File under “Word, F-”: The gutter word for sexual intercourse is not an acronym.
My second-favorite moment of television blunderdom" occurred during a documentary retrospective, aired on network TV during the ’90s, of the Woodstock Music Festival, which was staged in the ’60s. At one point, the documentary cut to Country Joe McDonald, titular head of musical group Country Joe McDonald & the Fish (he was the one who wasn’t the Fish). Onstage, Country Joe shouted to the crowd: “What’s that spell?!” A roaring response
” My first favorite moment? It has nothing to do with English other than the fact that English was being spoken/not spoken during the incident. But now that I’ve mentioned it, I can’t not tell it: Andy Williams (your grandma’s slick crooner and schmaltzinator of TV Christmas specials, most famous for “Moon River”) was hosting an Emmy Awards program (different times, obviously). Stevie Wonder was going to sing on the program via satellite remote, but technical difficulties stepped into the live broadcast, and Stevie wasn’t responding to Andy’s cues. “Can you hear me?” Andy said. He tried that question a time or two by my recollection, and when he got no response, Andy asked Stevie, “If you can’t hear me, can you see me?” Because this is a footnote, I leave it to you to calculate the levels of inanity in asking a blind man who can’t hear you that question. (And my third-favorite TV blunderdom moment involves curmudgeonly sportscaster Howard Cosell, but I’ll have to wait until I write Everything You Know About Sign Language Is Wrong before I can tell that story’s story.
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Bill Brohaugh
rose from the half-a-million-plus flower-powered attendees. “What’s that spell?!” Another roar. “What’s that spell?!” A third roar.
What the editor/director/writer/whoever of this prime-time network documentary had not included in the broadcast, either by blunderdom or by sly and deliciously demonic irreverence, was Country Joe’s lead-in to the repeated spelling-bee question to the gathered listeners. “Give me an F/,” Country Joe had first yelled at Woodstock, and the Woodstockians had shouted “F!” in reply. Then, “Give me a U!” and “Give me a C!” and ... well, you can see where that was going. The documentary had picked up the legendary “Fish Cheer” when Country Joe was done requesting letters from the masses of responsive Vanna White wannabes. Therefore, right there on national broadcast TV, half a million people (minus those zoned out, looking for a bathroom or catching a nap) were yelling “Fuck!” And three times, no less.
Now, this is neither a spelling lesson (though it should be considering that the network, if I’m recalling correctly, was the abecedorial network ABC), nor is it a Federal Communications Commission propriety lesson. Instead, this is a lesson in concocted etymology. To explain, here are two sequences that Country Joe did not shout to the crowd:
C-Joe did not, for one, yell “Give me a ‘Fornication’! Give me an ‘Under’! Give me a ‘Consent’! Give me an ‘of the King’!”
Nor, for that matter, did C-Joe yell, “Give me a ‘For’! Give me an ‘Unlawful’! Give me a ‘Carnal’! Give me a ‘Knowledge’!” (He might have yelled that had he been backed up not by the Fish but by Van Halen, the band that released a 1991 album entitled For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.)
Such cheer-leading proclamations would have dumbfounded the assembled masses almost as assuredly as the etymologies attributing the formation of the nasty-word as an acronym dumbfound word historians.
You see, the word in question can’t be an acronym of such phrases as “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” if for no other reason than the word in question (starts with F, in case you’ve forgotten) is far older than acronymy as a neologic mechanism— the first tenet of the rules of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle. Other factors explain why, in this case, folk etymology and fuck etymology are synonymous (“Folk etymology and the horse you rode in on!”): Our nasty F-word has been spelled in variant ways over the centuries, which would have required our industrious acronym-imaginers to be facile creative geniuses to keep concocting phrases that supported the acronym-creation theory over the years. There’s fuk (“For Unlawful Knowledge”?— like knowing a state secret or something?), and fucke (“For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge Etc.”?) and Jukk (“For Unlawful Knowledge of the letter K”??) and my absolute favorite, fuck, from a seventeenth-century manuscript: “Which made him to haue a mighty mind To clipp, kisse, & to ffuck.”
What’s worse than the F-word? The FF-word, of course.