Why do we.....

[lasher]

the lords name in vain has always bothered me in that folks consider it to be swearing. vain, among other meanings, is from the latin vanus which means empty. i presume the commandment is to ensure one does not ask "the lord thy god" to dam n a person, place, or thing as an empty gesture. i consider asking "the lord thy god" to dam n as a curse, requesting the offending thing or person to be actually dam ned, covered with boils and infested with locusts,,etc. perfectly good use of the words in many instances

 

[soonersfan]

the lords name in vain has always bothered me in that folks consider it to be swearing. vain, among other meanings, is from the latin vanus which means empty. i presume the commandment is to ensure one does not ask "the lord thy god" to dam n a person, place, or thing as an empty gesture. i consider asking "the lord thy god" to dam n as a curse, requesting the offending thing or person to be actually dam ned, covered with boils and infested with locusts,,etc. perfectly good use of the words in many instances

Lasher, you've given me something to think about it. What you're saying makes a lot of sense. It still doesn't change how I feel about cursing God's name or using His name as a curse word but my interpretation of the meaning of those words may need re-evaluation.

 

[Glock 'em down]

I was told that the mother of curse words, the "F bomb" is actually an acronym that was used just after slavery was abolished.

Seems like some of the slaves and plantation owner's daughters and wives might have had some flings with some of the big, strong slaves. When a recently freed slave was caught with a southern belle, they were arrested and the charges, similar to today's rape were called...

Found Under Carnal Knowledge.

An old, old man told me that. Believe it or not...I'm just sayin'.

 

[Dave70968]

I was told that the mother of curse words, the "F bomb" is actually an acronym that was used just after slavery was abolished.

Seems like some of the slaves and plantation owner's daughters and wives might have had some flings with some of the big, strong slaves. When a recently freed slave was caught with a southern belle, they were arrested and the charges, similar to today's rape were called...

Found Under Carnal Knowledge.

An old, old man told me that. Believe it or not...I'm just sayin'.

I'd heard it as "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," but either way, it's highly unlikely. Borrowing from Wikipedia, but scholarly sources cited:

Etymology
The Oxford English Dictionary states that the ultimate etymology is uncertain, but that the word is "probably cognate" with a number of native Germanic words with meanings involving striking, rubbing, and having sex or is derivative of the Old French word that meant "to ****".[7]

First use in sexual sense
In 2015, Dr. Paul Booth claimed to have found "(possibly) the earliest known use of the word '****' that clearly has a sexual connotation": in English court records of 1310–11, a man local to Chester is referred to as "Roger ****ebythenavele", probably a nickname. "Either this refers to an inexperienced copulator, referring to someone trying to have sex with the navel, or it's a rather extravagant explanation for a dimwit, someone so stupid they think this that is the way to have sex," says Booth.[8] An earlier name, that of John le ****er recorded in 1278, has been the subject of debate, but is thought by many philologists to have had some separate and non-sexual origin.

Otherwise, the usually accepted first known occurrence of the word is found in code in a poem in a mixture of Latin and English composed in the 15th century.[9] The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, "Flen flyys", from the first words of its opening line, Flen, flyys, and freris ("Fleas, flies, and friars"). The line that contains **** reads Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk. Deciphering the phrase "gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk", here by replacing each letter by the previous letter in alphabetical order, as the English alphabet was then, yields the macaronic non sunt in coeli, quia fvccant vvivys of heli, which translated means, "They are not in heaven, because they **** wives of Ely".[10] The phrase was probably encoded because it accused monks of breaking their vows of celibacy;[9] it is uncertain to what extent the word **** was considered acceptable at the time. The stem of fvccant is an English word used as Latin: English medieval Latin has many examples of writers using English words when they did not know the Latin word: "workmannus" is an example. In the Middle English of this poem, the term wife was still used generically for "woman".[citation needed]

