This is The Illusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, wrestle with language in a paddling pool for Which of us won? Oh. When you're doused in wrestling custom, there are no winners. The show is back after a break so I guess this is the season premiere of I don't know, 1755, of The Illusionist. It is definitely the start of a series about four-letter words. This episode is about one of your favourites. It's multifunctional. Emotionally versatile.
a semantic Swiss Army knife. It even compels a reappearance of Zaltzman's first law of etymology, and it is a So, content note for that, plus some sex rations. There are live Illusionist shows coming up very soon. 1st of June 2025 in Toronto and 9th of June in Montreal. Tickets are linked at theillusionist.org slash events. For years, people have said to me,
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a tea towel and then hand you a piece of paper with a rectangle drawn in it. And you go, what is this? And I say, it's a tea towel that I drew. Ten dollars, please. Although I will draw you a rectangle on a piece of paper for free if you bring your own piece of paper. Anyway, come along. It's so nice when we can all get together. And also this live show is very good. On with the show. People for some reason expect me to look different than I do or to look, you know,
I mean, I'm a fairly academic person. I use the word relatively commonly in the way that most people do but I'm not constantly going around cursing or insulting people or anything like that. I am careful about this word as I am about my usage in general. I have adopted certain new uses that I find useful, but I'm not going around using this word absolutely constantly. If people expect me to be doing that, then they're going to be disappointed.
Well, I'm Jesse Schaedlauer. I'm a lexicographer. I spent 14 years at the Oxford English Dictionary. Before that, I was in the Random House Dictionary Department, and I am also the editor of the online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, which is a free historical dictionary devoted to the vocabulary of science fiction. I specialize in sexual terms and obscenity, and I have written now four editions of a book about the word fuck called The F Word. If you'll say...
How the fuck can you write a 500-page dictionary just about the word fuck? many different verb and that is before you even had similar terms like bum And then there are so many less usual terms like fucksome or fuckstrated or fuckist or fucktuous. How did you get into the F word detail?
So it was pretty much by chance. So when I was at Random House, I had discovered John Leiter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang basically in a drawer. And I found it and thought, this is awesome. We should do this. John Leiter had collected American slang terms spanning 300 years, and after Jesse came across the manuscript, in 1994, Random House published the first volume, From A to G. Obviously, there were a very large number of pages devoted to this word and that.
And I thought for a long time, this is the word people are going to care about. People are going to find this super interesting. Everyone's going to turn to the end of F and look this up. But this is also, this is a large, expensive, I mean, it was published by Random House, but still effectively an academic book. You know, it's not easy for people to find. And I thought to myself, well, we should publish this as a separate book.
But I didn't say anything because of course this was too absurd. I thought if I actually said this out loud I would be laughed out of an editorial meeting. But he wasn't! And I finally said, well, what if we took the F-word material from the slang dictionary and published that as a separate book? And everyone thought, yes, that's great. So I worked on that. And he is still working.
The first edition of The F Word, collecting different uses of the word fuck across the eight centuries of its known existence in print, was published in 1995. A second edition of The book expanded significantly for a third edition in 2009, and expanded and updated yet again for the fourth edition, which was released in November 2024. What has it been like being... Essentially a lexicographer for a single word for 30 plus years.
Well, it's interesting, of course. I mean, I find the word interesting. I mean, the thing about this word is that most people find it interesting. At this point, it's clear that we are allowed to find it interesting, but that wasn't always the case. When I started, it was not really considered appropriate for academics or scholars to spend time working on words of this sort.
the idea that you could be a real academic and spend a lot of time working on sexual terminology like no no this is off the table so in fact there wasn't that much serious scholarship that had been done about this word or similar things there were you know some documents that were well known among a small number of people that were never published but passed. Alan Walker Reed, the great scholar, had a
A paper in American Speech in 1934 called an obscenity symbol that was entirely devoted to the word fuck, but never used the word fuck. Practically an oolabo exercise. And... This is the first thing that was seriously written about it, again, without using it. Among Alan Walker Reid's research interests were Britishism absolutisms, yells, American placement, di Atomology He did extensive research okay for which there had been lots of flimflam explanations floating until he located its...
