A Penetrating History of F*%k

The following podcast contains explicit language. [Music] From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWater and I want to go there or go here. Today, there's something I've been holding off on doing for about six months, and you know what? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I want to do this one because I think it's genuinely interesting and educational and somewhat entertaining. It's all of those things. It is high time that we discussed the origin of the word known as, well, frankly, fuck, F-U-C-K because it actually has a rather interesting history or non-history, a very interesting timeline. One learns so much and I want to share with you what's been up and what is up and what will be up with this little word. Now, it doesn't come from some acronym. It isn't fornicating under consent of King or anything like that. Anything like that that you hear is a street myth. I mean, you should associate it with heroin and rusting cars. It's a street myth like Mikey from the Life Commercials, supposedly, killed himself by putting a whole bag of pop rocks in his mouth and then chucking a can of Pepsi Cola and it just blew his head off like he was in Breaking Bad or something like that. Well, same thing with these fornicating under consent of King, anything that good is almost never true we learn to expect that as we become adults. And so it's a little more complicated than that. But, you know, really, it's not just complicated. It's a bit of a sort of, it's all kind of a mystery. Fuck comes out of the mist, kind of like the town of Brighadoum. You never quite know where it's coming from. I mean, really, it should be pretty boring. So, house to take, you know, boring word, traces back to Old English. And there was a word and it was, "Ahh, oofs." That was Old English for house. So you think that fuck would trace back to some Old English word that would be, "Fook." There's no "fook" in Old English. And so it leaves you kind of squirreling around trying to find out where it came from. So let's start not from the beginning, as we don't know where that is. Let's start from the middle. Let's start with the first attestation, the first real attestation of the word "fuck." The first time that we have someone out and out using the word "fuck" clearly is in 1528. And it's in this strange place. There's this Latin manuscript. It's by Cicero and on one page down on the bottom, this monk scribbled something in 1528. And what he scribbled was "O-D" and then "fuckin" abbot, not "fuckin" fucking. So you just see it in ink. You know, there's no such thing as a ballpoint pen yet and he didn't do it in his blood. And so it's in ink and it says, "O-D" "fuckin" abbot. And that's just where it is. No British accent that we know existed in 1528, but still it looks like that's how he talked. That's what you have there. And it didn't mean old. He wasn't saying, "O-D" "fuckin" abbot. It's "O-D" "fuckin" abbot. And the "D" is most epigraphers think in abbreviation for damned. So you had to be very careful about damned in this time. But the "fuckin" part, that was just kind of body. And there actually is evidence that the abbot, under whom he would have worked, had some sort of moral issue. I don't know if they know that it had to do with having sex. But there was something about that abbot. And so the monk calls him a "fuckin" abbot. Now we can't know exactly what that monk meant. Did he mean that this was an abbot who was in the habit of fucking? Or did he mean that this was a dismissable abbot the way we would use it? I mean, if somebody's using it in that dismissable way, like if you're saying something like, "Oh, well, fucking taxes." Or "fuckin" westwing. How come there's so many episodes? So I can't catch up. You mean dismissable. But you wouldn't say that unless there'd been the sex word first. It's a metaphorical extension as we call it. So the idea is that if it's about sex and if sex is rather mundane and if there's some level upon which we like to think that we're not supposed to do it, unfortunately, then it could come to mean dismissable. So if the person was saying basically, "Well, I don't like him, fucking have it," then that means that the word "fuck" must have been even older. And there's a great deal of evidence that it was. But it all gets very veiled. It's never as clear before this monk scribble. Go back a little further and we're in 1503. And this time we're in Scots. Scots can be argued to not be English at all. Now we all know that Scotland and England are near each other and there's a rather intimate historical relationship. But in 1503 there is a Scots document where we get a use of the word. It's in this weird poem and the part of it where we get this word requires a little bit of translation. And so he clap it fast, he kissed and shook it and shook it means fumbled. So he clap it fast, he held on, he clap it fast, he kissed and shook it. As with the glycus he war organ, glycus means feeling, go figure. So organ means he was overcome. So as with the glycus he war organ. It be his ferris and that means and yet by his manner, yet be his ferris he would have fuked. And so it seemed as if he was getting ready to do this thing, yet be his ferris, he would have fuked. "Ya break my heart my boneyon." And boneyon is not that an is boney, it means boney. Like I am boney less than so my boney won my pretty one. So he clap it fast, he kissed and shook it, as with the glycus he war organ. Yet be his ferris, he wild to fuk it. Ya break my heart my boneyon. This fuked. I'm insulting people in Scotland again with this non accent. I'm sorry it's the best I can do I haven't been to Scotland yet. I was invited last summer but I became weary of travel and