Sometimes used in the present participle as a meaningless intensive

I’d learned most of my off-colour vocabulary by my seventh birthday; but I was always looking for proof that all those dirty words were, in fact, real. The first big dictionary I found had its own pedestal in the middle of the Yorkville library, but it didn’t have what I was looking for.

The Compact Oxford included all thirteen volumes of the 1931 edition, but it didn’t include the word “fuck.” Years it took, but I finally did find it, in my grandmother’s humble Webster’s, where the editors had somehow come round to approaching those words just like the others.

Inspired by Ban Small-Mindedness, Not Books. Image from Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, eighth edition.