A corpus-based study on the polysemy of the attributive adjective fucking

Abstract: While discussing the possibility of investigating the polysemy of an English profanity as the topic for this essay, Dylan Glynn, who is supervising this work, pointed to an (albeit old) edition of an Oxford English Dictionary resting on a shelf in his office in order to look up the definition[s] of the lexeme fuck. However, the entry was nowhere to be found, and this only added to the interest of the topic. It is interesting how a profane word, although as common as fuck, which both men and women use frequently in speech and in written text, could be omitted from such a large and respectable dictionary for the sole reason of it being ‘profane’, ‘taboo’, and was therefore seen as unfit for academia some 40 years ago.