Eff'n Deadwood

[SoonerBorn68]

So the TV's on & I'm really not watching it but Deadwood's on. I noticed the characters vollied the F word back and forth about 4 times in 4 seconds. I started counting & so far there's been 19 F bombs in the last 5 minutes. :eek:

This dude just reeled off a sililiquey (sp?) that included 13.

What gives? I'm guily of machine gun F bomb rants but this is just dumb.

[Mongo]

The F bomb is common place in the line of work we do, and you should be ****ing used to it. What got me more than the F bomb was the excessive amount of use of c*cks*ck*r. I dont think these words were invented until WWII.

[SoonerBorn68]

**** off, dip****. ;)

[Mongo]

:D

[GottaHavePride]

The F bomb is common place in the line of work we do, and you should be ****ing used to it. What got me more than the F bomb was the excessive amount of use of c*cks*ck*r. I dont think these words were invented until WWII.
Heh.



[****] is a very old word, recorded in English since the 15th century (few acronyms predate the 20th century), with cognates in other Germanic languages. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Random House, 1994, ISBN 0-394-54427-7) cites Middle Dutch fokken = "to thrust, copulate with"; Norwegian dialect fukka = "to copulate"; and Swedish dialect focka = "to strike, push, copulate" and fock = "[er, let's use "willy" - GHP]". Although German ficken may enter the picture somehow, it is problematic in having e-grade, or umlaut, where all the others have o-grade or zero-grade of the vowel.

AHD1, following Pokorny, derived "feud", "fey", "fickle", "foe", and "****" from an Indo-European root peig2 = "hostile"; but AHD2 and AHD3 have dropped this connection for "****" and give no pre-Germanic etymon for it. Eric Partridge, in the 7th edition of Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Macmillan, 1970), said that "****" "almost certainly" comes from the Indo-European root *peuk- = "to prick" (which is the source of the English words "compunction", "expunge", "impugn", "poignant", "point", "pounce", "pugilist", "punctuate", "puncture", "pungent", and "pygmy"). Robert Claiborne, in The Roots of English: A Reader's Handbook of Word Origin (Times, 1989) agrees that this is "probably" the etymon. Problems with such theories include a distribution that suggests a North-Sea Germanic areal form rather than an inherited one; the murkiness of the phonetic relations; and the fact that no alleged cognate outside Germanic has sexual connotations.



In plain English, this means the term's origin is likely Germanic, even though no one can as yet point to the precise word it came down to us from out of all the possible candidates.

[King Crimson]

i wouldn't sweat it. in the series Rome the word "broadcast" is used a couple times and the Romans didn't really have a concept of electronic mass communication i'm fairly certain.

[Okla-homey]

What got me more than the F bomb was the excessive amount of use of c*cks*ck*r. I dont think these words were invented until WWII.

I own a copy of a scholarly work authored by a respected historian and physician entitled "The Story the Soldiers Would'nt Tell...Sex in the Civil War" which includes period first-person accounts and Civil War soldier letters using that particular pronoun and pretty much every other "bad" word we use in modern society. It also features CW pron.;)

http://img464.imageshack.us/img464/2858/wwwwwwwwwimagedbag7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

I believe "Deadwood" is set in 1875 or so...maybe later. I'm not sure.Anyway, the dialogue doesn't use words not then in vogue among the "courser" class of folks of that era.

[SicEmBaylor]

I'm not impressed.
Patton once said any real gentleman should be able to swear for three minutes without repeating himself.

[TUSooner]

[old fogey] all people do on TV and in the movies these days is CUSS, There's nothing clever, no imagnation, no humor, instead its just cussin. Like a 4-year old saying "potty" to make the grownups chuckle [/old fogey]

I understood that the F-bomb did not really come into wide usage among even the profane classes until WWI (which provided many new and modern horrors to cuss about). But who knows?

[skycat]

I don't think the point is that the language is historically accurate. I think the point is that people spoke in a manner that was proportionally rougher than common usage at the time, and the show uses f-bombs and c-suckers to show us that dispararity in a way easy for us to pick up.

Note that there are several characters that never cuss, and others that cuss far more rarely than others.

And once you get past the dirty words, you start to notice that the dialogue is very deep and subtle, and infused with wit.

[King Crimson]

And once you get past the dirty words, you start to notice that the dialogue is very deep and subtle, and infused with wit.

the writing is fantastic, and sort of hillbilly shakespearean.

[GDC]

I thought the f-bomb came from the extended middle fingers and "Pluck You!" at the battle of Agincourt.

[skycat]

I thought the f-bomb came from the extended middle fingers and "Pluck Yew!" at the battle of Agincourt.

Fixed. And I think that's a myth.