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I received the following via mail and thought it might interest you lot. Any opinions?
Wow, it seems a lot of you had your own opinions of where the F**K word came from. Many of you agreed with Jeff's definition. However, even more of you disagreed. The hands down winner was..For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Works for me.
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"I'm replying about this fact and the true background history of the word f*ck. This fact is indeed false. If people in olden days (I think around the 18th century or something of that nature) would accused or found guilty of adultery, they were put in the stocks. Above their heads was written For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. It later became abbreviated as f*uck later on. Thank you.
~Kyrstyne Thomas
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#5 IS COMPLETE NONSENSE:
The word is derived from the Danish word "fokken" to breed cattle and Swedish "fokka" to copulate.
Jeesh! Some people will fall for anything.
-C.C.
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I have had classes on ren history and in truth yes the F-word does mean Fornication Under Consent of the King, but it was ingraved in the entry ways of brothels, it ment that the brothel was legal and paid taxes. Henry the 8th made prostitution legal and taxed it in order to make more money.
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Number 5 is total B.S. Fuck defrived from the Greman word FLickin. it means something like ouch or damnit... but thats story is a load of internet crap that has no reliable source. anyway this newsletter is cool bye
~Ben
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Actually the word "fuck" has nothing to do with Kings or their consent to have sex. Fuck is an Old English word which means "to sow a seed" (as in farming). "To sow" means to scatter seeds, similar to the process of a male ejaculating in to a female.
Man you get a lot of idiots that send you false information.
Best of luck,
-ihateriido
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and the definitive response on the "F" word......
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 fuck the wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge]." 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 fuck. In the same play (III.iv), Princess Katherine confuses the English words "foot" and "gown" for the French "foutre" and "coun" (fuck and cunt, 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, fuck 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 fuck."
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 fuck, rather they 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's 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.
For more information on fuck and its usages, see The F
Word , by Jesse Sheidlower, Random House, 1999, ISBN
0-375-70634-8. This is perhaps the most comprehensive
treatment of the word available.
~Carole
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Ansd what says the OED etymology?
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Carpal Tunnel
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>what says the OED etymology?
in the interests of effing completeness, here it is:
[Early mod.E fuck, fuk, answering to a ME. type *fuken (wk. vb.) not found; ulterior etym. unknown. Synonymous G. ficken cannot be shown to be related.]
For centuries, and still by the great majority, regarded as a taboo-word; until recent times not often recorded in print but frequent in coarse speech.
a1503 Dunbar Poems lxxv. 13 Be his feiris he wald haue fukkit. 1535 Lyndesay Satyre 1363 Bischops+may fuck thair fill and be vnmaryit....[etc]
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they probably come from a common rootIndeed® And interesting to see the Bishops were ever thus 
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the Bishops were ever thus
Notoriously so; hence often the butt of limericks (e.g., There once were two ladies from Birmingham ... )
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So whence the euphemisms frig, friggin', and frickin' (or fricking)?...any others I missed?
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...any others I missed?
firkin'
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...any others I missed?Thanks, Keiva! I also forgot freakin'. Anything on these substitute "effers", tsuwm?
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occasionally I hear frappin'
frap, coincidentally (or not), means to strike, to beat
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'Fudge' is a common alternative too. > frap Mmmmm... Frappe. The Greeks certainly know how to make an iced-coffee. How Star Bucks came up with Frappacino is beyond me! Perhaps a churlish attempt to 'bond European cultures' .
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In my mother's idiolect, "frickin-frackin" is used particularly when she's only jokingly angry. 
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