A great discovery has been made by Dr Paul Booth, a fellow of Keele University. It is a 14th-century example of fuck. We might think the word Anglo-Saxon, but it’s hard to find written examples before the 16th century. Chaucer never uses it. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a poem from 1500 in the surprising form gxddbov. That is a cipher which, by shifting each letter back a place in the alphabet, reveals fuccant, a dog-Latin third person plural of the verb.
Dr Booth was an honorary fellow of the University of Liverpool until he called the institution ‘bastards’ for its architectural shortcomings. This was held to be against its ‘Social Media Compliance Policy’. So much for academic freedom. Anyway, Dr Booth had plenty of other words that he might have chosen. One was a personal name that he discovered in the records of the County Court of Chester in 1310 and 1311.
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