#etymology of fuck

[prokopetz]

Fact: The earliest reliably dated use of the phrase “fucked up” appears in the court records of a US Navy court-martial case from 1863; the way the phrase is used suggests that its meaning was already well known at the time, but this is the first known printed record of it that we can confidently put a date to.

Additional fact: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is set in 1897.

Conclusion: It would not anachronistic for your Dracula fanfic to have a character describe the Count as a fucked up old man.

#media #literature #dracula #bram stoker's dracula #fandom #fanfic #history #language #linguistics #etymology #swearing #sherlock holmes could also say 'fucked up' #he wouldn't #but he could

[feralgeese]

she gets me she just does

#kassandra #cassandra of troy #kassandra of troy #greek mythology #anne carson #greek women #tagamemnon #speaking of #fuck agamemnon #apollo #etymology #cannot believe i forgot that tag

[7roaches]

not canon at all but i had a vision

#my art #art #adventure time #adventure time fionna and cake #simon petrikov #finn the human #marceline the vampire queen #trans #(all of them btw) #sorry minerva fans i got lazy and hate drawing chairs #entire c what the fuck #when i type entire it gives me the craziest headlines ever in suggested tags like watch this #fairlife confirms it has discontinued entire lineup of products – customers are saying ‘omg stop playin’ #anyways yeah this entire thing is kinda rushed cause i had to go to class #the etymology is off but shhhhh #do i have anything else to say? #i had a milkshake twice today so that was cool #im going fishing again next week so ill draw actual petrigrof fishing before then #should i tag this? #blood tw #yeah #thats all love you bye

[vidavalor]

"Help may come from an unexpected quarter."

We can take apart all of God's intro to Good Omens in 1.01 at some point if people continue to be into my word nerdy posts but I want to look at just one part of it right now-- the end of the horoscope-- and how it applies to S2 in a way that I think helps to explain The Final Fifteen. That part is:

Help may come from an unexpected quarter:

A coming is an arrival. Gabriel's unexpected arrival is the start of S2 and 2.01 is entitled "The Arrival." One of the meanings of a quarter is that it is a coin-- specifically, that it is American money worth 25 cents. There is not a British monetary equivalent to the quarter-- just as that, if we go by accents, there is only one "American" angel in a sea of "British" ones and that "American" angel is, of course, Gabriel.

The quarter is the coin inserted to play a song on an American jukebox. Gabriel's miracle of a constant state of "Everyday" on The Resurrectionist Pub's jukebox makes him basically a never-ending roll of eternal quarters. So, in this way, Gabriel is the unexpected quarter, right?

So, let's keep going with this and see what we can dig out of the words in the end of the horoscope that God read to us in 1.01 that might relate to what going on in 2.06...

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. "Hired help"/"The help" can refer to both to those who clean and to those who cater...

...and also to assistant shopkeepers, in general, whose goal is to try to be as helpful as possible:

Remember how the opening shot of Good Omens in 1.01 is the word WAR but then it expands out and shows us that we were looking at the word WAR within the word WARNING? This tells us that, right from the get-go, the show suggests that we take a close look at its language-- in particular, the roots of words. How they evolved, their histories and how they are related to other words aka their etymologies.

Our first rule of language in GO, per the opening of the show, is to always look for words within other words-- which I'm sure Anthony J. "(d)awning of a new age" Crowley would also suggest is always a fun idea. There can be a lot of deeper meaning in this but there also can just be a ton of humor as well. Case in point:

😂 UneX-PECted QuARTer:

More seriously now, though...

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. Hell: From the Old English and the Dutch hel...

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. Our unexpected quarter is Gabriel. The Metatron makes Gabriel a fallen angel, causing Gabriel to make a run for it, and starting a series of events that lead to Hell coming for Aziraphale:

Help may come from an unexpected quarter:

Maggie: Well, I'm going to my shop to sleep behind the counter... unless you need some help.

Nina: *asks Maggie to go get her 27 different kinds of milk/creamer, all of which come in... quart containers*...which Maggie does. When she returns, Nina and Maggie make the coffee ordered by "The Metatron," which would have been unable to be made without the quart of oat milk.

Help may come from an unexpected quarter...

Homophony: Quarter/Courter.

Courter: A suitor; one who courts. Like The (Apparent) Big Floating Head who shows up with a body for the first time that we've seen-- in a suit-- and courts Aziraphale at Marguerite's... the same place where Crowley was trying to have a date with Aziraphale the day before. All of which was kicked into motion by The Metatron casting Gabriel down-- and taking from Gabriel his signature, much-beloved suit (and leaving him in his "birthday suit" as a result.)