so I stayed in New York. I promise I'll get better. But I do know that I have to be careful because you know, is Scots English or not? And no, there are people who would say that Scots is a different language than English. Some people would say that Scots is a dialect of English and as you can imagine it's a subtle case where opinions may differ really it's a matter of culture and politics but we could try this. Which is that fuket and especially the way fuked would have been said at the time in English itself which would have been roughly fuket. There are not different words many people would venture that they are different versions of what you could on some level think of as the same word. So you could say that this 1503 is an earlier fuk or at least it's a fuk once removed because it's in Scots and I'm beginning to feel a little funny saying that word over and over and what do I do when I'm uncomfortable? Well I play Broadway tunes and of course what we would have to do now is something having to do with Scotland and I'm not going to play a bunch of songs with the word fuk in them because frankly we all probably know them so I'm just going to kind of dance around it. Here we've got to do Scotland it's obvious that we have to do the musical Brigaduin by learner and lo more famous for my fair lady. This is their show of the late 40s this is the 1958 recording those fans of you who listen for such things this is the representative period recording. This is Susan Johnson singing my mother's wedding day. So no fuk is in it but you'll see why I played it when she gets to the punchline at the end. See the idea is that her parents had already had sex before she was born just in case you didn't get it. In any case that's 1503 with the chuket fuket and then you go back and the word is really it's like somebody is trying to hide it from us. In 2014 75 and there's this bizarre poem that's written in this sort of mishmash of English and Latin. And at one point there's this passage where it's talking about these friars not chickens but religious figures and these friars and in Latin it's non-sointin coily. They aren't in heaven non-sointin coily. And then all of a sudden it's gach debob chak ze pug uvmch literally. All of a sudden it looks like it's in Welsh but it isn't in Welsh. Really what it is is it's in code. It's actually very interesting and so gach debob it's really is g x d d b o v. Well what it is it's the letters after what they're supposed to be. So g well the letter before that is f you see where it's going x the letter before that in 1475 is u because v doesn't exist yet u and v are the same thing and w is just thought of to the extent that anybody does as u so the letter before the x is a u so f u then 2 d's that's 2 c c and so the word ends up spelling fukant in Latin which means they fuck but it doesn't that wasn't a word in Latin it's this humor that's supposed to be funny but that means that the friars aren't in heaven because they fukant and then it's the wives of Eli so they gach debob chak ze pug uvmch so it isn't written but you can work it out from this code so they're being kind of kind of coy but it's there so it's not official because they don't actually write it but you can tell that they had the word and that had the same meaning that we associate with it and then before that it really is it's like they were trying to make us laugh it seems almost too good to be true nobody uses the word anymore but before that suddenly name start popping up in sober documents and so for example in 1310 and not even just once not even just once you read about roger fuk by the naval i'm not kidding that's what it says and yes name was roger roger fuk by the naval turns up in court records because he was apparently a bit of a scamp and you think that that must have been some sort of one off joke or something but you know nobody seems to think it's very funny in these documents and really just you know a few decades before in the late 1200s you have Henry fuk beggar and Simon fuk butter these were real people now one must be careful you know as a scholar one must be careful and you know life usually isn't funny and there are some people who say that fuk must not have meant to them what it means to us they think that fuk meant to hit and that's not crazy because especially with fuk beggar there's a different version of that name in straight up old english which is bouteville which meant hit street fukker it's a good street beggar churl hit churl so fuk beggar could have been calc as we say on hit fellow sure but then with fuk butter i imagine that there may have been bony lasses who talked about going out to hit the butter but let's face it if you think about the actual action of churning butter it seems rather precisely parallel to a certain other kind of action fuk butter and for fuk by the naval i mean really let's think about it given what the naval looks like and you know what it's near for what purpose would anybody be hitting around the naval mean what kind of practice with that have been you're not going to be hitting around anybody's name will fuck by the naval is a joke because presumably there's somebody who in a lesson lightened era maybe didn't immediately understand what he was supposed to do but no this was not people kind of slapping one another's belly buttons as a kind of a joke just because it was a long time ago doesn't mean that people were stupider that they weren't or any fuk by the naval meant what it sounds like and so i think we can be pretty sure just as we can be sure that a song that was sung in a nineteen twenty nine early talking musical called sunny side up called turn on the heat was not really about a furnace now the way it was originally done i'll play you