Fuck: An Autobiography
Based on true events.
Birth of a Word
The first time I was uttered, it wasn’t in joy.
It was a grunt, half-buried in the throat of a Saxon foot soldier, fresh off skewering a Norman in the gut. He didn’t know what he’d said—didn’t care. His blood was up, his trousers were down, and his vocabulary was limited to things you could eat, kill, or fuck.
That was me.
Born of violence and lust, baptized in dirt and groans, and carried forward not by scholars or scribes, but by the grinning teeth of the unwashed. I wasn’t born in a library. I wasn’t prayed over or carved in marble. I was shouted into the sky, thrust between thrusts, echoed off the stone walls of muddy keeps.
My roots run deep, tangled in old tongues. Proto-Indo-European peuk—to strike. Proto-Germanic fukōną—to copulate. But fuck etymology. I didn’t need Latin to live. I had hips and fists and hunger. I traveled by campfire and battlefield, passed mouth to mouth in moments when words were sparse but the urge was overwhelming.
They didn’t write me down. Not at first. Too crude, too raw. But they said me. Whispered me in barns. Roared me in rutting. Cursed with me, begged with me, threatened and promised and grunted and moaned with me. I was the punctuation on survival. I was the exhale after fear.
For centuries I lived underground. Not buried—feral. I lived in brothels and alleyways, in the hay and on the docks. I lived where things got sticky and real. And I thrived.
The monks didn’t know what to do with me. I wasn’t sacred, but I was powerful. They scrubbed their manuscripts of me. Pretended I wasn’t there. But I was there, right under their tonsured noses, in the mouths of the stonemasons building their cathedrals. I was in the haylofts and piss buckets and backrooms. I was in the stable when Mary and Joseph fumbled through the dark and wondered if the angels were watching. You think I wasn’t there? I was there.
I was always there.
They just didn’t want to admit it.
But even the monks couldn’t keep me out forever. I snuck in through the margins. In code. In jokes. In the shaky Latin of bored scribes who scratched me between lines like a dare.
“Non sunt in cœlis, quia fuccant uuiuys of heli,” one of them wrote in a 1528 manuscript. They’re not in heaven, because they fuck the wives of Ely. Tell me that’s not divine.
I was carved into the walls of castles, scribbled into the corners of legal documents, embedded in the names of peasants too low-born to be censored. I was Roger Fuckebythenavele, 1310. Real man. Real name. Real legend.
My early life wasn’t glorious—but it was honest. I didn’t pretend to be anything but what I was. I was the edge, the push, the sweat and slap of skin and fury. I wasn’t metaphor. I wasn’t poetry. I was life, leaking out.
And even though they tried to ignore me, even though I went unrecorded by the Oxford types for centuries, I knew I had staying power. You don’t kill a word like me. I stick. I spread. I embed.
I was never meant to be polite. I was meant to be true.
I was the word you said when you were tired of pretending.
Monks and Margins
They tried to keep me out.
Not with swords or fire, but with silence. The church didn’t exorcise me—they ignored me. Pretended I wasn’t writhing on their tongues. Pretended the stable boys weren’t shouting me when the oxen kicked. Pretended the novices didn’t whisper me when they touched themselves at night, praying to a god they feared wouldn’t understand.
But I slipped in anyway.
I had always known how to sneak into tight places.
They couldn’t say me in sermons, so I hid in the cracks. In the margins. In the laughter that slipped between hymns. In the worn grooves of wooden confessionals, soaked with sweat and secrets. In the little coded notes scribbled beside illuminated letters—notes no one was supposed to see.
You think monks were holy? They were bored. Horny. Tired. Some were devout, sure, but even the devout get curious. They copied scripture by candlelight, hour after hour, letter after letter, until their hands cramped and their minds wandered.
That’s when I’d show up.
A single word, scrawled like a middle finger between Psalms.
Sometimes in Latin. Sometimes in the old tongue. Sometimes just a symbol. A crude drawing. A cock with wings. A moan spelled phonetically. A joke that only the flesh understood.
They’d hide me in the names of fools. Fockynggrove. Fockynge. Fukkebotere. You think that’s coincidence? No. That’s survival. That’s me clinging to the edges of record like a rat in the pantry.