He wrote a serious linguistic study of latrinalia. and had to publish it himself because American publishers would not... so obscene. Eventually they did relent and publish it. and Alan Walker. paper that just and obscenity unprecedented linguistics But now it is a lot easier to publish. it. And why wouldn't you? For a start it's so unusual in big So many different parts of speech. Verb. Full sentence on its own. Noun. Why wouldn't you study it?
Well, people have tried. I mean, the famous anecdote about this. So Farmer and Henley's slang dictionary, the multivolum Victorian slang dictionary. It had a tremendous amount of sexual and other material in there, but it was a serious work. It was a work of scholarship. Many languages, many historical quotations. And it was printed for private subscribers only, so this wasn't something that you would run into in any kind of public way.
When the second volume was about to come out, the volume that contained cunt and fuck, Farmer's printer refused to print it. That left him in the lurch, and he had to find another printer at short notice, so eventually he had to go to the consonant for this. and meanwhile sued his printer for breach of contract for the year it took him to find another printer and redo everything and so forth. And there was a public trial that actually got a fair amount of attention about this.
There were Oxbridge scholars who testified that, no, this is a work of scholarship. This is important. This is real. And it took the jury three seconds to find for the printer. Like, obviously this could not be printed. Like, of course you could break a contract to avoid having to print this. I mean, obviously things have moved on quite a bit. This is 1893, but it can be difficult.
The notion that it doesn't matter how good it is in terms of academic quality, if this is not okay to do, it's not okay to do. The study of popular culture is relatively recent. studying things of this nature, by which I mean broadly popular culture, was not something that was really acceptable for academics to do. And now this is much more acceptable.
Now you can write about this, you can research this, you can publish it. Did you have any problems with the printer saying, I simply cannot publish this volume of obscenities? No, we didn't. And that was actually a bit surprising. We were genuinely worried that there would be a strong negative reaction to it. But in fact, there was almost no problem at all. There was no negative reaction. I mean, everyone thought that it was worth discussing. Everyone understood that.
It was interesting, but it was also a serious project. We weren't trying to do this to get a rise out of people. We were doing it because it was intrinsically interesting and worthwhile project. Of course, as time goes on, it's more clear that no, this is a serious subject for research. Would you have anticipated that you would by now have done four editions? This would have been part of your work for such a long time.
I did not think so, no. I mean, of course, with any dictionary project, it's never done. There's always more work to do. You can always keep revising. But I didn't think there would be so much to do. I didn't think there would be so many changes. The project has evolved a lot. The first edition in 1995 was based heavily on the aforementioned Historical Dictionary of American Slang by Jonathan Leiter. It was mostly not my work, it was Jonathan Leiter's work.
And there were some problems with that. The HDAS was devoted, as its name makes clear, to American slang. So things that were exclusively British were not included. Jesse sought to fix that in the second edition of The F Word, which appeared in 1999, and he continues to expand it. I put in the non-American things. I put in worldwide uses.
The editing of that, of HDAS, had only gone through the early part of the alphabet. I mean, it still hasn't gone past that. I had more time to do research on F-words that came later in the alphabet and so forth. The third edition doubled the size of the second edition, which I did not expect. I mean, partly that's because in 2000 aughts,
There was a tremendous amount of additional online historical data that I could use. And also at that point, I had joined the OED. So I had access to all of the OED sources. Tremendous amount there that I wasn't expecting. I thought, well, we already had a lot of information. How much more can there be? There can be a lot more.
The Internet Archive has so much material and they're also a colleague who's been working for a number of decades on a dictionary of sexual slang graciously gave me pretty much every related entry I might need. There were also a couple of archives of the history of sex, very broadly considered. So, you know, Victorian pornography, modern archives of homosexual pubs, things like that. I mean, so much there.
I was expecting a moderate update and it turned into an enormous update with a huge amount of new information in there. I couldn't have predicted the extent to which electronic research would completely transform the ability to do research. There's a lot of internet to have to wade through for the last 20 plus years of how people swear a lot more and write a lot more how they speak. is less available than written materials from previous centuries.
