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Damn all, Bugger all, Sod all etc., etc. What does all mean here? How did the expression originate? Was there a single original term (expletive or not) preceding all in this usage?

At the risk of overbroadening the question, does the underlying linguistic mechanism that gives rise to this expression generate others that are very similar? And are there close parallels in other languages?

Jimi Oke
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FumbleFingers
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  • I've accepted Karl's answer because it seems undeniably true. But I feel it's a bit like saying the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the cause of WW1 - true, but not particularly enlightening. I'm still intrigued as to why this particular usage became so prevalent, with so many variants. – FumbleFingers Apr 05 '11 at 16:32
  • Undeniable does not mean true. It just means you haven't been able to deny it yet. – MrHen Apr 05 '11 at 22:48
  • Don't rub salt in the wound MrHen. I was trying to be diplomatic and disguise my scepticism! – FumbleFingers Apr 05 '11 at 23:45
  • Anyway, the bounty is for the bigger picture, not the particular Fanny or Franz who happened to be in the frame at the right time. So unless anyone else has a better exposition of the principles / processes at work here, it'll go to you. – FumbleFingers Apr 05 '11 at 23:50
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    This is an example of what's called a Squatitive in the trade. As in He knows/doesn't know squat about that. More squatitives here. – John Lawler Aug 12 '15 at 22:09

4 Answers4

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I have always taken the "all" here to mean "everyone" or "everything". As in, "Nothing works, damn everything." The fuck or damn emphatically negates the all to say, "fuck all choices."

Less explicit ways to use the phrase do exist. The first that comes to mind: "Hang all."

MrHen
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  • Following feedback from Karl Millson I can hardly argue against Fanny Adams as the hapless 'progenitrix', but I do like the thinking here. Even if it doesn't represent the direct cause of the expression in all its variants, it seems very possible these associations would help a naval (or other) term to gain currency in the general populace. – FumbleFingers Apr 03 '11 at 17:10
  • (wild speculation) Is it possible Fuck all! existed in the vernacular with the general sense of Sod everything!, even before Dickens? It would hardly get much recorded in written form, given proscriptions against profanity. I have no idea when damn started to be used as an oath in the modern style, even. – FumbleFingers Apr 06 '11 at 00:17
  • I suppose it is possible. Other uses to look for: "fuck it all"; "fuck you all"; etc. – MrHen Apr 06 '11 at 18:44
  • Cure all. (in 15 characters too) – Billy ONeal Apr 07 '11 at 03:57
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    @MrHen: scanning Ngram stuff suggests damn it all! was something of a thowaway exclamation by the 1870's - slightly dashing & uppercrust, rather than low or risque. It was certainly around as a 'general purpose oath' in the 1840's - and probably at least decades earlier. Easy enough to lose the it, but the meaning still had to morph a fair bit to get to today's usage. – FumbleFingers Apr 07 '11 at 22:16
  • With all due respect to Karl, the Fanny Adams story doesn't really do it for me. I accept the abbreviation F.A. was likely first used for her - many people who use this form today know her name, if nothing else. But that don't explain Fuck All, so to speak! The vulgar form would have to be already known in order for anyone to think that was what F.A. stood for. MrHen's Answer is, I'm afraid, the best of a bad bunch. – FumbleFingers Apr 12 '11 at 03:37
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Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English leads us on this wild goose chase:

bugger all: (see damn all)

damn all: (bowdlerization of fuck all)

fuck all: a low variant of damn all: nothing: late C. 19-20.

There is no explanation of why this is used. Perhaps the reason is lost to us.

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Robusto
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  • As I recall, it was a bit of a challenge at school to find circular definitions like that in various cheap schoolboy dictionaries. But I think Partridge wouldn't have got past the bike sheds. They are annoying as well as amusing, though. Frustrating, I mean. – FumbleFingers Apr 06 '11 at 04:32
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    +1 for wild goose chasing (since I'm assuming getting a definitive answer is that). – jbelacqua Apr 06 '11 at 18:23
  • Well I have great respect for Partridge. Maybe he deliberately put the circularity in there to mimic the feeling you get when you mull over the Fanny Adams story for too long. – FumbleFingers Apr 07 '11 at 01:45
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It is widely accepted that the others are all variations of F**ck All.

It is further thought that F**k All is in fact a misunderstanding of the phrase 'sweet F.A.', meaning 'nothing at all'.

The story:

The phrase 'Sweet F.A.' is of British military origin and refers to Fanny Adams, a girl who was murdered quite gruesomely in the mid-1800s.

British naval soldiers likened their unpleasant meat rations to the remains of Fanny Adams. 'Sweet Fanny Adams' or 'Sweet F.A.' was then applied as a slang term for mutton and eventually for anything worthless.

Later, F.A. was assumed, by those not knowing the origin, to mean 'F**k All'.

Finally, with the 'F word' being as harsh as it is, it is often replaced by euphemism or lesser expletives, which has given rise to the variations you mentioned.

Hope this helps.