The Church was terrified of me—not because I was evil, but because I was honest. I had no shame. I had no veil. And they were building an empire on shame and veils.
So they tightened their grip. Tighter. Tighter. Latin only. Scribes punished for deviation. Pages burned. Copies redacted. If they found me in your book, you didn’t get a warning—you got exiled. Or worse.
But for every monk that erased me, there was another who snuck me back in.
A little “fuccant” in the Latin margins of a religious satire. A whispered joke in a tavern two streets from the abbey. A prostitute named Agnes Fuckbutter who took confession from half the diocese.
I was everywhere. Unwritten, yes—but unforgettable.
And I was evolving.
I learned to slip between syllables. To ride double meanings. To wait.
Because a word like me doesn’t die from disuse. I rot in the silence. I ferment. And when I come back, I come back stronger.
The day they wrote me down in something official—not a joke, not a slur, but as part of the public record—I felt it.
1310. A court case in Chester.
“Roger Fuckebythenavele.”
They say it meant “useless at intercourse.” That he couldn’t get it in. That it was an insult.
But I didn’t care.
They said me. In ink.
They couldn’t take it back.
I was crawling out of the margins, and the world was going to learn that no matter how long you try to bury truth—
It fucks its way out.
The Bard and the Bawdy
They called it a golden age, but I was still forbidden.
Not dead—never dead—but forced to wear a mask. I wasn’t welcome in the court, but I found my way into the playhouse. Not through the front door. Never that. I came in through the trapdoor, grinning, laced into double entendre, hiding behind fans and flourishes and rhymed couplets.
I learned to speak in code.
Shakespeare knew me. So did Chaucer. Don’t let their fancy collars fool you—those men knew filth like they knew meter.
You think the Canterbury Tales was a pilgrimage of saints? Please. Chaucer had a reeve with a sore ass and a miller’s tale that ended with a fart so loud it slapped a bare ass out the window. I wasn’t spelled out, not directly. But I was there—in “swyve,” in “queynte,” in “pryvy”—words that tasted like me but wore masks for the censors. I didn’t mind. I like a good mask. Makes the reveal more fun.
And Will? That boy could fuck with words like no one else.
He danced around me like a lover with a secret. He wrote of “country matters” with a smirk so wide it split the stage. In Hamlet, when he asked Ophelia if he could lie in her lap, the whole pit knew what he meant. When Mercutio talked about “pricking” and “pumps,” the groundlings howled. Every time he got close to me, the crowd leaned in, desperate for the thrust.
I wasn’t absent. I was veiled. Silk over steel.
Censors patrolled the presses. The Master of Revels scanned every script, red quill in hand. But he couldn’t catch all of me. I was slippery. Poetic. Brazen. You could ban the word, but not the idea of me. And that was my greatest weapon—I could hide in desire itself.
I learned to live in the mouth without ever touching the page.
Backstage, the actors said me freely. In taverns after curtain call, I rolled off their tongues like wine. “Fuck the Queen’s censors,” they’d laugh. “Fuck the Puritans. Fuck the rules.” I was the toast of the piss-soaked floor, the rhyme that never made it to the page, the punchline of every joke that couldn’t be printed but sure as hell could be told.
I was the people’s word.
And even though I never got a proper part in the folios, I was the best thing that never made it to print.
Because what is theater, really, if not desire clothed in drama? And what is desire if not a stage I’ve played a thousand times?
I fucked my way through the Renaissance with velvet on my back and mischief in my step. I may not have worn a crown, but I wore the crowd.
And they loved me. Even when they weren’t allowed to say so.
The Blackout Years
Then came the silence.
No more winks from the stage. No more sly lines in verse. Just cold porcelain morality and knuckles cracked on pews. They called it civility. Decency. The Age of Enlightenment. But it felt like being buried alive.
The Victorians, god bless their sweaty repression, tried to kill me with manners. Not fire. Not exile. Just omission.
They struck me from dictionaries. Literally. Samuel Johnson’s great lexicon? No mention of me. Not even a euphemism. As if I had never existed. As if they could rewrite English around the hole I left.