Older etymology
Via Germanic
The word has probable cognates in other Germanic languages, such as German ficken (to ****); Dutch fokken (to breed, to beget); dialectal Norwegian fukka (to copulate), and dialectal Swedish focka (to strike, to copulate) and fock (penis).[7] This points to a possible etymology where Common Germanic fuk– comes from an Indo-European root meaning "to strike", cognate with non-Germanic words such as Latin pugno "I fight" or pugnus "fist".[7] By application of Grimm's law, this hypothetical root has the form *pug–. There is a theory that **** is most likely derived from Flemish, German, or Dutch roots, and is probably not derived from an Old English root.[9]

Via Latin or Greek
There may be a kinship with the Latin futuere (futuo), a verb with almost exactly the same meaning as the English verb "to ****". From fūtuere came French foutre, Catalan fotre, Italian fottere, Romanian futere, vulgar peninsular Spanish joder, Portuguese foder, and the obscure English equivalent to futter, coined by Richard Francis Burton. However, there is no clear past lineage or derivation for the Latin word. These roots, even if cognates, are not the original Indo-European word for to copulate, but Wayland Young argues that they derive from the Indo-European *bhu– or *bhug– ("be", "become"), or as causative "create" [see Young, 1964]. A possible intermediate might be a Latin 4th-declension verbal noun *fūtus, with possible meanings including "act of (pro)creating".

However, the connection to futuere has been disputed‍—‌Anatoly Liberman calls it a "coincidence" and writes that it is not likely to have been borrowed from the Low German precursors to ****.[11]

Greek phyō (φύω) has various meanings, including (of a man) "to beget", or (of a woman), "to give birth to".[12] Its perfect pephyka (πέφυκα) can be likened[citation needed] to "****" and its equivalents in other Germanic languages.[12]

False etymologies
One reason that the word **** is so hard to trace etymologically is that it was used far more extensively in common speech than in easily traceable written forms. There are several urban-legend false etymologies postulating an acronymic origin for the word. None of these acronyms was ever recorded before the 1960s, according to the authoritative lexicographical work The F-Word, and thus are backronyms. In any event, the word **** has been in use far too long for some of these supposed origins to be possible. Some of these urban legends are that the word **** came from Irish law. If a couple were caught committing adultery, they would be punished "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge In the Nude," with "****IN" written on the stocks above them to denote the crime. A similar variant on this theory involves the recording by church clerks of the crime of "Forbidden Use of Carnal Knowledge." Another theory is that of a royal permission. During the Black Death in the Middle Ages, towns were trying to control populations and their interactions. Since uncontaminated resources were scarce, supposedly many towns required permission to have children. Hence, the legend goes, that couples that were having children were required to first obtain royal permission (usually from a local magistrate or lord) and then place a sign somewhere visible from the road in their home that said "Fornicating Under Consent of King," which was later shortened to "****." This story is hard to document, but has persisted in oral and literary traditions for many years; however, it has been demonstrated to be an urban legend.[13]

A different false etymology, first made popular on the radio show Car Talk, states that the phrase "**** you" comes from the phrase "pluck yew" and relates the origins of **** to the myth surrounding the V sign. This myth states that French archers at the Battle of Agincourt insulted the English troops' ability to shoot their weapons by waving their fingers in a V shape; after the English secured a landslide victory, they returned the gesture. The addition of the phrase "**** you" to the myth came when it was claimed that the English yelled that they could still "pluck yew" (yew wood being the preferred material for longbows at the time), a phrase that evolved into the modern "**** you".[9]

Grammar
**** has a very flexible role in English grammar, including use as both a transitive and intransitive verb, and as an adjective, adverb, and noun.[14] It can also be used as an interjection and a grammatical ejaculation. Linguist Geoffrey Hughes found eight distinct usages for English curse words, and **** can apply to each. For example, it fits in the "curse" sense ("**** you!") as well as the "personal" sense ("You ****er"). Its vulgarity also contributes to its mostly figurative sense, though the word itself is used in its literal sense to refer to sexual intercourse, its most common usage is figurative- to indicate the speaker's strong sentiment and to offend or shock the listener.[15]

Early usage
William Dunbar's 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" includes the lines: "Yit be his feiris he wald haue fukkit: / Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane" (ll. 13–14).

