The following podcast contains explicit language.

From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater and I want to go there or go here.

Today, there's something I've been holding off on doing for about six months and you know what?

I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I want to do this one because I think it's genuinely interesting

and educational and somewhat entertaining. It's all of those things. It is high time that we discussed

the origin of the word known as, well, frankly, fuck, FUCK CK because it actually has a rather

interesting history or non-history and the very interesting timeline. One learns so much.

I want to share with you what's been up and what is up and what will be up with this little word.

Now, it doesn't come from some acronym. It isn't fornicating under consent of King or anything like that.

Anything like that that you hear is a street myth. I mean, you should associate it with heroin and rusting cars.

It's a street myth like Mikey from the Life Commercials, supposedly, killed himself by putting a whole

bag of pop rocks in his mouth and then chucking a can of Pepsi Cola and it just blew his head off

like he was in Breaking Bad or something like that. Well, same thing with these fornicating

under consent of King, anything that good is almost never true. We learn to expect that as we become

adults. And so it's a little more complicated than that. But you know, really, it's not just

complicated. It's a bit of a sort of, it's all kind of a mystery. Fuck comes out of the mist,

it's kind of like the town of Brighadun. You never quite know where it's coming from. I mean,

really, it should be pretty boring. So how's to take, you know, boring word, traces back to old

English and there was a word and it was a hoose. That was old English for house. So you think that

fuck would trace back to some old English word that would be, uh, fuk. There's no fuk in old

English. And so it leaves you kind of squirreling around trying to find out where it came from. So let's

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