A Plague Quarantine Gave Us The Word Fuck. What Word Will This One Create?
You can say it's not ladylike or that I have a potty mouth, but the truth is, my favorite word on earth to accentuate my feelings, by far, is FUCK.
I think its one of the most versatile, beautiful words in the English language (one author discovered 69 different ways to use fuck in the English language). It's the one magical word that just by its sound can describe pain, pleasure, hate, and love. It functions as a verb (transitive and non-transitive), a noun, and as an adjective.
Whoever created this astoundingly perfect word deserves a fucking award, for fuck's sake.
And now, we know who birthed the word and when.
According to the BBC, the document has been discovered in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh where a student of the University (George Bannatyne) used the foul language in a book he wrote while in a version of today’s coronavirus lockdown.
The fucking plague. 1568.
This might resonate with you. During the lockdown, with nothing to do, Bannatyne used his idle time to put together a book of poems called "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy," "an account of a duel between two poets said to have been conducted before the court of King James IV."
The dopest thing to me about learning of this discovery, other than the origins of the greatest word on the fucking planet, is the whole concept of a "Flyting".
According to the article:
Flyting is a poetic genre in Scotland—essentially a poetry slam or rap battle, in which participants exchange creative insults with as much verbal pyrotechnics (doubling and tripling of rhymes, lots of alliteration) as they can muster. (It's a safe bet Shakespeare excelled at this art form.)
And in this rap battle is where we find the first fuck given. "wan fukkit funling."
Hell ya. LFG.
Should this surprise anyone? The first fuck ever recorded was in Scotland, during a pandemic, over a rap battle?
This is actually perfect. I couldn't have drawn up a better origin story if I tried.
Given all of this, are we in for a new, groundbreaking curse word to be invented during this Pandemic as well? Maybe Manny Fresh will battle Kanye over Instagram Live and we'll come out the other side of this with a brand, spanking new obscenity.
That would be fucking something.