Big F-Word breakthrough. Or...

[Jonathan Lighter]

Or too good to be true ?

  Well, it certainly seems to be the real McCoy.

  David M. Sullivan's four volumes on _The United States Marine Corps in the Civil War_
  (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1997-2000) is the standard work on that subject. Volume 3 contains the following information (267):

  "After being relieved from guard duty on Folly Island on October 31, 1863, Pvt. Robert McKnight did not report himself with his detachment for inspection by the orderly sergeant as required by standing orders....When Sgt. Thomas Buckley called McKnight to fall in...there was no response.  Buckley called a second time, and a third. Finally, McKnight emerged from his tent and, in a loud voice, said, 'What the bloody Hell is wanted now?  This is a fucked up company anyhow, and always has been since the guard came on shore.  To Hell with such a company and all connected with such a damned concern!'"

  Not surprisingly, McKnight was soon standing trial at court-martial, charged with "disobedience of orders and scandalous conduct tending to the destruction of good morals."  The court found him guilty on the charge of disobeying orders but not guilty on that of subverting good morals.  His otherwise sterling record, including volunteering for hazardous duty during operations against Battery Wagner (an Army assault on  which features in the film _Glory_), saved McKnight from a brig sentence, and he wound up with no more than loss of a month's pay (268).

  The surly question, "What the bloody Hell is wanted now?" suggests that McKnight may have been a British or Irish immigrant, many of whom fought in the Civil War. ("What...is wanted..?" provides the hint rather than "bloody," which HDAS 1 shows, perhaps to an extreme, to have been a transatlantic cuss-word for a long time.)

  "Fuck up/ fucked up" reappears in the known lexical evidence not till 1929, in Australian Frederic Manning's largely autobiographical novel of the British army in the Great War, _The Middle Parts of Fortune_ (Hemingway said he read it once a year).  The U.S.A. provided the Reconstruction Era specimen of the vaguely related "fuck out of" (swindle out of), also in HDAS along with one metric ton of previously uncollected and/or uncollated related material.

  Sullivan cites "Records of the Judge Advocate General (Navy), Case 3401, Pvt. Robert McKnight" as the contemporaneous source of McKnight's remarks (334).

  JL

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