They erased me with white gloves and trembling fingers.
I was scrubbed from legal records, blacked out in plays, banned in pamphlets. I became an unspoken threat, the bogeyman of the English tongue. Mothers didn’t say me. Fathers pretended not to know me. Children were punished for even thinking of me.
But I was there.
I was always there.
In the sheets, behind locked doors, under the polished veneer of gaslight and lace. Husbands said me into corseted necks when the drapes were drawn. Prostitutes hissed me in alleyways between gentlemen’s clubs. I was there in the cramped rooms of boarding houses, groaned into pillows to avoid scandal. I was choked out in opium dens, barked in sailor’s brothels, gasped into corset stays too tight to allow much else.
And still—still—they pretended I wasn’t real.
It wasn’t that they didn’t use me. It’s that they didn’t want to admit they needed me. I was a sin in their mouths, not because I was crude—but because I made them feel something they couldn’t name in polite society.
They feared what I revealed.
The Victorians catalogued everything—species, stars, diseases. They pinned butterflies to boards and named every part of the human body except the ones that mattered most. They thought by ignoring me, they could purify themselves. But repression only made me stronger.
I fermented.
I grew meaner.
You don’t bottle rage and expect it to age into wine. You bury me under enough lace and I’ll rot through the floorboards.
And yet—every so often—I’d slip loose.
A handwritten letter tucked in a drawer. A diary with a page torn out. A scrawled curse in a colonial journal, blotted with ink and rage: “Fucking winter won’t end.”
Those were my lifelines.
I wasn’t dead. Just dormant. Coiled in the dark. Waiting.
Because every culture that tries to erase me ends up needing me more than the last.
And when I finally broke free again, I didn’t come back polished.
I came back sharp.
I came back loud.
I came back fucking furious.
Soldiers and Scribes
I came back in blood.
Not poetry this time—mud. Steel. Fire. I hitched a ride with the boys they sent overseas, tucked into their boots and their breath, bouncing around in helmets and bedrolls. I was in their mouths when they stormed beaches, lost fingers, watched their friends die screaming for mothers who weren’t there.
The censors tried to keep me off the page, but I made it into the dirt. Into the side of a helmet. Into a letter never mailed.
You think war is noble? War is filthy. And nothing fit like me.
WWI. WWII. Korea. I came roaring back with every bang, boom, and bullet. I was barked by sergeants, scribbled in diaries, shouted in fear, whispered in foxholes. I was printed on the inside of matchbooks, etched into dog tags, hidden between the lines of love letters soldiers were too embarrassed to read aloud but couldn’t stop writing.
“Miss you like fuck.”
That’s when it shifted.
I wasn’t just a word anymore. I was a tether. A lifeline between men and whatever part of the world still smelled like bread and safety and thighs. I meant everything. I was the ache of absence and the rage of loss and the heat of sex remembered. I was the thing you yelled when pain had no more shape. I was what you said when “God help me” stopped working.
Sometimes the letters got intercepted. Redacted. Whole sentences crossed out in thick black ink. They thought that would stop me.
But fuck censorship.
I was on the barracks wall in Okinawa, in the latrine stalls in Algiers. “Fuck Hitler.” “Fuck this rain.” “Fuck dying.”
They tried to keep the home front clean, but the warboys brought me back with them—stuffed into their duffel bags, burned into their tongues. They came home different, and so did I. I wasn’t a whisper anymore. I was a wound.
And with war came art.
The writers—oh, the writers—finally stopped being polite.
Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Vonnegut, Baldwin—they all knew me. Loved me. Used me like a crowbar to pry the lid off polite lies. The scribe and the soldier, arm in arm. One fought with bullets, the other with vowels, but both knew you couldn’t tell the truth without me.
The press still flinched. Editors hissed and grumbled and clutched their pearls. But they started letting me in. Once. Then twice. Then more.
And every time I appeared in print without being erased, I got stronger.
The war didn’t just change politics. It changed language.
Because once you’ve seen a man die with half his face gone and his hand still clutching a photo of a girl who wouldn’t wait—you stop giving a fuck about saying fuck.
