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War

Fuck in wartime

The word was rare in print and confined to the rough end of speech until 1914. Two world wars, a generation of conscription and a century of barracks turned it into everyone's word.

The Partridge rule

John Brophy and Eric Partridge, in Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914–1918 (1930), reported that the word was so constant in the trenches that it had become "a mere warning that a noun is coming". Their most quoted observation is about its absence: an order given without it was serious. "Get your fucking rifles" was routine; "get your rifles" meant an emergency. The word had become punctuation, and its removal was the signal. Brophy and Partridge could not print it, and used a dash.

The First World War also put "fucking" into the mouths of millions of men from every class and region who had never used it at home, and sent them back with it. The officer class learned it from the ranks; the ranks took it into the factories. Robert Graves noted in Goodbye to All That (1929) how thoroughly the word had penetrated a public-school regiment.

The Second World War: acronyms

The American forces of 1941–45 coined the word's most durable compounds, and did it in the form of acronyms so that they could be said in front of officers and printed in newspapers.

Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), about the Pacific war, was the novel that tried to put the soldiers' language on the page and was made to write "fug"; James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951) got further. The war is also why the word became American as much as British: the GIs who were "overpaid, oversexed and over here" left their vocabulary behind.

Vietnam

The Vietnam-era US Army produced the next layer: FNG (fucking new guy), FIDO (fuck it, drive on), clusterfuck for a botched operation, REMF (rear-echelon motherfucker) for staff who never saw combat, and FTA (fuck the army), which became the title of a 1972 anti-war revue toured by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland to towns near military bases. Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977) and, later, Full Metal Jacket (1987) fixed the sound of it. Ronald Lee Ermey's drill-instructor monologues in the film, mostly improvised from his own service, are the reference performance of the word as an instrument of military discipline.

Since

Iraq and Afghanistan added fobbit (a soldier who never leaves the forward operating base), embrace the suck and a renewed unfuck yourself, and the wars were the first fought in the age of the helmet camera, which recorded the language as it was. The British Army's own vocabulary runs on the same word with local additions: threaders, gopping, jack, and a use of "fucking" between every other word that the Partridge rule still describes.

Why the military

Three reasons, roughly. Armies are large groups of young men under stress, the demographic that swears most in every corpus. The word marks belonging in an institution that depends on it. And in combat the ordinary reasons for restraint (children, strangers, superiors who care) are absent, while the reasons for release are everywhere. Every fighting force in history has had its equivalent; the English-speaking ones simply had a word that was ready to hand.