fvck (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:43 PM -0400 9/11/09, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 02:12:47PM -0500, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC wrote:
>>  Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
>>  Caveats: NONE
>>
>>  Probably too late for the new edition of Jesse's "The F Word", but . . .
>>
>>  I just read somewhere that "fvck" is a common euphemism for "fuck" at
>>  MIT, likely resulting from the Latinate spelling on the neoclassical
>>  buildings.
>
>I'm not sure I would include this. My tendency was not to
>include things that were purely written euphemisms,
>with a few
>exceptions (I added an entry for _fug_, though only
>cross-referencing to _fuck_;

Can't recall if you have a note on the famous story about how Norman
Mailer was forced by his publishers to replace "fuck" with "fug"
throughout _The Naked and the Dead_ (1948) and was later introduced
to Tallulah Bankhead who supposedly greeted him by loudly asserting
"Oh, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck'."

>  and I added an entry for _give a
>XXXX_ (after a British beer advertisement) because it struck
>me as being a different "word").
>
>But I don't have separate entries for other things that are
>just graphical variations, whether for purposes of humor
>("fvck"), euphemism ("f--k"), or pronunciation ("fookin'").


Frank McCourt in _Angela's Ashes_ has his family members refer to
"feckin" this and "feckin" that, which I assume represents the
Hibernian pronunciation and isn't exactly a euphemism.

LH

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