Fuccccckkkkk! Who knew that “fuck” was old as fuck?
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Wait, hold up. We are not just acting in a silly way. An English historian at Keele University recently found the earliest usage of the word “fuck.”
Dr. Paul Booth was researching old court records dating back to the 1300’s. That is where he found a man named “Roger Fuckebythenavele,” who was being named an outlaw by the court.
“This surname is presumably a nickname,” Dr. Booth told Medievalists.net. “I suggest it could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit’ i.e. a man who might think that was the correct way to go about it.”
Variations of the word “fuck” do make earlier appearances in the English language, but linguists say it was not meant as to be an offensive term.
A similar word appears in the form of the name “John Ie Fucker” as early as 1278, but experts say it was a derivative of the word “Fulcher” which meant “soldier.”
However, prior to Dr. Booth’s discovery, the earliest known usage of the actual word fuck as an obscene word was recorded in 1475.
The word was used in the poem Flen flyys and translated to “They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].”
