"fuck"
(Word Origins)"Fuck" does NOT stand for "for unlawful carnal knowledge" or "fornication under consent of the king". It is not an acronym for anything at all. It is a very old word, recorded in English since the 15th century (few acronyms predate the 20th century), with cognates in other Germanic languages. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Random House, 1994, ISBN 0-394-54427-7) cites Middle Dutch _fokken_ = "to thrust, copulate with"; Norwegian dialect _fukka_ = "to copulate"; and Swedish dialect _focka_ = "to strike, push, copulate" and _fock_ = "penis". Although German _ficken_ may enter the picture somehow, it is problematic in having e-grade, or umlaut, where all the others have o-grade or zero-grade of the vowel. AHD1, following Pokorny, derived "feud", "fey", "fickle", "foe", and "fuck" from an Indo-European root _*peig2_ = "hostile"; but AHD2 and AHD3 have dropped this connection for "fuck" and give no pre-Germanic etymon for it. Eric Partridge, in the 7th edition of _Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English_ (Macmillan, 1970), said that "fuck" "almost certainly" comes from the Indo-European root _*peuk-_ = "to prick" (which is the source of the English words "compunction", "expunge", "impugn", "poignant", "point", "pounce", "pugilist", "punctuate", "puncture", "pungent", and "pygmy"). Robert Claiborne, in _The Roots of English: A Reader's Handbook of Word Origin_ (Times, 1989) agrees that this is "probably" the etymon. Problems with such theories include a distribution that suggests a North-Sea Germanic areal form rather than an inherited one; the murkiness of the phonetic relations; and the fact that no alleged cognate outside Germanic has sexual connotations.
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