The Earliest Known Appearance of the FWord (1310)

"But alas, my lit­er­ate friend, you have the mis­for­tune of liv­ing in the age of Twit­ter, Tum­blr, et al., where the favored means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­sists of ready­made mimet­ic words and phras­es, pho­tos, videos, and ani­mat­ed gifs. World lead­ers trade insults like 5th graders-some of them do not know how to spell. Respect­ed sci­en­tists and jour­nal­ists debate anony­mous strangers with car­toon avatars and work-unsafe pseu­do­nyms. Some of them are robots."

"Indulge in bawdi­ness and rib­aldry. You may notice that you are doing no more than writ­ers have done for cen­turies, from Rabelais to Shake­speare to Voltaire. Pro­fan­i­ty has evolved right along­side, not apart from, lit­er­ary his­to­ry. T.S. Eliot, for exam­ple, knew how to go low­brow with the best of them, and gets cred­it for the first record­ed use of the word "bull­shit." As for anoth­er, even more fre­quent­ly used epi­thet in 24-hour online commentary?-well, the word "F*ck" has a far longer his­to­ry."

"Not long ago we alert­ed you to the first known use of the ver­sa­tile obscen­i­ty in a 1528 mar­gin­al note scrib­bled in Cicero's De Offici­is by a monk curs­ing his abbot. Not long after this dis­cov­ery, notes Medievalists.net, anoth­er schol­ar found the word in a 1475 poem called Flen fly­ys. This was thought to be the ear­li­est appear­ance of "f*ck&quot"

Respect for decorum, propriety, eloquence, precise diction, and polished public letters persists alongside the rise of social media platforms dominated by prepackaged memes, photos, videos, GIFs, and catchphrases. Political figures and professionals increasingly trade blunt insults and terse online attacks, often from anonymous or pseudonymous accounts, sometimes generated by bots. Embracing profanity and ribaldry aligns with long-standing literary practices tracing back to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and T.S. Eliot. Obscenities like “bullshit” and “f*ck” have deep historical roots, appearing in medieval marginal notes and 15th-century poems, demonstrating profanity’s enduring presence across centuries and media.

Read at Open Culture