A year or so ago a contributor to the London Review of Books identified a golden age of swearing, until it was pointed out that the "apparent prevalence of the word fuck in the period before 1820, and its complete disappearance for more than a century thereafter, can be explained by the end of the use in printing of the ‘long s’, which modern optical character recognition sees as an ‘f’. All the apparent ‘fucking’ before then is actually just ‘sucking’"
Slashdot Mirror
A year or so ago a contributor to the London Review of Books identified a golden age of swearing, until it was pointed out that the "apparent prevalence of the word fuck in the period before 1820, and its complete disappearance for more than a century thereafter, can be explained by the end of the use in printing of the ‘long s’, which modern optical character recognition sees as an ‘f’. All the apparent ‘fucking’ before then is actually just ‘sucking’"