That seems overwhelming. There's a lot for the early editions. I thought okay, pretty much anything I've heard of will go in. And now, no, there's no way to do that. I mean, you look at something like Urban Dictionary and just infinite amounts of stuff that you can't really tell how much currency this has. I have to be much more careful now about putting in things that the only evidence is a couple of random online things.
So if there's something that, again, not that much evidence, relatively recent, and not from a very mainstream source, I will record it, but perhaps not put it in at this point. Even without that stuff there is plenty to include. This new, the fourth edition, has over 150 new entries and over 150 anti-datings as earlier examples. So it's not just a few new things, it's a tremendous amount of new things. There's really a lot out there. It really is a major update.
Are you bracing yourself for a fifth edition? I am already collecting material, of course. There are a number of things that I've drafted or have notes for, but that didn't make it into the print version. People have sent me a couple of things. And, yeah, I mean, I don't know if I will live to see it or if anyone will want to publish it, but I am definitely collecting more material. Lexicographer's work is never done. Never.
Stay tuned for the origins of fuck and some surprising places it appears in history after a quick break for some ads. The Illusionist is sponsored by Home Chef. Users of leading meal kits have rated Home Chef number one in quality, convenience, value, taste and recipe ease. I want to eat meals that I have prepared and cooked myself.
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The word fuck didn't make it into a mainstream dictionary until 1966 even though it for hundreds of it is difficult to know precisely how long or how widespread it was or how people used it because it didn't appear in print overtly all that much and sometimes it was coded or sometimes you Taboo words are particularly tricky for etymologists. What do we know about the origins of the word pho?
We know it's dramatic. That's all we can say for sure. The etymological meaning is something like to move back and forth. to thrust or to strike you know to hit that that comes from that and the sexual meaning also comes from that sense so so that that's where the core meaning comes from how it got there we're not sure
We know that it's a Germanic word. So the English word is, in fact, the earliest example in any Germanic language, which is not common. I mean, usually there would be examples in other languages earlier. But it shows up in Dutch and German and Swedish and Norwegian. It appears in most of the Germanic languages.
having sexual meanings or meanings that are comparable, meanings like to thrust or to move back and forth. So you see this in a wide variety of Germanic languages. Beyond that, we don't really know. Why do people really want this word to be an acronym? How many times do we have to tell them it's not an acronym? There are many words from acronyms. The number that people will come up to you and say, hey, did you know that you know, fuck or cop or tip or golf or whatever are acronyms.
No, they never are. But no one will ever say, hey, do you know that laser stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation? No, and no one will say that. So if you just say no, it's not an acronym, you'll always be right. The exception to that is, in fact, two F-words, which are, you know, snafu and fubar.
which I'm very sure are acronyms. Probably both of these are World War II military slangs. Snafu stood for situation normal, all fucked up. FUBAR for fucked up, beyond all recognition. There was also SOSFU, situation on change, still fucked up. I don't hear that one wheeled out so much. And just to preempt any of you landing in my inbox to say FUGASI is an acronym from the Vietnam War, standing for fucked up, got ambushed, zipped in, brackets, a body bag.
I think that's a bacronym. There is no evidence for it having originated as an acronym. And if it were an acronym, what happened to the body bag? Why is it not Fugazib? Plus, when it first started appearing in print in the 1970s, it ended with a Y, not an I. Make an acronym make sense! Moms. But no, fuck itself is not an acronym. It's far too old to be an acronym. Zaltzman's first law of etymology. If a word existed prior to the 20th century, it is never an acronym.
Is that why people want it to be an acronym, though, because the origins of it are a little obscure? That's the usual reason. Usually when people say something's from an acronym, it's a combination of the fact that the story itself is somewhat interesting in its own right, like it's intrinsically amusing or interesting, and the fact that there's nothing else you can point to to say, no, this is it. That wouldn't necessarily matter, but it would help.
So Posh, we don't know the origin of Posh. We know conclusively that it's not from Port Outward, Starboard Home, but we don't know what it is. If we knew and if we could absolutely say, no, it's absolutely from this, here's proof, that would help. uh a little bit but Not that much. So people want, first of all, they do want a good story, but they also do want an answer.
