet even with this in mind, it is truly remarkable how a certain arrangement of four letters can elicit such censure, notoriety, and scorn across the globe.  It is probably the most powerful word in history.  Somehow, the entire depth of The Word is paradoxical.  It is enigmatic, yet few people have the desire to examine it.  It is potent, yet people rarely search for what it can teach us.  It is an important piece of human culture, yet parents tell their children it is reprehensible.

~    ~    ~    ~    ~

 Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund.  “Civilization and its Discontents.”  1929.  27 Jan. 2003.   <http://www.apsa-co.org/ctf/pubinfo/aggression.htm>.

Accipiter.  “Fuck.”  Online posting.  10 Jan. 2000.  27 Jan 2003 <http://www. everything2.com/index.pl>.

Mikkelson, Barbara.  “What the Fuck?”  13 July 1999.  27 Jan. 2003.  <http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/fuck.htm>.