TALKING DIRTY

By Jesse Birnbaum

TIME WAS WHEN A LITTLE BOY WHO wanted to see a dirty word in print made a surreptitious trip to the dictionary and got his thrill. Now, with the publication of The F-Word (Random House paperback; 232 pages; $12.95), any curious boy or, for that matter, girl can get a bonanza of thrills and at the same time become the most foulmouthed and maybe most envied kid on the block.

As the title suggests, The F-Word, compiled by Jesse Sheidlower, a reference-book editor at Random House, and prefaced with a playful essay by humor writer Roy Blount Jr., is a more or less scholarly lexicon devoted solely to all the unimaginable variations and permutations of what is surely the most often used sexual term in the English language. So "linguistically important" is it, says Sheidlower, "that its serious documentation is not only appropriate but also required."

Maybe so, though The F-Word is really a novelty. What makes it so interesting, if not thrilling, to grownups is the sheer volume of its usages, all of them duly authenticated with citations and examples. None of them--Darn it!--can be spelled out here (although some periodicals, notably the New Yorker, erstwhile doyenne of classy writing, print the word nowadays without a blush).

The majority of entries are the clever coinages of military folk, who seem over the ages to have had little more to do than embroider their vocabulary with ever newer inventions. Ask any soldier to count the entries, and he will say there are three hundred and sixty-f---ing-five of them. Were it not for our brave fighting men, this book would be a booklet.

Still, it is useful for nonetymologists to learn that the F word may stem from the Germanic languages (for example, the Middle Dutch fokken, "to thrust, copulate with"); that the word found its way into print as early as the 1550s; and that it was James Joyce, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence who first thrust it, as it were, into modern literature.

Tell that to the kids, and maybe they'll read Joyce.