According to legend, actor Colm Meaney managed to sneak the word ‘bollocks’ past American television network censors during an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine because they didn’t know what it meant.
Maybe that’s true. Or maybe they knew (Google is only a click away after all) but considered it too mild an expletive to worry about.
Now, the British Advertising Standards Authority has gone one better, giving the green light to Magners cider commercials which include the phrase ‘feck off’.
Magners defended the phrase by describing it as a ‘mild rebuff’, in the commercial, which features a character in the commercial telling a swarm of bees to ‘feck off’.
A linguistics professor chimed in to say that feck is merely ‘a euphemism’.
And the ghost of James Joyce was dragged into the fray, as his use of the word was cited to give it an air of respectability.
There’s an awful lot of nonsense being spouted as a result of the decision, though at least we’ve been spared the usual rethreading of myths about legal acronyms.
According to one source, ‘In Ireland, ‘feck’ originally derived from the word ‘feic’ which meant ‘to see‘.’
Somehow, I don’t see that.
Try as I might, I’m able to see feck all of a connection here.
Though I share your relief about the lack of the acronym thing.