Finally!

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Mon Sep 24 14:26:07 UTC 2007


Though skin pigmentation is irrelevant per se, HDAS suggests (and I believe) that "to fuck over X"

  a. was indeed the original form in the sense in question,

  b. has been vastly more prevalent among speakers of AAVE - so much so as to sugget the idiom's origin there,

  c. was not much used in white speech before the mid '70s,

  d. still sounds rhythmically or positionally "wrong" to me as a speaker of WAVE.

  Earliest HDAS ex. is from 1961, but the context suggests it was around for a while.

  The form "fuck X over" undoubtedly owes something to "work X over."  I believe this is becoming the general form.

  JL

  Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Finally!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The correct usage has appeared in print! From Slashdot:

"... [G]ranting corporations the right to _fuck over_ other
corporations who come up with rather ordinary improvements ..."

Lest the point be missed, for those of us old enough (and/or black enough?),

"... [G]ranting corporations the right to _fuck_ other corporations
_over_ who come up with rather ordinary improvements ..." is
ungrammatical.

That is, [fuck NP over] is absolutely *not* a viable or a grammatical
alternative to [fuck over NP]. Unless, of course, you speak a
different dialect.

There are 215,000 raw Google hits that include uses such as "get the
fuck over it." So, sorting out the various usages would take ten men
and a boy. But the Urban Dictionary, at least, has it right. Well,
sort of. The second definition defines _fuck over_ as a Briticism
meaning "fuck over," with examples ambiguous as to dialect. And either
UD doesn't have "fuck NP over" (unlikely?) or I don't know how to find
it (likely?).

-Wilson

-Wilson
--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Sam'l Clemens

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