(NSFW) -- JIC. Why is so much of English language profanity four letters long?

Obscenity emerged as a necessity for those with a limited vocabulary.

Maybe it’s just a way of keeping it simple. Like saying fuck eww! such a derogatory word. Which came into being from f fornicating u under c carnal k knowledge. How it came to be such a dirty word for situations I couldn’t tell you.

@AmWiser, you might want to check this site for other and I think more likely origins of the word.

@AmWiser I thought it was fornicating under consent of king, due tothe whole venerial disease thing. As I understood it, prostitues were required to be examined and after tey were pronounced clean they could operate; F U C K.
And I just wanted to point out that my favorites; cocksucker, fuck-a-doodle and; aaah go to hell, are all way more than four letters!

“anus” is not a corruption of “arse” – they’re different words with different etymologies

@Trillian @Austinlad yes, I stand corrected. I was thinking back to my slang days;)

@AmWiser

That’s what we call a “backronym”, forming an acronym for a word after the word is created and then labeling it as the source of the word.

Like for the word “phat”, people say it comes from “pretty hot and tempting”, but that’s a backronym, since it was created after the word was created.

I don’t know why they are 4 letters, but I can say that most of these kinds of words have origins in Old English. I think that words from that origin are usually short, as opposed to many of the multi-syllabic words that we get from putting together Latin and Greek roots and prefixes and postfixes.

I think that the existence of so many four-letter ‘curse’ words relates more to the simplicity of pronouncing such a short word. If you think of the reaction someone exhibits when they get hurt (“Ow,” or “Ouch!”), we can see how (semi-)instinctual reactions are manifested in language.

Words like “fuck” and “crap” and “shit” are all easy to say quickly, and all involve sounds which require one’s face to clench up, as if in pain. To test this, you can try making a clenched ‘f’ face pose, or a ‘sh,’ or ‘cr’ (the sort of teeth clenched, tongue in the ‘r’ position). Similarly, “ouch” and “ow” are both sort of related to the open-your-mouth-wide-in-pain expression akin to a stifled scream.

As for the legend of “fuck” being an acronym of Fornicating Under Consent of the King, or whatever, I think that’s more of a ‘backronym,’ like DominicX said: a retroactive legend that’s easy to explain and makes (some) sense sociologically.

For a more compiled etymology of the word, you might want to check out the online etymology dictionary entry for ‘fuck’

@DominicX thanx. I learn something new everyday.

@AmWiser That sounds so compelling. But the Oxford English Dictionary states that the ultimate etymology is uncertain, but that the word is “probably cognate” with a number of native Germanic words with meanings involving striking, rubbing, and having sex.

@morphail I did not say anus was a corruption of arse. Reread the OP. What it indicated is that our three-letter swear word, ass is a corruption of the four-letter British swear word, arse.

@DominicX Thanks. I like backronym. However, my spell checker does not.

@answerjill & @blastoboy1000 Thanks, Those answers makes sense to me.

@ETpro you’re right.
I don’t think there’s anything special about four-letter words from an etymological point of view. The words are short, and some of them happen to be spelled with 4 letters. It’s something of a coincidence that “arse” has four letters – it could have been “ars”. I’m not sure if the number of letters in a word is a good indication of anything.

@morphail I think you are right that being short and easy to blurt out in pain or anger is the main criterion. There are a few multisyllabic words like bastard, asshole and a host of others that tack some second word on the end of ass or butt. But those aren’t things we blurt out. We more often use or misuse them within the scope of their intended meaning. Bitch is more than 4 letters, but still a single syllable.

This resulted from an old federal law, which went into effect right after the Civil War (the Brevity In Profanity Act of 1867).

Using this as (an admittedly-shaky) precedent, in 1982 the Female Naming Act was passed, requiring that all newborn baby girls were to be named Ashley, Courtney, Brittany or Tiffany.

Thankfully, a few young parents ignored this law.

Not many, but a few….

@OneBadApple Aha. That clarifies lots of these. I can imagine that right after the Civil War, long profane exclamations would fall out of favor. I can’t really see a battle weary soldier cursing his mule in disgust with something like “You woebegotten halfbreed ejaculate-wad!”

@ETpro Oh yeah, absolutely. The poor bastard just crawled through two miles of blood and horseshit, just trying to survive another day….and is then expected to be eloquently verbose ??

Fuck that, man.

(oh…..oh,shit…...excuse me….)