Jess Zafaris

The boundaries between the communities we speak with and what we're used to hearing have dissolved as we've been able to interact with each other in online spaces.

We're no longer viewing simply curated television.

We're seeing the stream of consciousness of all of our fellow humans at all times.

Of course, yeah.

I would say, so a lot of these, like I said, come from Old English.

What I've actually found is the more interesting element here is that there are many rumors and myths, incorrect origins ascribed to these words.

There is an impulse to make, for example, the S-H word and the F word into acronyms.

There was a rumor going around for a good long time and often repeated.

You'll still see this around that the F word is an acronym for fornication under consent of the king.

Now, this is nonsense.

This word has been around since...

far longer than some of those words that made it up.

It's been spelled differently.

At the time when the F word was first recorded, the word king began with a C, and then consent, I believe, hadn't even entered English at that point in history.

So it's nonsense.

And then the other one that you hear about the SH word is that

it's short for or that it's an acronym for ship high in transit.

And the notion is that those letters were stamped on boxes of manure that were being shipped across the ocean because they needed to be on a higher deck because they would either get too wet or they would explode or something.

But that's also nonsense.

It's been spelled differently throughout history, and it's dramatically older than acronyms in general.