The joy of fecks

[j4]

Ah, the childish delight of using powerful search functions to scour vast databases of painstakingly keyed and indexed sixteenth-century texts for the words "Fuck", "Fucker", and "Fuck't".

While pursuing this puerile pastime -- why do we call such things "puerile", when puella is just as likely as puer to do 'em? -- I came across this passage in an account of a woman's bizarre dreams during pregnancy:

At the same time (ouer and aboue) shee thought that in stead of a boye, (which she desired) she was deliuerd and brought to bed of one of these kistrell birds, called a wind-fucker.

[From "The life and godly education from his childhood of that thrice famous clarke, and worthie Orator and Poet Gabriell Haruey", in Haue vvith you to Saffron-vvalden. Or, Gabriell Harueys hunt is vp]

Now, I'm sure I remember hoiho mentioning a while back that kites (as in, the things on strings that you trail dispiritedly across fields in a desperate attempt to get them to fly) used to be called "wind-fuckers". So I now wonder if he was thinking of the bird (hoiho thinking of birds? surely not!), or if the term was transferred from bird to bundle-of-sticks-and-canvas, or what.

Is it time to go home yet?

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

The bits I read seemed very funny actually, in a sort of sixteenth-century way. :) I'd print it out for you here but a) it's 83 pages long, so I think they'd notice, and b) our keyed version of the text (as opposed to our page-image scans) is dreadful, full of lacunae and errors and what-have-you.

You may be interested in Early English Books Online (http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo), actually, if you haven't already seen it. No idea how expensive it is to subscribe but there's free "Featured Content" on the website. I don't really fancy properly reading anything from scanned images, but it's quite fun to dip into.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Depressingly all the featured content is almost all very worthy, or notorious, or otherwise distinguished. Apart from a short pamphlet about a boy who only three could speak Latin, Greek and Hebrew withought having been taught it (apparently through the bounteous gifts of Almighty Cod).

Much of the stuff from that era (as far as I can tell) is parsons going on about pig-breading, or the way vvillovv-vvarblers frighten voles with cries so like those of the devil so that they doth cause badgers to lay eggs under havvthorn bushes such that the raspberry doth flovvreth before pentecost, being an insult to St John the Baptist, and so brin rack and ruin upon poor but honest folk vvho do live by mills or other standing vvater inhabited by svvans or similar fovvl, as was revealed to the personal farry-gither of the Bishop of Northumberland in a tavern in Cheapside the night afore the corronation of the king in the abbee at VVestminster, or somesuch.

I think they've chosen useful (and so boring) books as their examples, which just isn't cricket. :)