fvck (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, the paperback version that I read and re-read had "frig." 'Twas,
as my late father used to say (oddly, the anachronicity of this didn't
strike till I was in my 60's; I just thought, Well, he means
['It.w at z]) the first time that I'd ever come across this word. Does it
exist outside of literature? No, I mean it. I'm really asking. Has
anyone else either heard it in the wild or, perhaps, even used it
himself?

-Wilson

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
> Subject:      Re: fvck (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 08:18:46PM -0400, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> 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'."
>
> Yes, I mention this in the intro. In some versions it's
> Dorothy Parker.
>
>>>  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.
>
> No, it is Irish but it's used there as a euphemism for _fuck_,
> it's not just a reflection of the pronunciation. So I've added
> it as a new entry to this edition. (OED also regards it as a
> separate entry.)  The earliest example I have is 1980; it was
> popularized on _Father Ted,_ the TV series.
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
> OED
>
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--
-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.
-----
-Mark Twain

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