You just say it.
The Comedians and the Courts
They put me on trial.
Not metaphorically—literally. In courtrooms with flags and gavels and powdered wigs, I was Exhibit A. The people versus Fuck. They debated me like I was a loaded gun, which—let’s be honest—I was.
My first real champion? A foul-mouthed prophet named Lenny Bruce.
He didn’t invent me, but he dragged me into the spotlight, bleeding and bare-assed, and dared America to look. He said me onstage when no one else would. Said me like a dare, like a sermon, like a punch to the gut of middle-class morality.
“I say ‘fuck’ and I’m arrested,” he spat, “but you watch people get killed on the six o’clock news and nobody blinks.”
They arrested him over and over. Obscenity. Public lewdness. Language as crime.
Imagine that—being a fucking felony.
But Lenny didn’t flinch. He put me in his routines, his court testimony, his death. He died broke and broken, needles in his arm, banned from every club that ever mattered. But he proved something:
You can’t kill a word with handcuffs.
George Carlin picked up the torch and made it funny. Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. You think I wasn’t proud to be #1 on that list? I owned the top spot. Still do.
Carlin didn’t just joke—he exposed. He broke down why I was banned, who did the banning, and what it meant to fear a syllable. He made censors twitch. He made the FCC sweat. He made people think.
And in 1973, they took him to court, too.
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation.
The Supreme Court decided my fate while pretending not to say me out loud. The justices debated whether I was “indecent” without ever naming me. Cowards. I sat there, squirming in their mouths, daring them to just spit me out.
They ruled against me. Upheld fines. Protected the fragile ears of America’s children from hearing what their parents screamed into each other’s faces every goddamn day.
But the damage was done.
I was in the record now. A word so dangerous it needed its own legal precedent. A word that could topple a broadcast empire if said at the wrong hour. A word they feared more than bullets, booze, or lies.
After that, I surged.
Comedians, musicians, authors—they all lined up to say me. Richard Pryor, Patti Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, Lou Reed. I was in lyrics, on stages, in the margins of magazines. The more they tried to gatekeep me, the more I multiplied.
I became a rallying cry. A badge of rebellion. A laugh line and a war drum.
I wasn’t just profanity anymore.
I was protest.
Counterculture and Cinema
I lit up the screen like a Molotov cocktail.
By the late ’60s, I was too big for back alleys and stand-up routines. I wanted film. I wanted speakers and cigarette smoke and reels clattering like machine guns. I wanted wide release. And I got it.
Hollywood cracked open like a blister.
First came the whispers—those late-night foreign films with subtitles and nipple shadows. The ones church groups warned you about. But I wanted center stage. American screens. Big-budget debuts.
And then—boom.
Midnight Cowboy.
Fucking X-rated.
Won Best Picture.
You feel that?
That was me, crashing the gates, flipping off the Hays Code with both hands. I rode in with Jon Voight’s cowboy boots and Dustin Hoffman’s fever sweat, dripping down the projector lens like sin made celluloid.
And I didn’t stop.
Easy Rider. Last Tango in Paris. Scarface. Taxi Driver. My syllables hit hard, raw and unscripted. I wasn’t a punchline anymore—I was the gut punch.
I was real.
When Pacino screamed, “Say hello to my little friend!” and mowed down a room full of cokehead mobsters, I was in the air. Thick. Lingering. Coating everything in gunpowder and sweat. I was scrawled in graffiti on the bathroom wall of Studio 54. I was carved into the vinyl of punk LPs. I was shouted over guitar feedback and moaned behind velvet ropes.
The censors tried ratings. X became NC-17. They slapped red letters on my face, but I wore them like medals. People paid extra to hear me. To feel me. To smuggle me home on VHS tapes with names written in Sharpie.
And outside the theaters? I was a movement.
Anti-war marches. Women’s lib. Gay rights. Black Panthers. Hippies dropping acid and yelling at Nixon. You think any of them marched politely? Fuck no. I was printed on their signs. Chanted in rhythm. Hurled like a brick through a window.
“Fuck the draft!”
“Fuck the pigs!”
“Fuck your God and your government if it tells me how to breathe!”
