About the most popular English -language cursing of four letters, it is often said that it is a reduction in the phrase fornication under consent of the king (“fornication for the permission of the king”). We decided to check if this is so.

There are a lot of decryptions for this letter: Fornication under the commander of the king (“Blood on the command of the king”), Fornication under Crown KnowLEDGE (“Blood from the knowledge of the crown”) and already mentioned above the Fornication Under king Either the king gave the subjects permission to have sex, or he stimulated to do it after the plague that ruined the country, or this inscription adorned the stigma of prostitutes. And many others, very fantastic versions. One even got to the educational site Begin-english.ru.

Forced to disappoint: the earliest such decryption was dated to the 1960s. And this is not surprising, because the abbreviations became fashionable only in the 20th century. So here we can speak at best about the betronym - a new decoding of an existing word.

At the same time, one indisputable version of the origin of the word Fuck does not exist. Many linguists consider it convincing his connection with such verbs as the German ficken (“copulate”), the Dutch Fokken (“multiply”), as well as the Norwegian Fukka and the Swedish Focka with a similar meaning. The point of view prevails that the English word appeared later.

The first mention of the word Fuck in English written sources is attributed to 1310–1311 years. In court recordings, the name of a certain Roger FuckEbyThenavele has been preserved. Most likely, it was a nickname of a man who tried to enter into a vicious connection through the navel (navel - English), no matter what it means, for which he was convicted.

Other experts believe that the anonymous poem of the 15th century Flen Flyys, in which an obscene line is represented in an encrypted form, laid the beginning of the victorious procession of the word in literature. And the cause of encryption was not at all the obscene expression - just a line accused of very specific monks of violating celibacy.

Well, the adjective Fucking (“damn”) is first found on the fields of the manuscript of the Treatise of Cicero “On Responsibilities”, rewritten in 1528. In this place, the scribble was overlaid by an abbot with a strong word of the abbot, apparently entrusting him with such a tedious work.

The word entered the lexicon not only of ordinary people. In 1965, US President Lindon Johnson used it, addressing the Greek ambassador: “To hell with your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is flea. Greece is a flea. If the two fleas are then biting an elephant, he will simply slam them with a trunk. ”