Summer nights create strange thoughts. Earlier tonight I saw a little piece of TV entertainment dealing with the Swedish language, and a moment after that I was examining the etymology of one of the most famous words of the English language. I mean, of course, fuck (sorry, asterisks are taboo on my blog). It's amazing how consistently a word this old - used in English for at least 500 years and probably much longer - could remain virtually banned for such a long time. The Online Etymology Dictionary says fuck did not enter dictionaries until 1965.

Nothing is more refreshing than a modest daily dose of obscenity, don't you think? The story continues as a collection of fun little anecdotes :

In 1948, the publishers of "The Naked and the Dead" persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism fug instead. When Mailer later was introduced to Dorothy Parker, she greeted him with, "So you're the man who can't spell 'fuck' " [The quip sometimes is attributed to Tallulah Bankhead]. Hemingway used muck in "For whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). The major breakthrough in publication was James Jones' "From Here to Eternity" (1950), with 50 fucks (down from 258 in the original manuscript). Egyptian legal agreements from the 23rd Dynasty (749-21 B.C.E.) frequently include the phrase, "If you do not obey this decree, may a donkey copulate with you!" [Reinhold Aman, "Maledicta," Summer 1977]. Intensive form mother-fucker suggested from 1928; motherfucking is from 1933. Fuck-all "nothing" first recorded 1960. Verbal phrase fuck up "to ruin, spoil, destroy" first attested c.1916. A widespread group of Slavic words (cf. Pol. pierdolić) can mean both "fornicate" and "make a mistake." Flying fuck originally meant "have sex on horseback" and is first attested c.1800 in broadside ballad "New Feats of Horsemanship."

So today's popular discourse of sexual heroism has replaced the horse with a plane, and it seems imagination has certainly not increased in all other relevant areas either. Somehow those legal agreements from ancient Egypt sound much more morally binding than ones written in convoluted modern language.

Anyhow, what made me look into this was the Swedish word slöfock, 'a lazy or slow person, sluggard, slouch". The first part, slö, means "indolent, apathetic". Fock stems from the verb focka, which used to denote a brisk to-and-fro movement. No wonder, then, that the noun came to refer to the male organ.

The very common and versatile Swedish word fack, of course, despite its pronunciation being virtually identical to the English fuck, means nothing of the kind. I don't have much information on the precise customary usage of slöfock in Swedish, but I doubt that all users of the term are aware that they are in fact talking about a drooping penis. 13:00