December 03, 2007
Don't swear so much, you prick-eating bastard! In 1897 major league baseball owners met to discuss swearing on the field, and decided they were against it. So they created a set of "Special Instructions to Players." The recently unearthed document (soon to be sold at auction) describes, in detail, exactly the kind of language they didn't want their players using -- language you haven't heard since Deadwood went off the air.
This is pretty much the best thing in institutional swearing since the times when the first thing a scrabble player received showing up to a tournament was a list of 167 obscene words that had been expurgated from the official scrabble players dictionary.
If this is real there's some pretty significant antedating in there. Language Logger Geoff Nunberg runs down the history of swearing in this article -- he cites an earliest usage of "Go Fuck Yourself" as 1920.
According to the highly enjoyable OED entry on fuck (note: most people won't be able to see this sorry -- if you're a UT student use the proxy), the earliest cite for fuck as an abstract profane verb (that is, fuck /not/ used to mean copulation) is 1922.
2. Used profanely in imprecations and exclamations as the coarsest equivalent of DAMN v. 5.
1922 JOYCE Ulysses 587 God fuck old Bennett! 1929 F. MANNING Middle Parts of Fortune II. xv. 379 ‘Fuck the bloody thing!’ he said fiercely under his breath. 1955 S. BECKETT Molloy 69 Fuck the son of a bitch. 1959 F. KING So Hurt & Humiliated 151 ‘Suppose any of the neighbours were to look out and see them.’ ‘Oh, f{em} the neighbours!’ ‘Really, Henry!’ 1969 ‘J. MORRIS’ Fever Grass ii. 24 Why don't you..tell whoever it is to go fuck themselves?
"Fucking" used in a non-copulation sense ('as a mere intensive') goes back much further, to mid-1500s:
Hence {sm}fucking vbl. n. Also as ppl. a. and adv., used esp. as a mere intensive.
a1568 A. SCOTT Poems iv. 55 Thir foure, the suth to sane, Enforsis thame to fucking. 1680 ROCHESTER Poems on Several Occasions (1950) 30 Through all the Town, the common Fucking Post, On whom each Whore, relieves her tingling Cunt. 1707 [see FRIGGING vbl. n.]. c1888-94 My Secret Life III. 228 This house had but eight rooms, and two mere closets to let out for fucking. Ibid. VIII. 307 She was..a magnificent bit of fucking flesh, but nothing more. 1893 FARMER & HENLEY Slang III. 80/2 Fucking..Adj., A qualification of extreme contumely. Adv. Intensitive and expletive; a more violent form of bloody. 1922 JOYCE Ulysses 580 I'll wring the neck of any bugger says a word against my fucking king.
James Joyce really seems to be the pioneer in this field.
OSPD3 / David Phillips: 1
Virginia: 0
"What, poofter is a word?" - The State of Virginia
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Also enjoy this Baseball Think Factory post on the subject which devolves into a collection of bawdy baseball-related limericks.
posted by mrflip at 05:52AM CST on December 03