Making Crowley an angel again would undermine the entire Heaven/Hell system. All the demons would want to challenge their own status because if Crowley could, why couldn't they? It would actually cause it all to collapse and there's no way The Metatron would ever allow that... which is a big clue that this ain't The Metatron:

Aziraphale's being courted by The Devil.

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. A quarter of an hour is, as we know, 15 minutes. (God also referred to "almost a quarter of an hour" earlier in her opening monologue in 1.01 before saying "unexpected quarter" later on during it, which I take as a suggestion to always look at the multiple meanings of words in the show.)

The unexpected quarter of an hour = The Final 15 of 2.06. Crowley & Aziraphale fade away from the final splitscreen during the credits at just about Minute 52, I believe. Fifteen minutes prior to that is the moment that Aziraphale leaves the bookshop with "The Metatron" aka Satan:

Help may come from an unexpected quarter...

The unexpected twist-- and realization-- for Aziraphale of: "We call it 'The Second Coming'."

Note also what we said about come meaning arrival earlier... If 2.01 started with an episode called "The Arrival" and featured Gabriel coming to and arriving at the bookshop, if what is said here is to be believed and there is a "Second Coming" that is coming... then someone is going to end up like 2.01 Gabriel.... only, 2.01 Gabriel was the Supreme Archangel when he was cast down, which is what kept him from being sent to Hell. Aziraphale has no such political power.

Help may (and Help may) come from an unexpected quarter:

God sent unexpected quarter Gabriel as help-- speaking through him to remind Aziraphale of Job and of when God said, in Bildad's summary: "Satan and his diabolical ministers may destroy everything Job owns, no questions asked. Hugs and kisses, God."

God wanted Aziraphale to remember when She let Satan take what supposedly belonged to Job and Sitis as a test and he and Crowley worked together to stop it. She wanted him to remember when he thought he'd fall for thwarting her but She couldn't have been prouder because Job and Sitis were not the only ones really being tested-- Crowley and Aziraphale were. They did the right thing and they protected each other and the innocents around them in the process. That is what they should have been doing in S2 in the present.

Aziraphale did not heed the warning, though, so God stood aside and let it be that Help may come from an unexpected quarter as a result...

A quarter = 1/4th. Aziraphale's four, interwoven rings in the magic shop in 1941 that take out the house of cards from the bottom, symbolizing he and Crowley and Gabriel and Beez, who are going to take out the Heaven/Hell system. A quarter of our Ineffable Quartet, then, is Crowley. He is the most unexpected quarter there is when it comes to Aziraphale falling to Hell and Hell comes for Aziraphale with Crowley's help but against his will:

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. The paralleling and foreshadowing of Crowley dragged to Hell in front of the Gabriel statue in 1827, leaving Aziraphale on his own for a time. Sets up the reverse of that at the end of 2.06.

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. A quarter is a coin, like the sixpence and the farthing were in 1941. In "a blink of an eye", only one of the coins remained-- the farthing had vanished. The farthing is decorated with a wren. The coin with the little bird on it is the one that disappears, foreshadowing "no nightingales."

In 1941, the coin trick led to the magic shop... which led to The Bullet Catch... which led to a different representative of Hell coming for Crowley and Aziraphale and arriving at a different door, after Aziraphale had persuaded Crowley to perform a different type of dance with him in public... Furfur at the dressing room door paralleling "The Metatron" at the bookshop door. Crowley sitting to the side both times; some confusion, at first, over who the visitor is...

...but help may come from an unexpected quarter and it did for Crowley in 1941 because Aziraphale actually is a pretty decent magician and he saved the photo from Furfur (and so saved both of them) the same way that he does his coin tricks.

From the line preceding 'help may come from an unexpected quarter': You may be vulnerable to stomach upsets today...

Vulnerable: In a position to be attacked or harmed. Now, split it up: Vul. Ner. Able. (or A Ble.) Also contains: Vu and Rab.

Vul (in Czech): Both an ox and an idiot. "You idiot! We could have been us." Aziraphale, you're being tempted for real by The Actual Devil this time...

Vu: French for "seen," as in deja vu, which means "already seen" and describes the feeling of having lived through the present once already before. No one is recognizing the being at the bookshop door for who he really is. Also, we've seen these conflicts before-- this is Aziraphale's same daily round of negative thought cycles. At the center of those thought cycles...

Rab: Homophone for Rabb: Term used in Arabic to refer to God as "lord" or "master." The Voice of God may be The Lord and Master of Language on Good Omens but She doesn't actually want anyone to live in her name. She's trying to get them all to go live like whales already.