a bit it was easy to miss it i recommend watching this it's all these people who can neither dance nor sing and basically burn themselves up but here's the song as it was done this is a disilver brown and Henderson song this is Sharon Lynn singing turn on the heat so this is the version where you might not know turn on the heat start in front we go to the level warm up the hot song here's thirty below turn on the heat miss me to read get hot on top of a hot song but then if you take the song and make it into minor art as the cabaret artist bobby short did you can hear that actually despite the fact that this is nineteen twenty nine and it's nasty cynical easy lowest common nominator pop it was about doing the deed just like fuk by the naval must have been listen to bobby short why did i just say lesson listen to bobby short and his rendition in the seventies of turn on the heat which no one had done this way until now turn on the heat start in the teeth get hot pop pop pop pop pop pop will free start burn in the snow if you want to put my little radar it's understood you get a gum drop later alligator so it's been said that in twelve seventy eight we have the real first the first the first attestation a f*ck and this is um about john the f*cker or more precisely he's john lufucker because he's French because remember the French the normans ran england for a good long time after the battle of hastings and by twelve seventy eight were still dealing with the shadows of that but the problem with this guy being john la f*cker is that you have to do philological research and you see that f*cker for one thing was not about sex at least not at first because there were many names f*cker is a variation there were fultures there were fultures there were f*ckers and then there were f*ckers and so it's just one variation but more to the point this was a French name and already by this time it would have been pronounced not f*cker but f*cker so this is john le f*cker now we immediately think well that's kind of like saying john the f*cker but in a clusoesque accent but remember this is a time when almost nobody can read this is a purely oral society and so when you met this person who was john la f*cker you didn't think about an f u c k e r on the page you heard somebody say john la f*cker and to the extent that you could see something spelled which you couldn't it was f o u c a i r e we're talking very Peter Sellers here and so it would be for example like suppose your name is bucket and you wish to sound French and sophisticated and so you call yourself bouquet you would only think of that if you were a literate person and you could see bucket on the page and you think about French spelling and you think oh well it's going to be bouquet well f*cker and f*cker would have been the same thing if you couldn't see it if somebody tells you their name is f*cker you're not going to think oh oh oh oh oh oh oh no f*cker no you would just think ah you're one of those French japs and that's about it yes you all know what I'm talking about of course I have to give you a little clip of Patricia Routledge in keeping up appearances doing the bucket bouquet number this is from a late great Britcom of the 90s she's like 118 now I was no need to take that attitude this is a serious customary inquiry my name is bouquet b-u-c-k-e-t no it's not bucket it's bouquet by the way there was f*cker there was f*cker there was f*cker there was f*cker there were other variations on this name and one of them was f*cker and so as that switched over as it would have you know f*cker becomes f*cker well f*cker became f*cker and that means that on a certain level there are people all over the United States drinking f*cker's coffee I find that a very important thing to know especially during these short winter days but in any case no f*cker John that one doesn't work and so Roger f*ck by the naval and Simon f*ck Butter and Henry f*cker have to be our first f*cks and so we've gotten all the way back and here's where the problem is this is the problem we go back to old English I've dragged you back to middle English but then we go back to old English and there's no there's no f*ck instead there's f*ck there's a word that today would be f*ck and it meant to deceive and that goes down to middle English there was a word fight which meant to trick somebody to deceive somebody and yes if you deceive somebody then you're you're f*cking them over and so you think well maybe that could have developed into f*ck but if you think about it the metaphorical development really is only going to go one way it's one thing to start with the meaning of to have sex with and for that to metaphorically come to mean for the unfortunate reason that you might associate sex with power relations and you know imposition etc. Given that you might imagine that f*ck might come to mean to f*ck somebody over to do somebody a bad turn to trick somebody to overpower somebody in some way that's one thing but if the word starts out meaning to deceive then why would that word then come to mean to have sex with somebody would seem to involve a certain under rating of one's powers you know imagine somebody saying oh well me and suki went up in the hay loft and I deceived you know that's not what somebody would say you talk about the deceiving as a kind of f*cking later it's not the way you would start and so it doesn't seem like lame besides even more basically a seven year old might ask no I did not discuss this with my six year old but a seven year old might ask how do you get from thick to f*ck you know the word wasn't f*ck it was it was thick so thick f*ck that's not a normal sound change it could happen if somebody got struck by lightning but if they did they probably die and