fvck (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Baker, John]

My daughter, a 17-year-old high school senior in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., says that some students do use "Fug!" as an exclamation.  She thinks it may derive from "fugly," though.
 
She also remarked on the prevalence of "FML," short for "Fuck my life," essentially a cri de coeur of despair.  Looks like 3.4 million raw Googlits.
 
 
John Baker
 

________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Wilson Gray
Sent: Sat 9/12/2009 12:30 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: fvck (UNCLASSIFIED)



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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org <http://www.americandialect.org/> 
>



--
-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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org <http://www.americandialect.org/> 

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org