Ble (in French): Wheat. It is, technically, a fruit that is cultivated as grain. In Hebrew, wheat is referred to as khitah, which is a pun on the word khet, which means sin. The wheat berry has the same fruit structure as an apple, which is one of the reasons why it has been theorized by some humans to be what it was that Adam and Eve ate in The Garden of Eden that led to their fall. Interesting that falling is being mentioned, no?

Ner (in Swedish): Down; headed in a downward direction. Well, that's a great sign... 😂

Ner (in Old Irish): A boar, which is a wild pig. See: Grice, mentioned by Muriel. (A separate meta on Grice is linked at bottom of this meta.) Boar is a homophone for Bore and Boor. Bore is the root word of bored, which is for one of the reasons Crowley said in 2.01 why Aziraphale might call him and is also a Crowley euphemism for horny (see: other meta linked at the bottom of this meta.) A boor is an insensitive person.

Able: To be capable-- to have the power, means, skills and opportunity to do something. Aziraphale is capable of being a boor and of being tempted and of sin and of heading in a downward direction. He is also Able: clever, intelligent, adept... which he will need to get out of the mess he's gotten himself into.

Also: Able: Evolved from the Latin words habere and habilis, meaning, respectively: to hold and handy. (See: below gif. TW for The Kiss TM)... and also: "What's that lovely human expression? Hold that thought!"

Stomach: Originated, in part, from the Greek stoma, meaning mouth. Yeah, 2.06 brought some mouth-related upset for Crowley and Aziraphale (and us lol)... just a bit...

Stomach upset/Upset stomach: Something which causes you to have trouble eating. An upset stomach is probably the best possible way to refer to a temporary Crowley & Aziraphale breakup since food = sex in Ineffable Husbands Speak. For more on that, see: er... honestly... most of my blog lol.

Upsets = Upsets. Some upsets over what's Up. Flip it around, though, and it's... Set Ups. Up = Heaven and it's all a Hellish set up. Aziraphale has been... what's that lovely American expression?

This upset is also a setup and a setup? Is a trap. The Hastur-Aziraphale paralleling doesn't end with their clothes/hair:

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. There are four locations present at the end of 2.06: The Elevator (in motion), Heaven, Earth, a and Hell. We've left Earth, gotten into the elevator, and the button pressed was Heaven, so... the unexpected quarter that may come in S3 is Hell.

But, also in S3...

Help may come from an unexpected quarter. Post-fly, there's two of them, so, unexpected quarter now = Ineffable Bureaucracy.

Grice meta:

Bored/Board meta:

#ineffable husbands #good omens #good omens meta #aziracrow #good omens 2 #crowley #aziraphale #good omens theory #etymology #ineffable bureaucracy #the archangel fucking gabriel #lord beezlebub #ineffable wives #maggie good omens #nina good omens #the metatron #final fifteen #good omens final fifteen

[sadclowncentral]

also did you fucking know that they are called irrational numbers because they cannot be expressed as a ratio (like you can't divide something and get to that number) unlike rational numbers which got their name that way. that makes so much more sense that what i was thinking, which is that everyone agreed that they just make less sense than the other numbers. i cannot believe i went my whole life i assuming we were speaking about numbers in a derogatory manner and i just accepted it. i mean in my defense. they are fucking shifty

#which does make me wonder about. the etymology of the word irrational #what fucking pissed of mathematician flung that at somebodies head huh

[thepringlesofblood]

GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT I FIGURED IT OUT

one of the Archbishop’s titles from her very beginning intro card:

AVATAR OF DEUS-PA’ZUUL

*MEGA SPOILERS UNDER CUT*

DISPOSAL

DEUS-PA’ZUUL = DISPOSAL

LIKE GARBAGE DISPOSAL

THAT’S WHERE THE STEEL BLADES COME FROM

#holy shit holy shit #not the most exciting thing this ep i know #but i have been working on an 'etymology of calorum' post and i could not figure out deus'pazuul #bc of course deus is latin for 'god' #so i was just lookin up 'pa'zuul' #i cant fucking believe it #so much going on #i am PSYCHED #am going to be vibrating with anticipation for a full week now #trw #trw spoilers #the ravening war spoilers #the ravening war #d20 spoilers #d20 #dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #original post

[eatsleepcrap]

you know what's fucked up?

that the words isle and island have absolutely no relation to each other

#etymology #linguistics #it fucks me up to this very day #cursed linguistic facts #false cognates #within the same single language!

[bigbroadvice]

Is it possible to be pan but have a preference of gender/“see” gender? I just learned about pan vs Omni and I guess Omni fits better but I love the pan flag and colors and more people know about it. Idk it’s a little confusing

Alright, getting on my etymological soap box here.

