Ahem!

[Victor Steinbok]

Wilson, you're just old. "Fuck[ed] up" and "fuck[ed] over" hardly raise
an eyebrow these days.

     VS-)

On 7/12/2013 8:16 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> I should have warned newcomers. This really just an in-joke based on posts
> from back in the day. When I was at the Army Language School in 1960, I
> once rhetorically asked my classmates, all of whom were white, whether they
> had heard how the first sergeant had "fucked over" another classmate. My
> hearers freaked, never having heard the expression, "to fuck over NP,"
> before. Yet, this phrase falleth so trippingly from the tongue of black
> speakers - I've been familiar with it since WWII - that *I* freaked, in
> turn, to discover the extent of Jim Crow, that a phrase as common as "cool"
> among blacks wasn't even comprehensible by whites. Ca. forty years later, I
> posted the anecdote to this listserv and white people were *still*
> unfamiliar with the phrase, though "to fuck NP over" *was* familiar and the
> semantics, being the same, were no mystery. Some suggested that "fuck NP
> over" was a modification of "fuck over NP," but, IMO, you have to be
> familiar something in order to modify it and nobody but me was familiar
> with "fuck over NP."
>
> So, the facetious point is that white speakers have finally gotten it right.
>
> Slightly OT, but, IMO, still relevant: I had long been under the impression
> that white slang, _to hook up_ "to have sex" derived in an obvious way from
> black slang, _get the hook-up_ "connect, by telephone or in just about any
> other sense that you can think of." However, my own unpublished research
> <har! har!> shows that _to hook up_ "to fuck" in fact predates _to get the
> hook-up_ in any of its meaning, despite the "clear" derivation of the
> former from the latter.
>
> Youneverknow.
>
>
> --
> -Wilson

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