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The Ghost That Tells You To F**k Off!

I frequent a local hotel, and a number of years ago a member of staff who stayed in one of the rooms one evening claimed to hear a disembodied voice telling her to 'shut the f****** window'.
 
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Was the phrase as "popular" in 1789?
 
Many years ago I was staying at a country house and got talking to one of the family. She claimed there was a ghost in one of the stables and you could hear it shouting.

"What does it shout?" I asked.

"Cuntyhair."

I almost hurt myself laughing but they all swore they'd heard it.
 
Many years ago I was staying at a country house and got talking to one of the family. She claimed there was a ghost in one of the stables and you could hear it shouting.

"What does it shout?" I asked.

"Cuntyhair."

I almost hurt myself laughing but they all swore they'd heard it.
Could that have been her rendering of a foreign or obsolete expression?

As feeble example, in French Comment allez-vous? means 'How are you?' which might sound like 'Cuntyhair'.

(Mind you, a member of a family living in a country house with stables should know enough French to get it right. ;))

Just a thought.
 
Could that have been her rendering of a foreign or obsolete expression?

As feeble example, in French Comment allez-vous? means 'How are you?' which might sound like 'Cuntyhair'.

(Mind you, a member of a family living in a country house with stables should know enough French to get it right. ;))

Just a thought.

It was many moons ago.

Although I do remember the lady in question being rather fond of me which always sets alarm bells ringing given I look like a rejected model for shopkeeper in a medieval fantasy video game.
 
It was many moons ago.

Although I do remember the lady in question being rather fond of me which always sets alarm bells ringing given I look like a rejected model for shopkeeper in a medieval fantasy video game.
*nods* Bit o'rough. We all need it now and then.

(First time I heard that expression was when my older sister called one of my boyfriends that. She was spot-on. :rollingw:)
 
*nods* Bit o'rough. We all need it now and then.

(First time I heard that expression was when my older sister called one of my boyfriends that. She was spot-on. :rollingw:)
We're all a bit of rough to someone.

I like to think of myself as relatively sophisticated but if you are actually a relative to sophistication then that's a different thing!!
 
The word 'fuck' certainly has (especially in its original meaning, to beat or batter, hence the 'windfucker' kestrel which hovers by beating its wings against the wind) but I dunno about that actual phrase.
Trying to check on the actual phrase.

Merriam Webster gives first known use as 1929 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fuck off but doesn't give any more information or cite where this is from. Sounds very late to me but perhaps they lead a sheltered life. :)

Huffpost concludes its article with:
"But while the f-word was common in the period, it was not a swearword. It was simply a direct and increasingly impolite word for sexual intercourse. Only in the early to mid-nineteenth century did it begin to be used non-literally, as most swearwords are, to insult and offend others, to relieve pain, and to express extremes of emotion, negative and positive. In other words, it took roughly three hundred years to make the transition from "he fucked her" to "that's fucking awesome!"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-fcking-short-history-of_b_3352948

So, if all that is correct it maybe that these 18th century ghosts are picking up some bad language from somewhere. :worry:
 
Merriam Webster gives first known use as 1929
A little off-topic here: in Hollywood's Silent Era there were sometimes complaints about the bad language on screen.
As there was no actual script or dialogue, actors would ad-lib to give the appearance of it.

While the words they were supposed to be saying were displayed in captions, what they actually said was sometimes uncouth.
Brawling characters would not be inviting their opponents to kindly unhand them. Lip-readers could tell. ;)

So one has to wonder, what exactly were those ruffians saying? Could it have included the odd early 'Fuck off!'? :chuckle:
 
A little off-topic here: in Hollywood's Silent Era there were sometimes complaints about the bad language on screen.
As there was no actual script or dialogue, actors would ad-lib to give the appearance of it.

While the words they were supposed to be saying were displayed in captions, what they actually said was sometimes uncouth.
Brawling characters would not be inviting their opponents to kindly unhand them. Lip-readers could tell. ;)

So one has to wonder, what exactly were those ruffians saying? Could it have included the odd early 'Fuck off!'? :chuckle:

In the old silent musicals the cast often sang off key.
 
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The word 'fuck' certainly has (especially in its original meaning, to beat or batter, hence the 'windfucker' kestrel which hovers by beating its wings against the wind) but I dunno about that actual phrase.

Not according to this site:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/fuck

Chronology and phonology rule out Shipley's attempt to derive it from Middle English firk "to press hard, beat." The unkillable urban legend that this word is an acronym of some sort (a fiction traceable on the internet to 1995 but probably predating that), and the "pluck yew" fable, are results of ingenious trifling (also see here). The Old English verb for "have sexual intercourse with" was hæman, from ham "dwelling, home," with a sense of "take home, co-habit." French foutre and Italian fottere seem to resemble the English word but are unrelated, descending rather from Latin futuere, which perhaps is from PIE root *bhau- "to strike," extended via a figurative use "from the sexual application of violent action" [Shipley; compare the sexual slang use of bang, etc.].

