What follows is a response to my 7/26 posting “F-lexicography, in which I wrote, combatively (and, as it turns out, not entirely accurately):
I argue that the OED treatment of the semantics of the sexual verb fuck is unsatisfactory, not compatible with the actual usage of English speakers for a long time now — apparently because earlier lexicographers, embracing normative views of sexual behavior, posited a single sense of sexual fuck, centrally denoting an agentive act of penis-in-vagina intercourse but with a large penumbra of vagueness, embracing many other sorts of sexual encounters. Then this inadequate treatment was adopted without comment or critique in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word. So that essentially all the authoritative literature on sexual fuck gets things wrong.
What follows is not the scorched-earth savagery that I would have expected from some of my colleagues, but a calm, thoughtful, and clarifying response from JS, which I reproduce here almost untouched, as a guest posting from him. I have some brief reflective words of my own afterwards.
(To properly appreciate much of what follows, you would really need to look at the (often technical) material reproduced in my 7/26 posting — admittedly, enlivened by a fair number of raunchy real-life citations, but still essays on technical syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not, I think, impenetrable, but also not especially reader-friendly.)
I had intended to go on to celebrate JS’s character — in particular, as shown in his response, but also more generally — and to situate him in a larger academic and personal context. But recent days have been medically perilous for me, so I’m settling for the bare bones right now, with a promissory note to get on with the rest of the picture later, painting in the humanity.
JS’s response, in between the lines:
Thanks, Arnold, for this post.
I have two major points, but will say overall that your criticism of my (and OED’s) treatment is correct; this treatment is inadequate, and could be improved.
First, regarding the history of the dictionary coverage: You write that “the OED treatment of the semantics of the sexual verb fuck is unsatisfactory … centrally denoting an agentive act of penis-in-vagina intercourse but with a large penumbra of vagueness, embracing many other sorts of sexual encounters. Then this inadequate treatment was adopted without comment or critique in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word.”
In fact, this is incorrect. The OED‘s original treatment did not include the “large penumbra of vagueness” at all; it only covered heterosexual vaginally penetrative intercourse with a male subject. The extended senses were first specifically introduced in the second edition (1999) of The F-Word; the first edition (1995) did have the note “Also in transferred senses” to allow for such uses, but it was the second edition that added a definition and put these uses into a new subentry. (This treatment, remaining the same in later editions, consisted of lumping all non-agentive-heterosexual-vaginal uses, transitive or intransitive, into a single sense, albeit with a full definition.) Some of the inspiration for expanding the coverage came from some papers in your Studies Out in Left Field collection (I quote Avery Andrews in both OED and The F-Word). [Arnold M. Zwicky, Peter H. Salus, Robert I. Binnick, & Anthony L. Vanek (eds.), Studies out in left field: Defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley (1971, Linguistic Research, Edmonton, Alberta; reprinted 1992 by John Benjamins]
The OED entry was revised in 2008 (under my direction; I had joined the OED by that point). The main changes relevant to this discussion included allowing for homosexual pairings in the main definitions, and adding a separate transitive sense to cover the uses with an orifice or something inanimate as an object. This is perhaps “better” in some ways and “worse” in others (in relation to the treatment in The F-Word, that is), but it still is the case that it glosses over a number of uses that need to be better explained. In particular, your distinction between ambiguity and vagueness, with relation to the subject.
My second major point is to acknowledge that I did not fundamentally change my treatment in the third edition of The F-Word (2009, after the OED‘s entry had been revised), or in the most recent (fourth) edition of The F-Word, which came out last year, with extensive changes.
My original justification was that attempting to explain these syntactic distinctions would have been confusing and of limited utility to non-linguists; I was also nervous about doing the research to locate early examples of these. I felt that the treatment, while vague, did at least encompass the actual uses, even if it didn’t clearly explain them. My most recent justification was … well, pretty much the same, in fact. In retrospect I acknowledge that it would probably have been possible to have a treatment that clarified some of the semantic issues without making things overcomplicated for the nonspecialist reader; this was a missed opportunity.
I did not add any examples of man-on-man Pat-SU uses to the fourth edition (although this is a random accident rather than a specific flaw, I think, since I wasn’t looking for them and don’t define these differently).
I will note, however, that I am quite aware of the fact that I lack this coverage, and furthermore that I am planning to speak about it at an upcoming conference devoted to the word fuck ([the international conference “Profanity: Redefining the Limits: The F-word across Linguistics, Translation and the Arts” at the Maison de la Recherche, Artois University, 9/24-26/25]). (The title of my keynote presentation is “Access Denied: Exclusion Policy in The F-Word”; my focus will be on the uses that I did not include in the book, and the reasons why. Most of my examples will be of lexical items, but I will also be discussing some grammatical issues, i.e. this one.)
Brief afternotes. Yes, what I say about the OED is somewhat balled up. In writing my blog entries on the lexicography of sexual fuck, I consulted the version of the OED entry (marked as in revision) that came to me in a search via the Stanford library, but it certainly was not the original, which rightly would have had only the penis-in-vagina sense. Then other uses would have developed as creative (on the hoof) metaphors, some of them becoming conventionalized as separate (off the shelf) senses. I didn’t know any of the details of these developments and clearly didn’t appreciate what the OED was trying to do.
It is of course pleasing that there will be an international academic conference devoted to the F-word.
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