they wouldn't pass on their way speaking to their children so how do you get from thick to f*ck and so because you just don't have anything in old English that's plausible the experts on this quite appropriately have looked elsewhere and the idea is that English must have borrowed the word for f*ck from somewhere else the place where a lot of people have settled is German and you know what I disagree with them I don't think that this word comes from German now I say that even though in dialectal German I don't even know how dialectal it is because I certainly heard it more than once during my German sojourns one word for f*ck it is f*cking I once heard somebody referred to as a quick f*ck and that meant like a quick you can imagine but that is the word and if fickle is one word for the penis and apparently either in the past or now I'm not sure which if you're German and you're walking around swooshing a stick you say f*ck f*ck so if you've cut that's taking your hand and you're trying to get a raccoon out of your house if you're German f*ck f*ck you get out you racoonstein you what is it German rac is it a halped keel I don't know that's a guess Mike if that's wrong don't cut it out I'm enjoying trying to remember German for raccoon but yeah thick thick thick so okay but there are problems with this for one thing how do you get from f*ck to f*ck you know if their word is f*cking then how come we're f*cking I mean it doesn't make sense we get blitz from them you know there's been a blitz of advertisements but it didn't go from blitz to blots so why if it doesn't make sense and then there are words in German where you've got the proper vowel like f*cking it means to hurry but once again that's rather an odd source for what we're supposed to be talking about how much of a hurry are you supposed to be in then there's a word f*ck son which does mean to f*ck someone over but again it's backwards that's not the first word you would use for enjoying the the pleasures of the bed and really mainly the whole German thing it sounds quite authoritative it's from the low German f*cking f*cking f*cking f*ck etc but the problem with it is that's not really part of the English story overall English is all about how you get a whole lot of words from Scandinavian and then a whole lot of words from French then a trickle from Dutch that need not concern us and then their words from Latin and Greek that's how the story goes there isn't some grand German story that's not how the history worked and if you're talking about something is integral to experience not dimension you know humor as fuc k i don't see how anybody would have gotten it from Germans that they spent the summer with chasing girls or maidkins or something like that it just doesn't add up i think more elegantly frankly where we're supposed to get the word is from them Vikings the Vikings they start coming and messing things up in England in 787 AD and they spoke old Norse which very quickly became what we know today as Swedish norwegian and Danish and you know there are better f*ck words scattered throughout Scandinavian especially if you deal with the dialects i.e. what's spoken by the real people not things in books you know nobody uses these words in ibsen but in ibsen all anybody basically does a stand around and then somebody walks out the door at the end but in say regional Swedish one word for f*ck is get this folk I don't think they had the tone yet but it's just fun to say folk I'm just making up those tones but folk now there you go it's generally f o k k a that's one of many so basically we can trace f*ck back to f*ck that's called scientific elegance and precision the Vikings came they were mostly men we now know that not only from what people said but from the genetic evidence and you know men will be men and they married a lot of English women and we can presume that they did a lot of what this word refers to that would be its entree into the language there is always a little part of me for no decent reason that conflates Scandinavians and the Amish basically because of American immigration patterns and when I was thinking about sharing this folk up business with you I thought well clearly that's going to be a plain infancy plain infancy his a 1956 Broadway musical of no particular import it was about the Amish and there is one cute song in it this is sung by Douglas Fletcher Rogers where he's singing about why he's going to settle for Katie rather than wait to fall in love and of course nobody in plain and fancy has sex I guess the Amish don't either until they get married except maybe when they do their room spring of it needless to say that didn't happen in the musical but this is him singing about why not Katie once you promised Ilsa Brett when she grew up you she'd get but she ain't stopped growing yet so I'll take Katie once I kissed Darrell and I found schmutz in Darragrand so they'd have a bird in hand so I'll kiss Katie it could be if I wait pumps along a perfect mate but for this man could wait until he's 80 so tomorrow when I stand with my hand in Katie's hand and in meeting house they put me on a spot you're clear and honest voice since I ain't got no other choice I'll answer Katie sweet and lovely Katie I reckon Katie why not I don't think it was German that's just me but still and I'll bet it was Scandinavian because so much was but then on the other hand it really may be that there was a word Fouque in Old English because the truth is only so much Old English comes down to us it's a whole lot it's about 34,000 words but that's nothing like the whole language and it's one thing to say well Old English didn't have it because it isn't in all those ballads and bellows and chronicles but those things really only capture