So in the case of words where you don't have an answer, yeah, the academic thing to do is to say, well, we don't know. The popular thing to do is say, well, if we don't know, then this must be correct, or we have to find something, so we'll use this, even if it makes no sense, even, you know, because... Knowing something wrong is better than not knowing anything at all. And I do think that's the inspiration behind assigning acronymic origins to stuff.
where there's no basis for it. You have to have an answer, and wrong is better than no answer. What chaotic imagination conceived of fornication on the consent of the king, though? Come on. A thing that surprised me quite a bit was there are two main acronymic suggestions. One is fornication under consent of the king. The other is for unlawful carnal knowledge.
In fact, things like that, the phrase, not the use of that as an acronym for fuck, but the expression unlawful carnal knowledge or for unlawful carnal knowledge does appear in legal records going back to the 19th century. It was a real legal term referring to exactly what it sounds like. Now, again, this was not wordplay. They weren't making a joke. They weren't suggesting this.
but it happens that you can find unlawful carnal knowledge in legal texts in the 1880s in several different places. So it's not true, but there is at least a plausible origin for that. Yeah, there seems to be an above average amount of maybe not true stuff that you have to sift through when researching this area of language.
Yeah, I mean, for any of this, you need actual documents from the time, not someone saying, oh, did you know that this meant so-and-so? You had stuff like that constantly. And someone simply asserting something obviously isn't reliable. One of the first reliable examples of the word fuck in the sense we've been talking about is in a place name in England. This is from the late 14th century.
And it actually had this name or variants of this name for many centuries after that of a place near Bristol, a field called Fucking Grove. This was in a charter. Well, you go up to the small pile of rocks here and then left to whatever. And it's, you know, a place called Fucking Grove. It seems that A grove where one copulates is the only plausible meaning here.
There are other parallels for that. There are places called Loving Field, things like that. So it seems like, yes, the word meant this at least in proper names in the 14th century. I'm feeling a rare stab of pride to be British right now. The Austrian village named Focking was famous for tourists going there and stealing the village's signs to the residents' annoyance.
A vote to change the village's name failed in 2004. They thought, why should we have to change? But on the 1st of January 2021, fucking did change its name to fucking. For a few months after, swear tourists scrawled fucking over the new town signs for fucking. But eventually they got bored, and the hundred or so inhabitants, aka fuckingers, have been left in peace.
But the town's name wasn't even from the word fuck that we're talking about. It's an ancient eponym after a 6th century Bavarian aristocrat named Fokko. And in 1070, when the town name was documented, fucking would probably have been pronounced fucking anyway. But when have we ever let etymology spoil our fun? Don't answer. The poem Flea and Fleece, meaning fleas and from 1475 is written in a mixture of latin and english and it satirizes carmelite friars
It includes the line, They are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely. Ely, the town in Cambridgeshire, and also a wordplay on hell. This poem is currently the earliest known written example of fuck that is definitely in the sexual sense and being used as a common word or a person's name yet. People actually had names containing fa-
Well, this was a great discovery. A historian working on what seemed like relatively dry legal records in Cheshire in the early 14th century found an example of a man whose name was Roger, fuck by the navel. Amazing choice of first name for that second name. It's a wonderful, it's an astounding coincidence, but it's a coincidence, I'm sure. Roger as a sexual term is much, much later than that. So he had committed some crime. We don't actually know what the crime was.
but he committed some crime and the authorities were having trouble tracking him down. So over the course of months, there were many records of They're trying to find him. And this is his name, and it's spelled in a couple of different ways, as is typical for the time.
This doesn't appear once. It appears seven times over the course of a number of months. So we know this was his name. This wasn't some weird slip of the pen or something inexplicable. We know this was his name. The question of how to interpret it is open, of course. But it seems the only plausible interpretation is that Roger either attempted to copulate in this manner or thought that this is how you do it.
