A federal appeals panel on Monday said the FCC could no longer slap indecency fines on broadcasters who accidentally allowed the word fuck on the airwaves, arguing that these days the word fuck is commonly used to express frustration rather than sexual obscenity. How did fuck and other words get so dirty anyway?

They were born that way, for the most part. Fuck has always been an offensive word, though its exact origin is unclear. It's related to words in Dutch, German, and Swedish, and the etymological meaning has to do with moving back and forth...

The first known evidence of the term is found in an English and Latin poem from before 1500 that satirized the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England. In the line "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk," the author replaced each letter of the unprintable words with the succeeding letter in the alphabet: "They [the friars] are not in heaven, since they fuck wives of Ely."* (Remember that the alphabet at the time was different, and that i was also j, v was also u, and vv was w. Thus gxddbov produces fvccant, a fake Latin word taken to mean "fuck.")

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