OFF: Swearing

[Carl E. Anderson]

On fre 5 dec 1997 11.05 +1000 "Peter Sondergeld" <p.sondergeld at QUT.EDU.AU>
wrote:
> At 10:35 AM 3/12/97 +0000, you wrote:
>>I was led to believe it was circa 13thC and was an acronym for Fornicate
>>Under Command of the King.
>
> I heard a long time ago, typical schoolyard sex education I suppose,
that it
> was an acronym to describe the criminal charge For Underage Carnal
> Knowledge. Then again, I heard a lot of things in the schoolyard...

     Wow, I thought Jon had been taking the piss!
     It's not an acronym :)

> I found
> the following book here at work and the author says that the word itself
in
> its current form is only traceable to 1503, though his explanation of
its
> possible origins goes on at length about various modern and ancient
> languages - too long to summarize here.

     I think the earliest reference is older, but I would have to check.
I worked through a lot of this stuff trying to figured out some medieval
obscenities for a piece of fantasy fiction ...

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
Dept. of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, & Celtic
St. John's College, University of Cambridge
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/