History of The Middle Finger

[Meehowski]

Wow.............

[method77]

is that true?

[Malicious Intent]

In England we use two fingers to swear at people. That came from the wars with the French. It was a crude taunt used to break the disipline of the lines - for the reason given above.

On the same subject: The salut comes from when the commanders lifted their visor to speak to the troops.

[Malicious Intent]

Wiki on "Fuck"

Early usage

The earliest reference appears to be the name "John Le Fucker", which John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins dates to 1278. What John did to earn this name is unknown.

Its first known use as a verb meaning to fornicate is in a poem titled "Flen flyys" some time before 1500. Written half in English and half in Latin, the poem includes the word fuccant, a hybrid of English root with Latin conjugation, disguised in the text by a simple code. It was originally written as gxddbov, and is decrypted by substituting each letter with the letter which precedes it in the alphabet (keep in mind the alphabet that was used at the time).

William Dunbar's 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" includes the lines: "Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit:/ Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."

While Shakespeare never used the term explicitly, he may have hinted at it in comic scenes in several plays. The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) contains focative case (see vocative case). In Henry V (IV.iv), Pistol threatens to firk (strike) a soldier, a euphemism for fuck.

There are some urban legends postulating an acronymic origin for the word. In the most popular version, it is said that the word "fuck" came from Irish law. If a couple were "Found Under Carnal Knowledge" they would be penalized, with FUCK as the crime. Other variants include the ideas that the word came from "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" or "Fornication Under Consent of the King." However, all these explanations are considered to be backronyms and hence recent inventions.

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Rise of modern usage

Fuck did not appear in any dictionary of the English language from 1795 to 1965. Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary (along with the word cunt) was in 1972.

In 1900, the Prince Albert Edward, Prince of Wales said, "Fuck it, I've taken a bullet" when he was shot by an anarchist while standing on a Brussels railway station.

The liberal usage of the word (and other vulgarisms) by certain artists (such as James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Lenny Bruce) has led to the banning of their works and criminal charges of obscenity.

After Norman Mailer's publishers convinced him to bowdlerize fuck as fug in his work The Naked and the Dead (1948), Tallulah Bankhead supposedly greeted him with the quip, "So you're the young man who can't spell fuck." (In fact, according to Mailer, the quip was devised by Bankhead's PR man and he and Bankhead never met until 1966 and did not discuss the word then.) The rock group The Fugs named themselves after the Mailer euphemism.

[Meehowski]

M.I.

Very interesting............

Mike

[slum_goddess]

thank you Meehowski and MI (i'm stealing these)

[KiwiCoromandel]

very informative..... :) :)

[moonglow]

Aha........that is a nice tidbit