The medieval historian Paul Booth, who found Roger fucked by the navel's name in the Cheshire documents, thought the name must have been bestowed upon him as an insult, a form of revenge, perhaps from a sexual partner. It could also be a masturbation reference. Now, there were some fuck names that occurred earlier. John LeFocker, recorded in court documents from April 1278 because he had been charged with double murder.
But etymologists debate whether his last name was actually from the sexual sense of thought. Most err towards it being from another non-sexual derivation, perhaps related to the word fike, meaning to be restless or fidgety, or a variant on fulcher, meaning soldier, or a misspelling of tucker.
And around 1290, there may have been one Simon fuckbutter, meaning he beats butter in the act of churning it. At least that's the public version of the story. What he does with butter in his spare time is his business.
and William Smallfuck, which likely meant a small sail. Whereas the reason Roger Fuck by the Naval is an important discovery in the history... is that his name is difficult to interpret as anything other than the sexual sense of the word, even though that had been rare in writing when Roger Fuck by the Naval was enshrined in documents then being declared an outlaw in 1310 and 1310.
This seems like it has to be the sexual use. This seems like it has to be the same word people have looked at and tried making arguments about what else it could mean. It seems that this has to be sexual. I don't know any other way around it. So what are the meanings of the word fuck around? Are there any meanings that aren't sexual?
No, no. For almost the entire history of the word, it is sexual. And that's one of the big things about the study of this word. People regard fuck as a sexual term. In fact, if you go to a corpus now and... Just take a random sampling of uses of fuck. Overwhelmingly, it is not sexual. It appears in so many different non-sexual forms. as intensifiers, insults, expostulations, punctuation, Yes, it is sexual in origin, but these are all rather new indeed.
There are one 18th century example, one or a couple, a small handful of 19th century examples. And again, despite the fact that the word was very common, like if you look at these Victorian pornography collections that I've mentioned, you know, fuck appears all over the place.
always in sexual use. And of course, that's what they're writing about. But you don't like accidentally come across some other, some non-sexual example, given that they're clearly okay with using the word itself. So things like that suggest that No, it really wasn't in use in figurative contexts until very recently. I mean, things like fuck you, fuck you is 20th century. We don't see that until I think 1905.
Fucking is an intensifier. You know, I'm fucking exhausted, that sort of thing. The earliest completely clear example of that is, in fact, in Farmer and Henley's dictionary from 1893. It's described as common. But we don't have an earlier example. But the point is, this is something that's overwhelmingly common now, and we just don't have much evidence for it until fairly recently. Many of these are very recent. Fuck off, as in go away. That is documented from 1929, as is the verb fuck up.
Fuck over, 1961. Fuck me! As expression of surprise, 1929. Fuckton, 1995. Fuckwit, 1968. The insult, Fuckpig, 1922. But don't forget, lexicography only gets to go on written examples. People could have been shouting Fuckpig every day of their lives 500 years ago.
but since nobody jotted that down in their diaries or poems or legal documents, we can't Oh, for a time machine In the fourth edition of The F Word, around 150 terms have been antedated, meaning Jessie has been able to include earlier citations than were previously known about. One of the big anti-datings is the word unfucked, meaning, you know, literally, you know, someone who has not had sex, which had an anti-dating of over 100 years to Horace Walpole in the 1740s, of all people.
Horace Walpole's 1743 poem Little Peggy was a celebration of sorts of his probable boyfriend's baby being birthed by one of his other lovers. His small cock, women unfucked, at sight of it should breed, and other virgins teem with heavenly seed. This poem really flustered Walpole's editors well into the 20th century. They struggled with whether to publish it, because of obscenity, and because they didn't want to suggest that Walpole was a sex person at all, let alone one who had sex with men.
Anyway, that's the earliest known instance of unfucked to mean someone who has not had sex from 1743. Everything you think is new has been around a lot longer than you think. Of course there are some things that are genuinely new. But most of the time, by the time you've heard of something or by the time you can react to it, it's been around for quite some time, even if you're really active and paying attention to these things and trying to follow it. That's just the way things are.
