F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word. Rufus Lodge

the fray, American soldiers have been known to call this a ‘Chinese fire drill’, bringing the planet’s most populous nation into the target area. The Chinese phrase for the same cock-up is probably ‘American election’.

       For entertaining use of the abusive phrase ‘Go fuck a goat!’, listen out for Mooj’s appearance in the 2005 movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin.

      HORSE: My introduction to the internet, in the days when it took about twenty minutes for the dial-up connection to take hold, and another hour or two for each page to download, involved my selecting something entirely harmless in what passed for a search engine in 1997, pushing ‘Enter’ – and being rewarded with what we would now call a ‘gif’ of a woman and a horse getting to know each other in a surprisingly intimate way. After which I was not at all surprised to hear that horses were being dragged into the arena of sexual innuendo, with young men boasting that they had ‘fucked a horse’, not in the Biblical sense, but as an expression of whole-hearted enjoyment of their climax. The saucier the filly, the better.

      LARK: ‘Fuck this for a lark,’ people used to say when they were faced with something too tedious to deserve their attention. That was, of course, a lark in the sense of a frolic, a game, a jolly good time, rather than the garden bird otherwise known as the skylark. None of which prevented Sir Laurence Olivier, no less, from adopting a very literal, bird-centred French translation of the phrase during his stewardship of the National Theatre: ‘Baisez cela pour une alouette’.