Four-Letter Words Can Hurt You

an excerpt from Four Letter Words Can Hurt You by Barbara Lawrence:

The best known of the tabooed sexual verbs, for example, comes from the German ficken, meaning “to strike”; combined, according to Partridge’s etymylogical dictionary Origins, with the Latin sexual verb futuere; associated in turn with the Latin fustis, “a staff or cudgel”; the Celtic buc, “a point, hence to pierce”; the Irish bot, “the male member”; the Latin battuere, “to beat”; the Gaelic batair, “a cudgeller”; the Early Irish bualaim, “I strike”; and so forth. It is one of what etymologists sometimes call “the sadistic group of words for the man’s part in copulation.”

The brutality of this word, then, and its equivalents (“screw,” “bang,” etc.), is not an illusion of the middle class or a crotchet of Women’s Liberation. In their origins and imagery these words carry undeniably painful, if not sadistic, implications, the object of which is almost always female. Consider, for example, what a “screw” actually does to the wood it penetrates; what a painful, even mutilating, activity this kind of analogy suggests. “Screw” is particularly interesting in this context, since the noun, according to Partridge, comes from words meaning “groove,” “nut,” “ditch,” “breeding sow,” “scrofula,” and “swelling,” while the verb, besides its explicit imagery, has antecedent associations to “write on,” “scratch,” “scarify,” and so forth – a revealing fusion of a mechanical or painful action with an obviously denigrated object.