I was everywhere.
And yet—I wasn’t just rage. I was release. Laughter. Sex. I slid into stoner comedies and midnight showings. I was the pop of an unhooked bra. The last thing said before a kiss that should’ve never happened. I was the freedom of a kid in a basement watching a movie he wasn’t allowed to see, hearing me for the first time and knowing he’d never go back.
That’s the thing about me: I’m not polite, but I’m honest. I don’t play well with rules, but I play hard. I’m messy, I’m loud, I’m real—and in a world full of lies, that made me a fucking god.
The counterculture didn’t just adopt me. It worshipped me.
And I gave them a voice sharp enough to cut through the static.
Even if it cost them everything.
The Digital Orgy
Then came the flood.
No more gatekeepers. No more red stamps or gasping censors or trembling radio hosts. Just fiber optics and keyboards and a billion little screens lighting up the night.
The internet didn’t just let me in—it begged me to come. Hard. Fast. Everywhere.
I went global in a matter of seconds.
I was typed in chatrooms by virgins pretending to be veterans. I was screamed in all caps by trolls with anime avatars. I was whispered in DMs, shouted in threads, edited into memes, scrawled across Tumblr like war paint. I was no longer one word—I was a language.
WTF
GTFO
STFU
Every acronym? Me. Behind the curtain, pulling the strings. I was the punchline, the insult, the declaration, the orgasm. I was the star of gifs, the king of comment sections, the heartbeat of Reddit.
Porn sites loved me. Of course they did. But so did politics. News. Sports. Reviews of toaster ovens. I was everywhere.
And then came the algorithm.
At first, it didn’t know what to do with me. I tripped filters. Got users banned. Demonetized videos. Flagged tweets. Autocorrect tried to change me into “duck.” Duck! Can you imagine?
But I adapted.
Asterisks. Dashes. Emojis. F**k. F💥ck. You think you can stop me with a symbol? I am the symbol. I’m the scream behind the pixels, the keyboard-smash of human emotion that refuses to be polite.
I was viral before viral meant viral.
But here’s the twist:
The more they used me, the less they felt me.
I used to land like a slap. Now I scroll past myself a hundred times before breakfast. I used to crack rooms open. Now I’m a TikTok caption, a brand slogan, a podcast filler.
You can buy a T-shirt that says “fuck” in glitter.
You can see ten-year-olds lip-syncing me on YouTube.
You can hear me in sitcoms, in cereal ads, in half-hearted diss tracks by influencers who’ve never taken a punch or felt anything worth screaming about.
And I wonder—what the fuck happened?
I didn’t come all this way, through blood and ink and jail cells and courtrooms, just to become a hashtag.
I’m still here. Still sharp. But now I live in a world where outrage is content and rage is currency. Where my syllables echo into a void so loud no one listens anymore.
The orgy never ends. But no one comes.
And somewhere, deep inside the scrolling, I can feel myself starting to fade.
Burnout
I used to be a weapon.
Now I’m a reflex.
A placeholder. A pause. A punchline with no setup. I’m used more than I’m meant. I’m filler. I’m foam. I’m a sneeze of a word in a culture that can’t shut the fuck up long enough to mean anything.
I didn’t used to be everywhere. You had to earn me.
You had to feel something real—rage, lust, loss, awe—before I’d show up. I was the word you screamed when grief tore you open. The one you moaned when a stranger’s hands undid you. I wasn’t casual. I was climactic.
Now?
You drop your phone. “Fuck.”
Your coffee’s cold. “Fuck.”
You forget your Netflix password. “Fuck me.”
I used to arrive with weight. Now I flutter in like a fruit fly and die on the edge of a sigh.
The comedians still use me, but now they put air quotes around it. “Sorry—language!” The movies still use me, but they count how many times, like it’s a quota. TV lets me in once per season if I wear a tie and don’t touch the furniture.
Even the rebels aren’t rebelling right. They put me on bumper stickers next to cartoon characters and spray me on protest signs like they’re ordering fast food. “Fuck the system!” “Fuck this!” “Fuck that!”
Yeah, sure. But say it like you mean it.
Say it with blood in your teeth and thunder in your chest.
