Help Revise “The F-Word”!

I am delighted to be able to announce that I have been working on a new, fourth edition of my book The F-Word.

The F-Word is a historical dictionary devoted to the word fuck, illustrating in detail every significant usage of the word: parts of speech, senses, derived forms, abbreviations, expressions, proverbs. As a historical dictionary, it, like the Oxford English Dictionary, includes quotations showing exactly how the word has been used throughout history, drawn from a wide range of sources, including famous writers, Victorian pornography, Urban Dictionary, TV shows, military diaries, Twitter and Reddit, rap lyrics, and even this blog.

The first edition came out in 1995, and was based on the Historical Dictionary of American Slang (the fuck-containing volume of which had been published in 1994). This edition largely ignored non-American uses of the word, and its treatment of entries beyond the letter F was spotty. The second edition of 1999 remedied these and other problems. The third edition, published in 2009, was a massive update; by that point I had become an editor at the OED, and was able to use its resources, as well as the greatly increased availability of online sources, to significantly expand the book. The fourth edition will benefit from the further expansion of online databases, as well as increased interest (both popular and academic) in both the use and the study of offensive language.

I’d been doing haphazard work on the fourth edition since the third edition went to press, but in the last year, I’ve been working in earnest. There are over 1,500 new quotations; over 100 antedatings (earlier evidence for existing senses, forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about a word’s history); and over 80 new senses. Some examples of the new drafts, with the earliest example I’ve been able to find so far:

• General expressions:
  • Assfuck (in mock place-names) ‘a very remote place; Bumfuck; Bumblefuck’ (2011)
  • thank fuck ‘thank God’ (1970)
  • fuck n. ‘a (single) instance of caring’, esp. in phrases like to give no fucks or zero fucks given (1945)
  • fuckboy ‘a contemptible man, esp. a promiscuous man who disrespects women’ (1996)
  • fuckton ‘a large number or amount’ (1995)
  • fuckwittery ‘stupidity’ (1995)
  • unfuckwithable ‘impervious to criticism or opposition’ (1998 1995)
• Initialisms chiefly associated with electronic communication:
  • AF ‘as fuck’ (2009)
  • FFS ‘for fuck’s sake’ (1991)
  • FML ‘fuck my life’ (2005)
  • LMFAO ‘laughing my fucking ass off’ (1993)
  • STFU ‘shut the fuck up’ (1991)
  • WTAF ‘what the actual/absolute fuck’ (2004)
• Uses associated with regions other than the US or England:
  • boot-fuck (Canadian) ‘to violently kick (a person)’ (1992)
  • get tae fuck! (Scottish) ‘”fuck off!”; “go to hell!”‘ (1977)
  • to fuck spiders (Australian) ‘to fool around; waste time’ (usually in the expression not here to fuck spiders) (1995)
• Sexual terms:
  • fuck doll ‘a life-size doll used for sexual purposes’ (1973) and ‘a woman regarded as a sex object’ (1989 1975)
  • fuck eyes ‘sexually flirtatious glances’ (1981)
  • fuck rod ‘the penis’ (1985 1969)
  • fuck toy ‘a sex toy, as a dildo or vibrator’ (1991 1979)

I will also be revising the Introduction, incorporating new discoveries about the earliest known examples of fuck, and discussing the constantly shifting acceptability of offensive terms in current usage, where mainstream American newspapers have begun printing the word openly (often spurred by the frequent use of such language by prominent political figures).

“How Can I Help?”, You Ask

Thank you for asking! There are many ways. You can suggest items that should be in, preferably with good examples of usage. If you have antedatings of any of the new examples listed above, I’d love to get those. If there are particular quotations, anecdotes, or the like that you think deserve to go in, please suggest them! In all cases, please contact me by email at jester@panix.com. (Though if you’d like to engage in more general discussion, please use the comment section of this post.)

