> The word "fuck" also sounds similar to fork, frolick, fickle, fake,
> flake, and fink, etc. All these COULD have in common that which is
> forked (as in a choice, or conjunction). The term as it might appear if
> examining the ontology of the letters themselves (as if the letters
> represented various relationships, like a forked tree or a broken branch
> might represent the f and the k, or whatever) and these relationships
> survied as the words spelled similarly, would indicate that "fuck"
> represents a certain combination of relationships-- and none of this
> describes how the term might come to be vulgar.
>
> What is more likely is that the term described a common relationship
> between objects of particular configurations and was used widely by
> common people... thus the term came to be "vulgar" (meaning common or
> mean... average)
While letting Brett's idiosyncratic free-associations on phonology go by,
I will make a comment on the last paragraph. This is actually a fairly
common pattern in the history of English: the common people referred to
something by an Anglo-Saxon term, and the upper classes referred to it by
a Latin-derived French term, and both ended up in the huge vocabulary of
Modern English, with different connotations or applications. For
instance, the words for common livestock (pig, cow, chicken, etc.) are
Anglo-Saxon, reflecting the language of the commoners who cared for them,
while the words for the meat of various aniamls including livestock and
game are from French (beef, venison, pork, derived from the French terms
that apply to both the animal and the meat), reflecting the language of
the nobility on whose tables they ended up. Similarly, our common swear
words (fuck, shit, cunt, etc.) are Anglo-Saxon in origin and were the
terms in ordinary usage among the peasantry, while the more polite terms
are from the Latin for the same things.
--Eva