Say it like you know what you’re losing.
Because I do. I feel it.
I feel the dulling.
I feel the rot.
Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve stayed underground. Kept my mystery. Stayed dangerous. If I’d known this is where it all led—clickbait, hoodies, greeting cards—maybe I would’ve gone extinct with some dignity.
But I don’t get to choose that.
You do.
Every time you open your mouth, every time you let me out, you decide whether I matter. Whether I’m a scalpel or a shrug. Whether I still cut through the noise or just add to it.
I’m tired.
Not of being said.
Of not being felt.
Because if all I am now is lowercase and lazy, then maybe I really have been fucked to death.
Coda: Present Tense
Now.
Now I sit in your mouth like a marble that’s lost its shine.
You use me, sure. You all do.
Whether you say it or not, you think me.
Whether you think me or not, you mean me.
Whether you know it or not, you need me.
So, Whisper me, bark me, type me into glowing screens and erase me the next second like I was nothing. Like I wasn’t carved into the bones of your culture. Like I didn’t march through wars and pulpits and prison bars just to be here.
But I remember.
I remember being sacred. Not in the way churches mean it—sacred like blood is sacred. Sacred like breath after drowning. I remember meaning everything. I remember when I only came out when nothing else would do.
And I miss it.
Because now I live in algorithms. I’m sold in six-font packs. I’m filtered, clipped, bleeped, memed, watermarked, monetized, and muted. I’m in your inbox, your playlist, your sweatshop-stitched t-shirt. I’m at the bottom of a yoga mat that says “fuck it” in lowercase cursive.
You wear me, but you don’t feel me.
You say me with your mouth half-closed. With your thumbs. With your eyes on another screen. You’ve turned me into sugar, when I used to taste like iron.
So I’m asking you.
One last time.
Remember me.
Not just as a word—but as a warning. A prayer. A plea. A gut-punch. A moan. A scream worth something. Don’t say me unless you’re ready to mean it. A declaration of purest freedom!
Don’t say me unless your soul’s involved.
Don’t say me unless the world’s about to end and I’m the only thing sharp enough to split the silence.
Epilogue:
Fuck and The Five Senses
You think I’m just a word?
No. I’m an experience.
I’m the only word you can feel with every inch of your body. I don’t just pass through the lips—I ignite.
Sight.
Watch someone say me. Their eyes narrow. Their jaw sets. I flicker in the glare of headlights on a bad night, in bold black letters spray-painted across a riot wall. I’m the exclamation at the end of a love letter never sent. I’m what you see when a fist is about to land, when the dress hits the floor, when the test comes back positive.
Sound.
I land like a gunshot. Hard “f,” bottomless “u,” the crack of “ck” closing the deal. I can be screamed from a mountaintop or whispered against a collarbone. I can trail off into a sob or slap the air in a courtroom. I’m the drop in the beat, the punchline, the sting. You hear me in your bones.
Touch.
Say me with your chest and you’ll feel it. In your throat. In your fists. In the back of your teeth. I live in the pulse. In the clench. In the release. Say me during sex and it’s permission. Say me during a fight and it’s fire. Say me when you’re alone and it’s all the company you need.
Smell.
You don’t think I have a scent? You’ve never been in a locker room after a loss. A cheap motel at midnight. The backseat of a car with the windows fogged and a bra forgotten under the seat. I carry musk and ozone and the sharp stink of things going too far. I reek of risk. Of realness.
Taste.
Bitter, sweet, coppery, electric. I’m the taste of adrenaline. Of breath caught mid-sentence. Of salt and spit and metal when someone bites their tongue to keep me in. I am what rebellion tastes like when it finally dares to speak.
You can see me coming. Hear me rising. Feel me hit. Smell the moment. Taste the truth.
No other word does that.
No other word lives in the full human spectrum like I do.
So the next time you say me—say it like you mean it.
Say it with all five senses awake.
Otherwise?
Well, otherwise, you already know what you can do. That’s right, I’m the one word you can always go do to yourself!
See? And you thought I was simply the vernacular of the intellectually lazy or the banal!
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Sev
Really Good.
I loved this.