Finally, I do have a list of items I’m actively looking for. For these specific items, I already have an entry; I am looking for actual quotations. The general idea is to find “good” examples (except for antedatings, which can be anything): nothing from glossaries, nothing referring to the word as a word, nothing from “the Internet” at random. Printed examples from published texts are preferred, but anything traceable, or from sources that are well-known or reliable, is fine. Indeed, my coverage of online sources could be improved, so I would welcome evidence from major websites, prominent social media accounts, and so forth. Least preferable are totally random examples such as “I’m familiar with this,” or ones found by Googling, searching Twitter, or the like.

Please ask me if there’s any question about what I’m looking for; I can clarify the actual definitions, or the full context of existing quotations.

Thank you for your interest in the project!

• cuntfuck, n. British use as a term of abuse: antedating 2002
• DILF: antedating 2001
• eye-fuck n. ‘a hostile glare’: antedating 1991
• fist-fucking n. ‘male masturbation’: anything other than My Secret Life, Farmer & Henley, and Cary’s Slang of Venery
• F.O. ‘fuck off’ (as noun or verb, in any sense): postdating 1988 (this is hard to search) (I do have later examples of Foxtrot Oscar in this sense)
• FTL ‘fuck the law’: antedating 1992
• fuck (as mass noun, in the sense ‘copulation’): anything recent
• King Shit of Fuck Mountain: antedating 1997 (N.B. I do have “King Shit of Turd Mountain” from 1980)
• fuck v. ‘to cease or abandon; ditch; etc.’: anything later than 1985 in uses that are not “fuck it” or “fuck this shit”
• fuck v. ‘to trifle or interfere with; fool; lie to’, any evidence (1989 and 1995 only)
• fuck v. ‘to be wonderful; to rock’, e.g. that song fucks: any non-Twitter evidence; anything antedating 2013
• fuck v. in the phrase this/that guy fucks: any non-Twitter evidence (that does not explicitly refer to the Silicon Valley episode featuring this)
• fuck n. used equivalently to “the fuck” in questions, e.g. “Fuck you know about it?” or “Fuck you talking to him for?” or the like: antedating 1983
• fuck bar: a bar where one can engage in intercourse, esp. a gay bar having a room for this purpose: postdating 2001 (not in historical use)
• fuck button ‘the clitoris’: any evidence
• fucked over adj. ‘drunk’: any recent evidence
• fucked up adj. ‘exhausted’: any evidence
• fuck eyes ‘(in direct address) disliked person’: postdating 2000
• Fuckeye: ‘a student at, or fan of, Ohio State’: any evidence that is not in the catchphrase “Buck the Fuckeyes”
• fucking n. ‘a defeat; an instance of exploitation or victimization’: postdating 1997; also, any examples not in the phrase a royal fucking
• fucking-A: after some reorganization, I can now use any evidence for any clear uses as a noun (e.g. “They don’t know fucking-A about it”) or an adjective not in “You’re fucking-A!” (e.g. “This is fucking-A”). (I’m not looking for interjectional or adverbial uses.)
• fuckist ‘person who copulates’: postdating 1974 (not in reference to Philip Roth or Larry McMurtry)
• fuck(k)nob ‘a despicable person’: any evidence (1995, 1998, 2022 Reddit only)
• fuck off v. ‘to idle away; to waste (time)’: any post-2000 evidence in transitive use (e.g. “he fucked off all that talent” or “to fuck off three weeks”)
• fuck off v. ‘to be sexually unfaithful’: any evidence (three 2016 examples in African-American usage)
• fuck out v. ‘to fail; (also) to renege’, any post-2000 evidence
• fuck up v. ‘to make intoxicated’: any evidence (1971, 1980, 2001 only)
• GFO ‘general fuck-off’: any evidence (1948, 1957 only)
• headfucker ‘a powerful drug; a strong alcoholic drink’: any recent evidence
• IDGAF antedating 1998 1997 1993
• mother adj./adv. ‘motherfucking’: postdating 1988
• SNEFU ‘situation normal, everything fucked up’: any evidence not from glossaries (have cites from 1941, 1942, 1943 only)