» Common Misconceptions Explained
Highlights:
- The word “fuck” did not originate in Christianized Anglo-Saxon England as an acronym for “Fornication Under Consent of King”; nor did it originate as an acronym for “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”, either as a sign posted above adulterers in the stocks, or as a criminal charge against members of the British Armed Forces; nor did it originate during the 15th-century Battle of Agincourt as a corruption of “pluck yew” (an idiom falsely attributed to the English for drawing a longbow).[89][90][91]Modern English was not spoken until the 16th century, and words such as “fornication” and “consent” did not exist in any form in English until the influence of Anglo-Norman in the late 12th century. The earliest recorded use of “fuck” in English comes from c. 1475, in the poem “Flen flyys”, where it is spelled fuccant (conjugated as if a Latin verb meaning “they fuck”). It is of Proto-Germanic origin, and is related to either Dutch fokken and German ficken or Norwegian fukka.
- The forbidden fruit mentioned in the Book of Genesis is commonly assumed to be an apple,[308] and is widely depicted as such in Western art. However, the Bible does not identify what type of fruit it is. The original Hebrew texts mention only tree and fruit. Early Latin translations use the word mali, which can be taken to mean both “evil” and “apple”. German and French artists commonly depict the fruit as an apple from the 12th century onwards, and John Milton’s Areopagitica from 1644 explicitly mentions the fruit as an apple.[309] Jewish scholars suggested that the fruit could have been a grape, a fig, wheat, or etrog.[310][311][312] Likewise, the Quran speaks only of a forbidden “tree” and does not identify the fruit.
The most upsetting one was about the word “irregardless” which my friend says all the time, but we all tell him no such word exists:
- “Irregardless” is a word. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary states that, “The most frequently repeated remark about it is that ‘there is no such word.’ ”[87] According to Mignon Fogarty, this is an English myth. “You shouldn’t use it if you want to be taken seriously, but it has gained wide enough use to qualify as a word.”
