I’ve had my fair share of laughs in the 3 years of studying in my uni, but what we were showed today takes the cake:
This is an archaic form of s, a long or medial s (ſ), used until the end of the 18th century. It looks quite like an “f”, don’t you think?
And here is ſ used in a book from 1817. Yes, that first letter in the word shortens. Now, I wonder what would happen if we searched on Google for a word with an “f”, in the books from, say, the 17-18th century? For instance, the word fuck?
oh. oh no.
And here they are, the words Google’s software detects as “fuck” in a dictionary from 1674. Featuring such gems as “fuckt up”, “A fuckling”, “A giving of fuck”, or, my favorite:
“fuckled by a wolf”
Needless to say, these machine trancriptions have never been checked by an actual human, but honestly, I think they’re perfect just the way they are.
