Читать книгу F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word - Rufus Lodge - Страница 7

Some of our rudest words can be traced back to those dirty Anglo-Saxons, who seem to have had an anal fixation a full millennium before this crucial stage of child development was first identified. Not content with beating each other over the head with cudgels and writing Beowulf, they made several fundamental contributions to our native tongue. It’s the lads in helmets whom we have to thank for such earthy terms as ‘shit’, ‘turd’, ‘fart’, and ‘arse’ – sparking the 1,300-year-long obsession with potty language that has made us the great nation we are today.

Enter the French. William’s conquerors may have invaded the country, killed our king, immortalised the battle in a wide-screen (tapestry) epic, and written down all our assets in a big book with a gloomy title; but apart from that, what did the Normans ever do for us? Well, they taught us how to ‘piss’: we must have been desperate to go by the time they arrived.

After the French, things became more confused: the natives were too busy cooking onion soup and composing chansons to keep track of what was happening to England’s glorious tongue. Those scholars who love wallowing around in the pre-history of foul language, and then have to compile entire dictionaries of more respectable words to disguise their bad habits, are generally agreed that some of our most traditional curse words, such as ‘bum’, ‘cunt’, and ‘twat’, have origins that are, to say the least, rather muddy. Some people would like to place the blame on visitors from Scandinavia, Holland, or Germany, but they all have alibis for the night in question, which leaves us none the clearer.

So it won’t surprise you that none of these filthy foreigners is prepared to own up and admit responsibility for creating the king of our four-letter words. So let’s examine what we know for sure. ‘Fuck’ (or ‘fucke’ or ‘fuk’ or ‘fukk’ – the same people who thought the Earth was flat weren’t very good at spelling, either) was definitely a part of our language before 1598, which is when John Florio, the original Englishman abroad, compiled his Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes. He defined the Italian verb ‘fottere’ as meaning ‘to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy’. Florio soon became the English tutor of Queen Anne of Denmark, and it’s intriguing to wonder how many of those words he taught her before she made any state visits to the British Isles (and also whether he told her what they really meant).

When I said ‘our’ language above I was being deliberately vague. The prime exponents of the F-word during the sixteenth century were the Scots, which won’t surprise anyone who’s ever watched a Celtic vs. Rangers derby at close quarters. Indeed, they are responsible for all of its pre-Florio appearances on paper. But nowhere even in the distant history of the English tongue is there any suggestion that ‘fuck’ first landed in Scotland, and then surreptitiously made its way south, quickly corrupting Newcastle and Liverpool before finally reaching Eastbourne in about 1973. So we can only assume that, for obscure social reasons, Scots were less embarrassed about using the already taboo word than their English counterparts.

None of which helps us to discover where we – Scottish or English – picked up such a dirty word. Given that our Anglo-Saxon heritage brought us so much earthy filth, it would be easy to imagine that ‘fuck’ came from the same source. But the Angles and Saxons seem to have been too busy farting to worry about copulation. So, with no evidence of ‘fuck’ pre-dating the French, is it possible that William’s lads didn’t just conquer us but also perverted our vocabulary? Here there is the partial evidence of the French verb ‘foutre’ (sometimes rendered in the past as ‘foutra’), which comes from the Latin ‘futuere’ – both describing the action of sexual congress.

That might explain the ‘fu–’ of ‘fuck’, but where could the ‘–ck’ come from? Enter the historians who stake the case for the German influence – specifically the verb ‘ficken’ (meaning ‘to strike’, a theme that crops up in several English sex verbs between 1400 and 1800). But though logic might suggest that ‘fuck’ was therefore a French/German hybrid, words don’t evolve that way, with a polite sharing of letters from two different sources to create something new: like the armies that spoke them, languages tend to fight to the finish, knocking out their opponents and establishing themselves on their vanquished turf with all their letters intact.

In any case, there’s a third strand to consider: from Scandinavia. Old Norse pretty much ruled the roost over all of that territory in the years after William the Conqueror shouted out ‘Harold, is that a bird or a plane?’ and the king of England got an arrow in his eye. And in Old Norse there’s a verb that both sounds and looks like a close cousin of our own faithful F-word – ‘fukja’, meaning ‘to drive’ (as in the sense of chasing things around, rather than getting stuck in a six-lane contraflow on the M1). Two words of Scottish dialect, ‘windfucker’ and ‘fucksail’, seem to confirm that ‘fukja’ did cross the North Sea to Aberdeen and Dundee, although neither of them has the slightest hint of profanity about it.

But wait: here’s a fourth contender, from another land entirely. Not content with creating Edam cheese, the inhabitants of Holland concocted Middle Dutch, a collection of related dialects that left their mark on Germany as well. Hiding among the multiple terms for clogs and windmills (though very few for mountains) was ‘fokken’ – a verb that meant exactly what it sounds like, widening its terms very quickly (by linguistic standards) from a word for ‘thrust’ to one that implied one person thrusting something into another.

Case closed, then? Not entirely. Because while the Dutch were busy ‘fokken’, those Scandinavians were keeping themselves warm during the long Nordic winters by developing their own tongues (and not like that). At around the same time, the word ‘fukka’ cropped up in Norway; and ‘focka’ in Sweden, where there was also a noun, ‘fock’, for the male organ.

So what seems to have happened is that what became known as Great Britain was surrounded by foreigners, all of whom were inventing their own words for sexual intercourse while the Brits were still swapping fart jokes. And during the fifteenth century, one or more of those illegal immigrants crossed the waters and started showing our innocent lads and lasses that there was something in life even more fun than having a poo. ‘What’s that called?’ asked our medieval Gavin and Stacey. And so Britain fell in love with an imported word that, like German lager and Indian food, has become so central a part of our culture that we prefer to think it was ours from the beginning.