The point of words is to communicate ideas. They work based off shared understandings that shift through time and between cultures. Most people do not fit entirely into the definition of one word because words are simplifications of concepts and people are complex. Specialized terminology can be a useful shorthand so you don’t have to spend a couple paragraphs describing all the intricacies of a concept every time, but they’re never going to be absolutely completely accurate all the time. Like when you call something ‘red.’ Yeah, it’s pretty much garrenteed whatever it is is not entirely red, it’s probably got some orange or purple or whatever else hues in it, and even those are just categories made up by humans anyways. But calling it red is a workable enough simplification so other people get the gist of what you’re talking about.

If you want to describe yourself as pansexual because it gets the basic idea across to most people, that perfectly fine. If you want to clerify by using the word omnisexual around people who would understand the difference, that’s great too. If you’d rather not, that’s also fine. Nobody is entitled to the complete description of all your feelings and experiences. If them understanding you as pansexual works just fine for you, then go ahead and use that word.

There’s always going to be more precise and accurate microlabels. You can use those if you like, or you can choose not too. Most of the time the way I describe myself is simply “queer as fuck” because it gets the general idea across and I have fun saying it 😎 When I want to be a little more specific I say pan because it lets people know I like everybody. I also percieve gender though, so maybe it’d be a more accurate to describe myself as omnisexual? But I also don’t think the ways I experience attraction are exactly the same as other people so maybe it really ought to be greyomniace? Is that even a word? (Trick question, of course it’s a word cuz I just used it as one and that’s all words are, sounds we string together to represent ideas) I could probably go down the rabbit trail of a hundred different sub labels if I really wanted to get precise about it, but I don’t really care to, and that’s fine. I’ve got a good enough understanding of me, and the terms I use give other people a good enough understanding. Purpose accomplished.

#big bro advice #lgbtq #queer #queer as fuck #pansexual #omnisexual #grey ace #acespec #aspec #microlabels #etymology #lgbtq community #queer community

[atreefullofstars]

Boy I sure do love unfollowing people for ice-cold takes about transandrophobia. Anyway here’s your periodic reminder that the oppression olympics is a shitty game that benefits only the oppressors, and it takes nothing away from trans women if trans men are allowed to acknowledge the unique form of transphobia they face and create a word for it, but it sure takes something away from trans men if they AREN’T allowed the language to describe their experiences.

#not a man trans or otherwise #but that's the point: we need to FUCKING STAND TOGETHER you absolute garbanzo #'it implies misandry exists!!!' piss entirely off #bi implies two but we've been over the meaning of bisexual a zillion times #humans are capable of clarifying etymological ambiguity #except you apparently #the insistence that trans men can't POSSIBLY be uniquely oppressed because they're men #is PART of the oppression of trans men #just like bi erasure and saying bi folks have straight privilege is part of biphobia #and ace exclusionism and denial of aphobia is part of aphobia #none of these groups are straight enough for the Straights and they therefore don't benefit from being #supposedly in your estimation closer to straight

[cycas]

The etymology of the word 'Fuck' on Etymonline is a wild ride, and I highly recommend it.

One highlight: Flying fuck originally meant "sex had on horseback" and is first attested c. 1800 in broadside ballad "New Feats of Horsemanship."

#etymology #brought to you by me wondering how old a concept 'the sex talk' might be #And what the Old English might say #I did not answer this question but I Learned Things #“They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of [the town of] Ely.” #smal-swivinge men “men who copulate infrequently”

[velaraffricate]

trying to come up with a word for "to understand" in my conlang has ground everything to a halt help

#gonna fuck around a bit more on google translate and wiktionary until inspiration strikes #if any of yall wanna share the etymology of this verb in yalls conlangs feel free to.......... #ramblings

[abeautifulblog]

me at the club: So did you know that Beowulf is -- although never outright stated to be -- repeatedly coded in symbolism that contemporary audiences would have understood to mean that he was, in fact, a were-bear?

#and it turns out that people at the club would rather fuck than hear about Beowulf #smdh 😔 #and don't @ me about the etymology of his name #frankly that is the least-convincing argument

[tahthetrickster]

i just learned that tungsten has the chemical element symbol of W because the element used to be called wolframite, a name built from the german "wolf rahm", meaning "wolf's cream". idk if you knew this already but i figure you'd enjoy that fun fact

WOLF'S CREAM?????

#wikipedia says we're not even 100% sure why they named it that #but they think its because wolframite eats the fuck out of tin. which they were like 'oh like wolves with sheep' #girl what kind of fucking etymology is this 😭😭😭 #AND WHAT DOES CREAM HAVE TO DO WITH ANY OF THIS #(jk wikipedia also says an alt translation is 'wolf's froth' so like. their spit?? or like rabies or smthg??)

