'An Expression of Abhorrence'

When I saw the word in print I flashed on more innocent days, when obscenity still packed a moral punch and I could still be shocked. The context was clean enough: an excerpt from John Dryden’s tragedy Don Sebastian, King Of Portugal (1689). In Act II, Scene 2, Johayma says to her husband the Mufti:

“But otherwise a very filthy Fellow; how odiously he smells of his Country garlike! fugh, how he stinks of Spain.”

No, not the anti-Spanish sentiment; that odd-looking four-letter word: fugh. It returned me to my thirteen-year-old self surreptitiously reading The Naked and the Dead (1948), in which Norman Mailer repeatedly euphemizes the handiest of English monosyllables into fug. I thought I was pretty hip knowing what he really meant. Around the same time, while browsing a poetry anthology in a department store book section, I happened on the genuine article (or verb, or noun . . .) in an Allen Ginsberg poem. That was a real jolt. Soon Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders formed The Fugs and a perfectly good word turned flaccid. Kupferberg, that genteel soul, had already founded Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts.

Back to fugh: In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson identifies the word as an interjection meaning “an expression of abhorrence.” The OED cites only Dryden and Johnson and says the word derives from the earlier Faugh! and its variants, including Foh!, Fah! and Fogh! As to etymology, the dictionary says: “imitative, representing the action of puffing or blowing away with the lips.” Which sounds a lot like a Bronx cheer or the old raspberry.