a certain sliver of humanity and you can just imagine that way off in the future were you know in matrix or something and I mean that the analogy doesn't quite work but somebody is trying to figure out what kind of profanity we had and it happens that what they've got from our time is a copy of Charlottes web and they watch an episode of Good Times and they read five issues of the New Yorker and imagine somebody saying well they didn't have Fouque because you know it's not in the corpus well no it's just that Wilbur never Fouque and so you have to be very careful about these things I frankly think I would bet some money not all my money but about half of it that if you could go back in time and you stood in some town square in Northumbria and you just yelled out let's Fouque on I'll bet people would have turned around and they would have known what you meant but we can't know so see it all just kind of comes out of the mists of time we'll never know watch somebody find concrete evidence tomorrow and ruin the drama of that but for now we'll never never know and so 1500 is when it's first there and for a little while it's not the hardest thing in the world to find somebody writing you know Fouque with a giggle but then it starts to go into eclipse again in print so English starts getting very prissy about things having to do with the body so it's no longer about abbreviating damned it's no longer about God it's about the holes in your body and what goes into them and what comes out of them and so it ends up being that there is no FUCK in any English language dictionary from the late 1700s until 1965 and so what that means is you know no Samuel Johnson there's no story about him writing some sassy note about FUCK he just leaves it out it's much of a mess as he was not in the dictionaries until 1965 to me that's the year I was born but I know that doesn't matter to most of you try that that's the year that Dylan starts playing the electric guitar all the drama that people found in that that's a long long time and in between you find it written but only in the pastiest little places this is my favorite one bay Ruth was a baseball player notice how seldom I ever mentioned sports bay Ruth was a baseball player he grew up and that's because he had parents who kind of raised him and his parents did not get along and his mother and the bartender of the bar that his father had apparently had what we now call it thing and at one point the bartender was forced to write an affidavit that attests to what or maybe who he had done and this affidavit survives and this is actually how it reads and I'm not quite sure why this is at what they had him right down but this bartender says I the undersigned fucked Mrs George H. Ruth March 12 1906 on her dinging room floor which she asked me to do it's the funniest thing undersigned is two words it does say fucked you know straight out it's not encode it's not good it's a fucked and then Mrs. Geo H and H. LaCama Ruth March 12 1906 people were you know having sex in 1906 on her dinging not dining on her dinging room floor which is spelled with a T in the middle so it's like you know a little witch she and he very very gallantly capitalizes the S on the sheet but there it is I the undersigned fucked Mrs. Geo H. Ruth March 12 1906 on her dinging room floor which she asked me to do that's life you for it earliest FUCK baseball cursing ragtime the musical this is the song what a game the father who is straight laced is Mark Jacobi and he doesn't like the kind of language that his boy is picking up as he watches people play baseball around the time that this thing happened on a dinging room floor in Baltimore in 1906 take a listen to this one I love this song like hell I'll find a good thing I miss me bring your children here teach them baseball but they're all true Americans do that well it's like a constitution the institution I'll fear old baseball where every man is treated the same give that me wonderful fuck fuck I do good work I'm here Ellie so people were using it but you have to be very careful about it there's a beautiful description of British soldiers in world war one this is from 1930 I think but one person said it became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word that's if a sergeant said get your fucking rifles it was understood as a matter of routine but if he said get your rifles there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger except of course he didn't write fuck it was with the little dashes so that's how much people were using it in those you know flickery black and white times that we know as world war one I highly recommend seeing the film that's been restored recently of world war one where you see them in color nice and smooth moving like normal people that actually happen and when this came out I was thinking those guys were saying fuck so it existed but you couldn't talk about it people could get so clever about it though I mean to the extent that there was a prudery about it it did sometimes enhance humor d'Arthie Parker wrote theater reviews from 1918 to 1923 nobody cares about them now but she was just as funny then as she was later most of what she reviewed was trash and she was very funny about it and at one point for a play and I'm pretty sure it was 1922 she says if I were to tell you the plot of the piece in detail you would feel that the only honorable thing for you to do would be to marry me that's very good and this is for something that you know barely anybody was really reading or Westside story the jet song when the dancing gangsters come out Steven Songheim does the lyrics it's Leonard Bernstein's music well you can't have people yelling fuck on Broadway in 1957 and so they euphemized it but you know