The oldest occurrence of the word in adjectival form (which implies use of the verb) in English comes from the margins of a 1528 manuscript copy of Cicero's De Officiis. A monk had scrawled in the margin notes, "****in Abbot". Whether the monk meant the word literally, to accuse this abbott of "questionable monastic morals," or whether he used it "as an intensifier, to convey his extreme dismay" is unclear.[16]

John Florio's 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, included the term, along with several now-archaic, but then-vulgar synonyms, in this definition:

• Fottere: To jape, to sard, to ****e, to swive, to occupy.[17]

Of these, "occupy" and "jape" still survive as verbs, though with less profane meanings, while "sard" was a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon verb seordan (or seorðan, ON serða), to copulate; and "swive" had derived from earlier swīfan, to revolve i.e. to swivel (compare modern-day "screw").

A 1790 poem by George Tucker has a father upset with his bookish son say "I'd not give [a ****] for all you've read". Originally printed as "I'd not give ------ for all you've read", scholars agree that the words "a ****" were removed, making the poem the first recorded instance of the now-common phrase "I don't give a ****".[18]

Farmer and Henley's 1893 dictionary of slang notes both the adverbial and adjectival forms of **** as similar to but "more violent" than bloody and indicating extreme insult, respectively.[15]

...

Footnotes:
[8] Booth, Paul (2015). "An early fourteenth-century use of the F-word in Cheshire, 1310–11". Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. 164: 99–102.
Pearl, Mike (13 September 2015). "We Interviewed the Historian Who Just Found the Oldest Use of the Word '****'". Vice. Retrieved 24 October 2015. Paul Booth: 'The significance is the occurrence of (possibly) the earliest known use of the word "****" that clearly has a sexual connotation.'
Wordsworth, Dot (26 September 2015). "The remarkable discovery of Roger ****ebythenavele: An exciting discovery in the records of the County Court of Chester – but it's probably not the oldest F-word". The Spectator. Retrieved 24 October 2015.
Emily Gosden (13 September 2015). "Earliest use of f-word discovered in court records from 1310". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 24 October 2015.
[9] Sheidlower, Jesse (Autumn 1998). "Revising the F-Word". Verbatim: the Language Quarterly. 23 (4): 18–21.
[10] "American Heritage Dictionary definition of ****". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 2011-11-11.
[11] Liberman, Anatoly (2008). An Analytic Dictionary of the English Etymology. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9781452913216.
[12] Liddell, Henry George, & Scott, Robert. Greek-English Lexikon; 3rd ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857; p. 1638a, b.
[13] "snopes.com: Etymology of ****". Snopes.com. 8 July 2007. Retrieved 2013-12-09.
[14] wickedwildabeast666 (23 September 2007). "the word ****". Retrieved 30 December 2016 – via YouTube.
[15] Mohr, Melissa (11 May 2013). "The modern history of swearing: Where all the dirtiest words come from". Salon. Retrieved 3 June 2013.
[16] Marshall, Colin (February 11, 2014). "The Very First Written Use of the F Word in English (1528)". openculture. Retrieved 25 February 2014.
[17] Hughes, Geoffrey (2006). "****". An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World.
[18] Mohr, Melissa (2013). Holy ****: A Brief History of Swearing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 215–216. ISBN 0199742677.

The word--and its usage in a sexual context--predates even the first New World settlements--to say nothing of the abolition of slavery--by several centuries.

 

[FredNOk]

With that as the case, I must be a total freakin wordsmith. Maybe I should be teaching English Comp I instead of being a student! Lol

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