The First F-Word in the World

You are looking at one of the first written appearances of the f-word. (The other two contenders are a version in Scottish dialect and a Latin/English coded poem.) Written in 1528 by a monk-scribe in the margins of a book he was copying, this low-key graffiti artist was slandering his boss, the Abbot.

This small scribble is part of a bountiful body of evidence that the word “f*ck” did not come from a command by an English king to his subjects to have a lot of sex so that children would be born to repopulate the land after a plague. “Fornicate Under Command of the King” is what a lot of folks nowadays may have heard as the etymological origins of the term. But this is incorrect.

What this doodling does show, though, is a transition that happened in Early Modern England in ideas about obscenity. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, Medieval people used sexually vulgar language without blushing– there wasn’t a common idea that such words should cause a feeling of shame or taboo. But by the sixteenth century, this was starting to change. Dictionaries from Latin to English started avoiding words like “c*nt,” for instance.

This manuscript was a copy of the Roman orator Cicero’s _De Officiis_, which was a manual about moral conduct. How appropriate that the swear words should describe the Abbot (a man named John Burton, whose morals were apparently questionable) as a “f*cker.” Did the scribe mean that the Abbot was actually having sex? (A no-no for a monk, obviously.) Or was it a sort of general slander? We don’t know, but the idea of an exhausted employee complaining about one of his superiors remains universally relateable.

P.s. in terms of etymology, “f*ck” is related to Dutch, Germanic, and Swedish words for “to strike” and “to move back and forth.” If you were wondering.