exactly what they meant this is the end of the jet song if you hear this is kind of cliché now imagine going to Broadway musicals in 1957 and everything is like plain and fancy and all of a sudden you have this this sounds like gangsters now and it was written when people were drinking oval teen and nobody had invented sex yet now one thing we can be sure of is that it wasn't used as much cursing has fashions and fuck certainly existed but it wasn't used nearly as punctuation the way it is by many people today and sometimes Steven a little bit me and so for example what price glory was a play about world war one in the 1920s what price glory was 1924 and it was famed for being very profane you weren't supposed to take a proper young person to see what price glory because they're doing all this cussing well I checked it out and lots of damn and hell but nobody ever says fuck or shit in the whole play despite how profane it was supposed to be and despite that the soldiers in question were using that word now predictably they did make a movie of what price glory and boy it's very interesting to experience the language that they used in that here's a clip the reason that you're not hearing anything because it was a silent film they made it two years later it's 1926 but it got around that you were supposed to try to read the lips of the actors because they were using such salty language well I did that and the only thing that they're saying that I can see and I don't happen to be deaf but I'm pretty sure I looked at all of it they're saying son of a bitch and they're saying prick but nobody says fuck so even on that set when there was no sound it wasn't considered gentlemanly to use words like that even around other gentlemen maybe because the script girl was sitting there or something like that son of a bitch and prick but not fucker for example if my father in the 70s or 80s had hit himself with a hammer on his thumb like cartoon character does anybody actually ever do that but if he had done it I'm pretty sure he would have said shit he would have hauled off and said shit in a good meaty fashion I would say fuck I'm of a different generation if I hit my thumb with a hammer if I stubbed my toe it's not oh shit no it's fuck that's what I would say it's become more common and there's one particular rendition of fuck that we do have to we have to touch upon it because it's grammatically interesting oh what's that vamp that I'm hearing in the background yeah I'm sure you all know what this is and so here we go with listen it gets shouted as a bad mother I'm done my shout please it's all the kidding man but no one understands him but it's what but so obviously the word elided there is mother fucker and mother fucker is actually interesting it's very interesting now you want to know when it first occurs and no it isn't in 1650 there's nobody who says why that gentleman is quite the ma of the fugora or something like that it's actually pretty late 1890 there's a report in the records of the Texas Court of Appeals that somebody the year before it called somebody might can I have the crackley thing so it sounds like 1889 that god damn mother fucking bastardly son of a bitch that's the first mother fucker but what's interesting about mother fucker is that if you think about it mother fucker sorry mother fucker is really the way that one properly says fucker yeah there's the verb to fuck now there's somebody who fucks like a hunt hunter fuck fucker but if you think about it fucker is a little incomplete you can say it but really the proper complete fulfilling way of saying fucker i.e. he or she who fucks is mother fucker if you're using it as an insult just like somebody might say orientated and you're not gonna smack them down but a lot of us have this feeling that oriented is better you know it's not really it's a matter of chance but if you prefer oriented orientated feels just not quite right and you might ask somebody about it or they're people who say mischievous and if you're not one of them and you say mischievous then you feel mischievous one uh well in the same way if you hear somebody say why you you're fucker you think to yourself no no it's not fucker it's mother fucker that's what you call the person so there was a Broadway play called the mother fucker with the hat mother fucker is the word fucker with a hat on it needs that hat so it's kind of an irregular noun so hunt hunter fish fisherman notice that that's an irregularity that you never think about hunt hunter fish fisherman fuck mother fucker not just fucker in any case we have just lost Nancy Wilson and one of the many things she wanted was for us to call her she didn't want us to call her maybe she wanted us to call her for real and often the song is written by Tony Hatch the lyrics are by her bauper and lanny hall it was written in 1965 Nancy Wilson's version is 1966 she wanted us to call her the song is call me this is a perfect cut of the late great Nancy Wilson if you feel inside and lonely there's a service I can't remember tell the one who loved you only I can use a warm and tender calling don't be afraid you can call me maybe it's late but just call me tell me and I'll be around in any case you can reach us at lexicon valley at slate.com that's lexicon valley at slate.com to listen to past shows and subscribe or just to reach out go to slate.com/lexicon valley I promise all of you a very clean topic next time to make up for all of this profanity but I just I needed to share and it's the top of the year and the days are short the show is edited as always by Mike Volow I'm John McWhorter reminding those of you who remember the 80s commercial that the best part of waking up is fuckers in your cup call me tell me and I'll be around