A choice curse

The salted butter of English

Fuck, I find, is pretty much the most pleasurable word. Whether it’s casual, emphatic, passive, idiomatic. Fucking chill. Fuck the police. This fucking guy. What the fuck?

Cousins include the Middle Dutch fokken, “to thrust,” and the Swedish dialect fókka, “to copulate.” According to linguist Kate Wiles, fuck was rare before the fifteenth century, back …