My younger brother has Down Syndrome, and I’ve fought against “retard” as an insult all my life. My grade school classmates may be the only 40 kids from the 70s who didn’t use it.

During the run of “Life Goes On”, “retard” seemed to go away as an insult for a while, but in the past few years it’s had a serious resurgence, along with “‘tard” and the increasing popular “fucktard”.

It always hurts. Always.

Upon reading, I tend to lower my opinion of the poster exponetially.

So, thanks for the wonderful OED-influenced post and clarification. It’s amazing how the redaction of a single letter makes so much difference.

(I’ve been giving this new word an unhealthy amount of thought for the last few days and I just have to share.)

Someone (ACM?) asked what “fuckard” has that is different from “fucker”. Here’s why I think it’s different.

“Fuckard” to me is, like “drunkard”, a description of a state of being. A fuckard is someone who is innately fuckardly and will always be fuckardly no matter whether he is fucking at any particular time or not.

A “fucker” on the other hand, like “drinker”, could merely refer to the person’s current activity. A fucker may cease to be a fucker the moment he stops fucking.

Also, I am with both Sara and Alphabitch on the general meaning of the word. To me “fuck” has always (like “screw” and “bugger”*) resonated more as a term of violence, domination and conquest, than one of sexuality. However, because the word *is* used to refer to sex as well as to violence etc, I prefer not to mangle the two and tend just to steer clear of these words whenever I have sufficient self-control. It does have a satifying ring to it though, at times. And I have a soft spot for “fuckwit”.

* I have a feeling that “bugger” does not have quite the same amount of feeling attached in the UK as in US.

Finally, on meaning, to my mind the state of being a “fuckard” is one where the person’s attitudes and beliefs are informed largely or only by reference to his ideas about fucking (in the domination/sex sense). For example, one who objectifies women on a daily basis - whether by leering at porn or by claiming property in someone else’s uterus or by following any one of the myriad other paths of fuckardliness - is a true fuckard. The same effect might be achieved by the term dickferbrains, because that part of their anatomy is indeed what they are using to think with.

I will now draw breath and relurk, happy in the knowledge that several days after the original post nobody’s going to read this anyway so it won’t matter if I’m making no sense.

I have never, ever, anywhere used the F-word so many times in one post!

I know about two words in Italian, one of which is “pugnalare”, which means “to stab”.

seeing how that is etymologically related to “to fuck” really gives me the willies.

I’m afraid I’m with Twisty on this one. And if that means I have to defy the OED, so be it. On accounta the OED does define the word as “to copulate,” etc. (and notes rather too parenthetically for my taste that when it’s used as a transitive verb it’s rarely used with a female subject - as in chicks can get fucked but we hardly ever get to fuck — to which I say ‘fuck that shit’).

But I will both disagree and digress a bit here:

The documented usage and etymology of ‘fuck’(current meaning intact) goes back as far as Middle English and, while the OED does not substantiate any history prior to that, you can follow the word way way back (in a purely speculative manner, of course) to before the 1st Germanic Sound Shift & Grimm’s law & all that to an early Indo-European or even Proto-Indo-European root ancestor (not documented, but reconstructed as pug- (seen nowadays in English in such words as ‘pugnacious’ and ‘impugn’ and ‘pugilist’ (via Latin pugnare or some such).

Which is to say that the word has deep linguistic roots that suggest fighting, assault, battery, dispute, and so on. Deeply hostile stuff, and some etymologies suggest that it was initially used in one or another of the early Germanic languages as a coarse substitute for some now-obsolete or perhaps more prissy term for copulation, and eventually those older meanings were replaced by the current one.

Wikipedia covers this ground pretty well here (with links to Grimm’s Law & all that stuff for those who are interested).

Most definitions and discussions regarding the current usage of the word devote much more space to the deeply hostile and/or otherwise simply negative aspects of the word [e.g. fuckwit: coarse slang (orig. Austral.) (derogatory). A. n. A stupid or contemptible person; an idiot. B. adj. Stupid, idiotic.].

In my musing last night about whether it’s possible, here in the patriarchy, to have one set of meanings (the sex is good and beautiful facets) without the other (the angry mean hostile facets), I think that I have to say no, it’s neither possible nor particularly desirable. I would argue that each derives its particular power from the other.

Multifaceted indeed.

Don’t give it up, Sara. Life is complicated.

Firefall: Big Bang vs. Steady State linguistics made my coffee come out my nose. Thanks for wrecking my keyboard. I’m more a steady state gal myself.

Pinko Punko: There are as many words as you want. I promise you won’t run out.

NicaKnit: if you want further info/conversation about why combinations of “fuck” etc. are so easily used in new epithets, email me at epithets@alphabitch.org - I think I have some old papers on the subject somewhere.

I can also set you straight on why that usage (e.g. fan-fucking-tastic, etc.) isn’t technically an infix, though it does function like one.

People pretend words only mean what they are trying to say in that particluar context, but if you look at usage and etymology it doesn’t hold water.

I can find hundreds of contexts in which fuck means intercourse, anyone would recognize it as such. Additionally, when it is used derogatorally, you can substitute any number of sexual terms for the word and the meaning would not change.

Illustrative is the old joke of the boy who wondered what the Electrical company did to the town when it “serviced” them. He found out when he climbed a barn wall and saw what a stud bull did to a cow when he “serviced” her. In this context, it does not matter which perjorative you substitute for intercourse, it carries the same meaning.

This is what we teach new generations: What people do when they have sex is like what they do when they cheat, abuse, or otherwise take advantage of another.