There are some genuinely new things. AF for as fuck. This is 2010s. to fuck meaning to be great you know like that song fucks You know, that's also pretty new, a decade, a decade and a half old. But many things are older than you think. And many things that have been in the whole time. There are a lot of anti-datings. I mean, a tremendous number of anti-datings. Some of the other anti-datings in the fourth edition of the F word, fuckery, was previously dated from 1954, now anti-dated to 1900.
the noun tongue fuck from 1972 to 1902, and the verb mouth fuck from 1954 to 1868. Foxstick, from 1973 to 1904. Assfuck, 1940 to 1874. Dogfuck, 1980 to 1867. You always want to find earlier examples, which is a key point of research in historical lexicography. This is what you want to do. I mean, some people treat this as a competitive game. And it's not just for the purpose of competition. It's not just, you know, showing off or whatever.
When you find earlier examples, it shows that what you thought you knew about the history of language was not correct. And it particularly matters for terms like this, where If you have something from 1975, let's say, you don't know if it's actually from 1975 or actually much older and just not written down because it's vulgar.
And if you make discoveries about that, it really tells you something about the culture to find earlier examples. It's not just like, hey, cool, I beat you by two months. It's a real discovery. It really changes how we look at the language, how we look at the culture.
Are there ways in which the word is used in more recent editions of the book that weren't around then and you were like oh that's surprising or that feels new well one of my favorite of the new entries is the group of expressions of the sort to give no fuck or zero fucks given, which was actually very hard to figure out how to define this. I ended up saying in idiomatic uses in negative contexts, a small or insignificant amount of caring or empathy regarded as a quantifiable unit.
So, of course, you have don't give a fuck. That goes back quite some way, depending on how you look at that evidence. But that's not a specific thing here. To give no fucks, zero fucks given. Couldn't give two fucks. this kind of thing like that that's a quantifiable thing And I find this interesting. The earliest example of this, rather to my surprise, in fact goes back to 1945 in a letter from, of all people, Philip Larkin. Oh, I mean, kind of tracks, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it tracks, but I wouldn't have said, if you had asked me, I wouldn't have said, oh yeah, it was probably from Larkin or something like that. But yeah, I mean, a great example from that, examples from the 1970s, the 1990s. You know, I don't give a fuck, not a single fuck, not a single solitary fuck. from Boss the Rapper in 1993.
So that's something, okay, it's been around for quite a number of decades now, but it's still, these uses feel pretty new to me now. The early ones felt like, if you had asked me in the mid-90s, I would have thought, oh, that doesn't really count, or that's a one-off. Now it's like, no, it's a whole group of expressions. It's really common. It's definitely out there. This is a real thing. This is a new thing. It feels new to me, at least.
I was wondering if you were still able to use it in a way that is immediate or if it requires too much intellectual processing. Well, there are some that would, but most of the time, no. I mean, in fact, this came up recently. I teach a class in lexicography at Columbia University, usually once a year.
You know, I pay attention. Well, of course, I pay attention to everything as I'm teaching. And I do notice that, you know, very occasionally I might use the word in conversation and I'm always curious how I use it and how people react to it when I say this.
And when I do, it gives us the opportunity to discuss the nature of taboo in general. I can use it in figurative senses. If I used it in some way to express exasperation, that would be okay. But I couldn't use it in class in a sexual way because...
The subject is not appropriate. It's not the word itself. If I said sorry i'm late there was this fucking traffic or whatever something like that i could get away with that but there's no context in which i as a professor could be speaking about sex and use this word because sex is not something that you can talk about in this way you know
So I'm paying attention to things like that all the time. I asked Illusionist listeners if they had questions for you, and they sure did. And several of them were very interested in fuck as an infix. And just why that is English is basically only in Vic. Infixation. So an infix is using something inside an existing word like absofuckinglutely is one of the classic examples.