FumbleFingers
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Karl
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    Well thanks for taking the trouble to respond, but I'm afraid the relationship with Fanny Adams derivation is actually the other way round. She was murdered in 1867, but Google Ngram shows the formation was common long before that. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=damn%20all,%20fuck%20all&year_start=1700&year_end=1900&corpus=0&smoothing=3 – FumbleFingers Apr 03 '11 at 15:22
  • Interesting. Thank you for the correction. Must be one of those awful Urban Legends that we learn to be true, since I have heard that explantation many times. – Karl Apr 03 '11 at 15:27
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    After further inspection, I see that the graph you presented is not really accurate, given context. Looking at the usage, you will see that all of them as I can see are as part of sentences such as "..plants f**k all nourishment from the crop..." and are not used in the same sense as this question deals with. – Karl Apr 03 '11 at 15:32
  • A list of examples from a variety of years, taken from the link provided by @FumbleFingers : damn all persons who entertain any errors - damn all those that do not hold it - damn all that are not of their communion - ..which fck all they have from thence - fck all the serious humours they have from their veins - – Karl Apr 03 '11 at 15:36
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    @Karl Millson: Your diligence is a much-needed reminder to me not to accept at face value anything that seems to back up my preconceptions. In a futile (and unworthy!) attempt to discredit your point, I checked a 1960 use of sod all by Dickens - but it's just an OCR error... [1]: http://books.google.com/books?id=OW4HAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA123&dq=%22sod%20all%22&hl=en&ei=5aSYTbbUKoit8gPCmLAX&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22sod%20all%22&f=false – FumbleFingers Apr 03 '11 at 16:58
  • Thanks, @FumbleFingers. With that in mind, I hope the explanation given helps answer your question. – Karl Apr 03 '11 at 17:14
  • Well I guess it does, but because of my earlier ignorance and the way voting works on this site, I don't seem to be able to reverse my misguided downvote at the moment. Even so, I'd like to think MrHen's point helps explain how the expression actually gained traction, irrespective of how it got started in the first place. – FumbleFingers Apr 03 '11 at 18:15
  • Fair enough. And yes, @MrHen's answer does seem quite nice. Though, I think it fits more as an attack, when written as 'fck everyone/everything' (just like 'Fck You' would be), and not really as the given meaning of 'nothing' as I can't see 'fck' fitting as a negating prefix - in fact to the contrary, it often acts to exaggerate: 'he was fck tall' would mean very tall, not short. – Karl Apr 03 '11 at 19:33
  • I'm afraid I really did used to think the Fanny Adams stuff was an urban myth. I'm still hopeful someone may help shed more light on why this particular expression became so widespread, but there seems little doubt as to the origin itself. – FumbleFingers Apr 05 '11 at 15:30
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    @Karl: while you’ve certainly debunked @Fumblefingers’ debunking, the Fanny Adams derivation still has very much the whiff of folk etymology/urban myth about it — I’d be much happier to see some source for this. – PLL Apr 05 '11 at 17:10
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    The OED confirms that Fanny Adams for naval mutton etc. goes back much further than anything else in discussion — 1889 is its first citation. But in the sense of “nothing”, it’s very inconclusive: fuck all is cited from 1916, (sweet) Fanny Adams in this sense from 1919, damn all from 1922, sod all and bugger all much later. It’s completely non-committal about the relationships between these, only saying that sweet Fanny Adams is “sometimes interpreted as a euphemism for ‘sweet fuck all’ in the same sense.” – PLL Apr 05 '11 at 17:45
  • Thanks for more info that might not have been easy to come by. My underlying question stands, and I'm heartened that I don't wonder alone. I still feel a bit bad that Karl's answer has -1. It's not (provably, thus far) wrong, and to most it presumably represents 'the answer' unless and until that changes. I'm just looking for a different class of answer. – FumbleFingers Apr 06 '11 at 00:02
  • Confused as to how this has now fallen to '-3'? – Karl Apr 07 '11 at 04:30
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    @Karl: I guess the reason for the downvotes is that there’s a big wariness here of turning into a site which just spreads urban myths further. The discussion in comments backs up that this is at least pretty plausible. But the original answer looks exactly like the kind of thing that spreads the urban myths — repeating a colourful story, with authoritative-sounding phrasing (“It is widely accepted that…”, “It is further thought that…”) but no actual sources, data, or evidence. If you edit the answer to incorporate some of the evidence from comments, I guess it will go down much better. – PLL Apr 09 '11 at 16:08
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    @Karl: (cont’d) I think the key point is to be completely clear about which parts of the answer are well-backed-up, and which are personal speculation or uncorroborated folklore. – PLL Apr 09 '11 at 16:16
  • @PPL: Your points are very well stated. I have long felt that the Internet itself has an inbuilt bias to promote rather than debunk urban myths - skeptics.se excepted, of course! Not that I particularly disbelieve the Fanny Adams stuff now anyway, as I hope I've made clear. My downvote was (eventually, after some misplaced discursiveness) because it smacks more of description of relevant particulars rather than explanation of process. – FumbleFingers Apr 15 '11 at 15:23
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Not to make things worse... but... I've begun to wonder if there was at one time (since the meanings/usage seem to have diverged) a link between F.A. (as Fuck All) and Fucking A. Nothing particular suggests this but the obsurity of origin of both FA and F'n A give me an itch.

If FA and Fanny Adams can be linked, with Fanny being pretty well documented to have military origin, I note F'n A seems to be believed to have military origin.

Here we have a reason to get rid of censorship... it interferes with the studdy of words.

Mark
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  • I dunno. It seems to me the form "That's fucking A* [man]"* is much more recent (maybe late 1980s?). No meaningful connection with sweet FA which goes back about a century earlier. – FumbleFingers May 25 '14 at 14:43