[glitchlight]

Lamiagirl drinking a mint tea: this just feels natural to me for some reason!

#why the fuck is it called lamiaceae?? #the etymology is completely orphaned #probably some equivalent of calling aomething witches nettle and eventually just called its family the 'witch family' but ugh #botany is frustrating sometimes

[coquelicoq]

In talking about Chaucer (p. 74), I said that, in general, puns and verbal connections of sound were unimportant and not to be sought out; and now, you will say, I have been using them to explain cruces in Shakespeare. Alas, you have touched on a sore point; this is one of the less reputable aspects of our national poet. A quibble is to Shakespeare [Johnson could not but confess] what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind.... A quibble was for him the fatal Cleopatra for whom he lost the world, and was content to lose it. Nor can I hold out against the Doctor, beyond saying that life ran very high in those days, and that he does not seem to have lost the world so completely after all. It shows lack of decision and will-power, a feminine pleasure in yielding to the mesmerism of language, in getting one's way, if at all, by deceit and flattery, for a poet to be so fearfully susceptible to puns. Many of us could wish the Bard had been more manly in his literary habits, and I am afraid the Sitwells are just as bad.

William Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity, ch 2 pp 100-101

i'm sorry this is so fucking funny. that pathetic loser shakespeare who loved puns so much it cost him everything, except of course his status as the most famous, most read, most immortal english-language author of all time. but everything else, he lost and it's all because of how weak he was to resist a pun :/ pouring one out for my sad little girly man who could have had it all if only he was better at writing, the thing he is the most famous guy in the world for.

even empson, who disagrees with johnson that shakespeare "lost the world", is like, too bad our favorite poet is susceptible to the thing that made him famous :/ really tragic that the guy whose wordplay we've been talking about for 300 years likes wordplay :///

also i can't get over writing a book about the types of ambiguity and NOT INCLUDING PUNS?? sorry but puns are ambiguous! that's where their juice comes from! imagine liking ambiguity so much you write a book about it but never mention puns except to dunk on them. imagine being a POET and POETRY CRITIC who looks down on sound-based ambiguity! could not be me!!

#puns are a device just as much as any other kind of ambiguity! this value judgment is hilariously nonsensical to me #why are puns bad but other ambiguities aren't? you can't just call them feminine and expect me to be like oh okay in that case #next time my dad makes a pun i'm just going to sigh sadly about his lack of decision and willpower #what a feminine pleasure in yielding to the mesmerism of language i will say. not very manly of you dad :/ #i'm annoyed too because one of the types of ambiguity he respects is when one word has multiple meanings possible #in the context of the text. but that is in a sense a kind of pun. he says puns are homophonic but guess what #when one word has multiple meanings another way of saying that is that those are different words that happen to be spelled the same #that is then homophonic ambiguity! aka a fucking pun!!!! #i'm not just quibbling over the exact definition of a pun. i'm saying the boundaries are THAT porous i don't see how you could possibly #like semantic ambiguity as long as the spelling is identical but suddenly think it's facile when the spelling/etymology is different #that's not at all based in rational thinking but he's over here like 'the mesmerism of language is for girls' #pot meet kettle much??? #poetry #ambiguity #puns #shakespeare #my posts #there was one other thing i was gonna say what was it. OH YEAH. he also was saying a few pages back that spelling was completely #unstandardized in shakespeare's time...so then why does it matter??? #okay and one more thing. he keeps trying to convince me that various verses are syntactically ambiguous if you ignore the punctuation #okay. if we're ignoring punctuation we must be hearing it orally. which means we also don't know what spelling was used!!!! #i think probably he would say he cares more about etymology than spelling. words with different meanings that are etymologically #related are allowed and manly but words with different meanings that came from different roots are a weakness to be avoided #like i'm sorry dude but that is so arbitrary. and you are just cutting yourself off from an immensely rich body of possible ambiguities #by disallowing that kind of wordplay. why would you want to do that????

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

hey everyone i got bored at work today and compiled a list of very silly and yet very real missouri place names because BOY do we ever have some. these are mostly ones i can make rude jokes about but i think there's a little something in here for everyone

#you might be tempted to go “wendy there's no way x is real or all of these are real. you snuck some fake ones in there” #to which i say “fucking BET?” #i was neck-deep in wikipedia/maps/wayback machined historical society websites #not all of them are extant but they are all real #missouri #sure is a state i live in #anyway i'm going to roundly ignore the election results until tomorrow when they're all in bc Several Fears #i learned some fun localish etymology from this. soooo many knobs