And infixed fucking goes back to World War I, basically, and fairly commonly thereafter. Other languages have a lot more infixation. English doesn't. That is not how English works. There are other infixes. Goddamn. Bloody. Bloody. Absolutely. Yeah. uh into bloody pendant but they're always with some sort of obscene term you know some some kind of taboo term inserted into an existing word
Because if you are going to have something, you're not going to do it for complex morphological reasons that some other languages allow. You're going to have it in some straightforward exclamatory use where it doesn't require that large a bending of English grammatical structures. Scott says,
Why did fuck end up getting into places that seemingly have nothing to do with sex, like WTF? Why is it there? As far as I have considered, no other word could really take its place. What the ass, shit, etc. doesn't really work. Well, hell works. The problem with taboo words, the very broad category of taboo words, is that They don't necessarily substitute for each other easily. For example, right now the most offensive words in English are generally group terms, so racial slurs,
ethnic slurs, things referring to group membership. These are the ones that you can't say. But that doesn't mean that you can substitute these words into F-word or S-word expressions. That's not how things work. The fact that you can't use some offensive words in that structure you can use other So yes, there are expressions. In fact, P-U-C-K is an Irish English term for the devil. And there are examples from the early 19th century I think of what the puck Meaning, what the devil, what the hell.
that are used the same way that WTF is used nowadays. And this could be just a complete coincidence. But in fact, things like what the hell or what the devil have been used for many centuries.
I think fuck lends itself to various kinds of figurative language in ways that make sense. They don't have to be pleasurable in one like fuck you has generated the expression unfuck you from 1960 or so the conscious suggestion that well you know sex is a pleasurable thing this is not something i would want to wish on an enemy Therefore, I will use unfuck you, meaning the same thing, but in a presumably non-positive way.
And unfuck, meaning to fix something that is fucked, also shows up in writing from the same time. So anyway, the point is that there are a wide variety of figurative uses that make sense for how fuck could be used. And that is true for certain things. I mean, shit has a huge amount of uses. That also seems
like it's well-suited for that. Kant, not so much. Very much more frequently used in British English than American English, But it doesn't feel to me like that's a word that could generate the incredibly wide variety of figurative uses that fuck or shit can. Alison said, what do you think of the fact that if you add fucking to your Google search at the moment,
it will return your search result without the AI summary. I think it's great. I mean, of course, any use of fuck I'm happy with, but anything to defeat AI. Yes, if fucking can defeat Google's AI, that's a huge win for me. I think that's fantastic. I love it. Are there any other terms? that you can imagine spending so much time working on well this has been a very long time i i do think that is an extremely interesting word
It is also used in an enormously wide variety of uses and examples and proverbs and phrases and jokes. And I think one could write an interesting book about that as well. But it's a lot. Jesse Scheidlauer is a lexicographer, writer and editor. Among his work is the historical dictionary of science fiction, which you can browse at sfdictionary.com.
And the four editions, so far, of The F Word, a history and dictionary of the word fuck and its many variants, available to buy now, and it is a fucking good read. Next up in four-letter word season, we are going to revisit... stronger one. The Illusionist is sponsored today by Audio Maverick, a nine-part documentary podcast about one of the most visionary figures in radio, Hyman Brown.
through the life of this famous New Yorker and his incredible seven decade career We learn about the birth of radio, the height of popularity of radio. Hyman Brown was the linchpin of the golden age of radio. 50,000 radio programs. of families to gather around their radios each night. I also love that Audio Maverick features archival audio. It's incredibly vivid to experience the past And you'll hear clips of famous shows. Tracy and mystery.
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And we chat about our problems and our faves, our finest fountain pens and our foulest portmanteaus. And we watch TV and films together too. Join us via theillusionist.org slash donate. Also, my other podcast, Answer Me This, is back from retirement with monthly episodes. We have recently covered the history of Biscoff spread, the significance of the shape of pretzels, the medical dangers of bagpipes, and the brutal world of sand there.
Get it in your pod apps and at answermethispodcast.com. And if you haven't heard it before, well, you've got more than 400 episodes to dip into. And if you like either please recommend them to other people doing that is incredibly useful to the lonely podcaster and hopefully for your recommendee it would be something colourable and magnificent. Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is Katabatic. Adjective. Meteorology. Of a wind. Caused by local downward motion of cool air.
Try using Katabatic in an email today. This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, with original music by the singer and composer Martin Austrick of palebirdmusic.com. Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, get in touch with them at multitude.production slash ads. If you've got a product or thing you're trying to market, I'm happy to help you do it, as long as it's not evil.
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