Same page cites it as of Middle rather than Old, English. It's "sounds" like it could be Anglo-Saxon but it is just a simple phoneme ultimately.

It's a fucking great word either way.
 
Good god, lady, where did you learn to speak French?!!?
Haha, busted! I was deciding between two phrases and had to go off to do something, and when I came back I thought I'd chosen one when it was the other.
 
Not according to this site:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/fuck



Same page cites it as of Middle rather than Old, English. It's "sounds" like it could be Anglo-Saxon but it is just a simple phoneme ultimately.

It's a fucking great word either way.
This morning on R4 in the usual bird feature before Today starts at 6am there was mention of the windbeater falcon. :rofl:
 
It’s actually the use of the phrase. If ”fuck” was just a fairly usual word for fornication or otherwise when did it get the ”off” added? 1929 does seem very late.

For instance we use the word “screw” now to mean the same thing but you don’t hear “screw off “ very often if at all.

Doesn’t mean it wasn’t used that way, and I’m not sure what phrases would have been in common use then. Probably varied a lot because of locality as well.

I always liked the supposed abbreviation on medical notes, ATFO Asked to fuck off, always suggested a certain British politeness :)
 
My favourite location by far that our team have visited frequently is All Saint's Church in Santon on the Surrey border.

The church has a reputation for being highly active, mainly for the suggested spirit of the long deceased reverend Richard Kendall who's often been convincingly (IMO) 'captured'/recorded using profanity by different teams as well as ours through the use of digital recorders so we feel we're possibly getting potential EVP phenomena .. to get to the point, he/it only swears at women investigators to the level that women investigators are willing to volunteer as a trigger object to encourage these recordings to manifest .. I should mention and include that the women who agree to be submitted to this aren't man haters so have no hidden social agenda .. the words cunt, fuck etc have all been reported, sometimes live reported and whispered in the ear, sometimes captured separately and sometimes both. If Fortean Times want a hook up to spend a night investigation there then let me know, no money involved.

There's so many video documents from different teams regarding All Saints, Santon with different suggested possibly phenomena I wouldn't know where to start. Here's one video chosen at random, nausea experiences is a common one that made two of us puke at separate times outside the place one night .. fortunately not on anyone's grave.

 
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It’s actually the use of the phrase. If ”fuck” was just a fairly usual word for fornication or otherwise when did it get the ”off” added? 1929 does seem very late.
It’s Biblical. ‘Go forth and multiply.’
 
I was led to believe that, back in the olden days (ie, any time before I was born), most expletives were religious in origin. So people may have said 'God's blood!' or some such, rather than used bodily functions.
 
Ghost in the house I grew up in swore like a trooper. And when it wasn't swearing it was being abusive. Two people visiting were woke up in the night by it standing at a no longer existing front door, hammering the door down and shrieking abuse (it was an elderly man). Nobody down the street later remarked on seeing or hearing a thing and it was the kind of place where if someone had been stood in the street screaming abuse at 2AM - everyone would have been on their doorsteps in minutes. House full of people and everyone else slept right through the kerfuffle. These guests were in bedrooms one on the first storey, the other on the second...

I heard it swearing upstairs inside the house, countless times as a child although my bro has totally blanked all memory of it.

The one time it physically manifested as a full body apparition (two of us saw it), it was silent and very intent on something. I think if it had started the shouting, I'd have had a heart attack on the spot.

Long to knock on the door and ask if the people who live there now have experienced owt, but suspect it must have faded, or they're less sensitive or something because it would have been really hard to live with had we not been used to it.
 
I was led to believe that, back in the olden days (ie, any time before I was born), most expletives were religious in origin. So people may have said 'God's blood!' or some such, rather than used bodily functions.
Ah no, I think Anne Lister in her journals mentions a few F words being flung at her by the homophobes, and once some people in the street shouted "Does your cock stand?" at her. This was either Regency era or early Victorian.

Although I just remembered reading something years ago when I was still dropping sprogs, that said midwives (this would be the 1990s) said the nature of swear words women used during labour had shifted from "Oh God"s to "F you, you c-word!"
 
Not according to this site:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/fuck



Same page cites it as of Middle rather than Old, English. It's "sounds" like it could be Anglo-Saxon but it is just a simple phoneme ultimately.

It's a fucking great word either way.
Yep, I just checked in the definitive Anglo Saxon dictionary - nothing that could even evolve into "feck" is there. Surprising. Haeman seems to be the verb. (That would be pronounced "haman" as in "ham"). Nothing I can see that could morph into the c word either.

In my search for that I did find "cum-paeder" - recognised the second element as "father" but the first, not so sure. But apparently it meant "godfather". Now to translate "The Godfather" into Old English...
 
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