I once asked one of my English teachers about why in old documents from the 18th century the s’s were often printed as f’s. He quoted the line from a poem in which the word sucks was used as a joke. I don’t remember it at all. I’m wondering if anyone knows it. I feel like it had something to do with bees. I’m not sure.
Where the bee sucks, there suck I
In a cowslip’s bell I lie
There I crouch when owls do cry
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
(The Tempest)
Up to the mid-1800s, there was in English what was called the “long s”, which looked liked the letter “f”. More here.
In the Usenet comic strip forum I frequent, there was much discussion of an instance of censorship of a Zits strip as it appeared in the Los Angeles Times. In the strip, Jeremy was mowing the lawn, and used teh mower to carve the words “This sucks” into the lawn (I believe you actually saw only “This suc…”). The version in the Times changed Jeremy’s complaint to “This stinks.” Shortly afterwards, when someone had written a Shakespearean parody, I added this:
Scene II: A room in Stratford-on-Avon
Enter Willie the Shake
WILLIE: It seems the silly buggers at the Times
Compel me what I’ve written to revise,
For certain words are filthy in their eyes,
Thus, from The Tempest I efface my crimes.
'Tis not the fearsome Caliban whose speech
Doth lily-livered editors affright,
But gentle Ariel, that airy sprite
Whose happy song they foolishly impeach.
And yet, what milder 'spression may I try?
I have it! “Where the bee stinks, there stink I…”
I’ve always been kinda proud of that.
And here, from an even more authoritative source:
Just to clarify, in case anyone still thinks that the use of the medial s was to make a pun.
Suck was always used literally, as in The Tempest quotation. It did not have a sexual connotation probably until the 20th century. Nor did it have a metaphoric negative sense until late in the 19th century, long after typographic reform.
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxsuckbe.html
The medial s was not supposed to be used at the front of a word, either, so even inadvertently it wouldn’t be taken for an f. Of course, nobody who grew up in those days would ever take it for an f in the first place.
So the OP’s teacher was just messing with the minds of the youth. I applaud this on general principles, and because it gives the Dope a never-ending raison d’etre. 
<Applauding Biffy> A fine satiric parody, and so it is, truly; and very notably discharged. 
I was thinking about this today. In forums like IMHO and MPSIMS, male Dopers often declare how they feel fellatio is one of the greatest pleasures of life, a major desideratum in a relationship. They also seem to believe that most men feel this way. If so, why is an act so loved by most men used as a term of abuse? 
Maybe because of homophobia, because fellatio was once primarily associated with gays?
I’m recalling the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. It was written in the 1970s, based on the '60s, and satirized American Zeitgeists from the 1920s to the '50s. Near the end of the book, George’s Mom says a homophobic slur. George retorts: “You mean cocksuckers? Some of my best friends are cocksuckers, Ma.” (And then Wilson inserted a parenthetical remark that George had to face death and giant sea monsters, and battle cosmic evil, or something like that, before he could get up the courage to talk back to his Mom that way.)
That data point of literary evidence suggests that in the '50s or so, cocksucking was attributed to gays. According to this hypothesis, which I just thought of, after porn became more widely accessible because of relaxed mores in the late 1960s, and the film Deep Throat became a notorious succès de scandale in 1973, men realized they could get women to suck their cocks, and it no longer carried a gay stigma. But the expression of homophobic background, no longer connected to its original meaning, stuck in popular slang.
Philologists know that lots of words and expressions started as a metaphor or allusion to something else, but are now fossilized and their original connections forgotten.
Well, to paraphrase Bill Bryson, why do we say “Get fucked!” as an insult, or tell people to “go fuck themselves”, an action that, supposing it were possible, would cause nothing but pleasure to the person thus addressed?
Johanna, what you write is wishful thinking at best. The stigma of homosexuality has barely lifted in American society. In fact, calling something “the gay” is the leading current insult among youth. Thinking that cocksucking is an activity that only females do or that having a male do so is anything other than an offense, a power play in prison, or a horribly disgusting event, is a delusional attitude when applied to the majority of American men in the majority of American cultures. You may wish this not to be true, but I don’t understand how you could spend five minutes online in most forums without being beaten over the head with this reality.
And it is because cocksucking is so pleasurable when a woman does it that homophobic men find the thought of gaining pleasure from a man’s doing so a particular abomination.
Some things have changed. Some people have changed. But culture changes very slowly.
Wow. I had no idea that the conversation would come to this…
My understanding is that the long s was used initially and medially and the short s was used finally. And the examples from Wikipedia and the other sources here seem to confirm that.
True, Orginally it wasn’t, hence the medial part of the name, and its use as part of a ligature wouldn’t put it at the start of a word. Custom did vary as to time and place, however.
So at the time you are speaking of, was the short s used initially?
What the Wikipedia article doesn’t explain is why the long s is called the “descending s” when in its Roman form it has an ascender and no descender and in its italic form it has both an ascender and a descender. Wouldn’t “ascending s” make more sense?
As I recall, there is actually one ambiguity over the long s/f in The Tempest: After Ferdinand finds out who Prospero is and what’s going on, he implores (IV,i,122)
In other words, Prospero (his new father-in-law, if he marries Miranda) is wondered and wise, and because of his wondrous and wise magic, the island is a paradise.
At least, according to some versions. Given the similarity of the letters, that line could also be
In other words, Prospro is wondered, and Miranda is too, and because of both of them, the island is a paradise. Personally, I prefer the more romantic second interpretation (it’s Miranda he’s in love with, and the place where his love dwells should be paradise even without a great FIL), but the first seems to be more prevalent.
Nitpick: not “crouch”, “couch”, as in French coucher. Ariel isn’t hunkered down in the cowslip blossom, he’s bedding down there at night. (Although I suppose he could also be hunkered down to hide from those predatory owls, but AFAIK the accepted reading is “couch”.)
I know, that was a typo I noticed immediately after hitting “Submit.” I was hoping no one would notice
The long s was used initially in Shakespeare’s day. More importantly, it was used as such in the first published version of the ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’ line in the First Folio.
No, the problem to the theory gitfiddle’s teacher mentioned is more obvious. The Tempest is a play. The line was meant to be heard, not read. In fact, it isn’t even obvious that Shakespeare would have expected that The Tempest would ever be printed - after all, it wasn’t printed during his lifetime and he would probably have been surprised that anyone would published his collected works after his death. So, to him, what the word looked like was probably irrelevant.
That ‘suck’ had any sexual connotations is also unlikely. The examples given by the OED are all very much later. Then there is the issue about whether fellatio was actually that common in this period. This is obviously almost impossible to establish. But some literary critics have been struck by what they consider to be the relative absence of it from the sexual innuendo in early-modern English literary works.
That leaves the question of whether Shakespeare was just punning. Which reduces it to the level of <snigger>, <snigger>, ‘suck’ sounds a bit like ‘fuck’, <snigger>, <snigger>. Possible, but impossible to prove one way or the other.
Chronos’s example is rather different, as that’s involves a possible misprint. For the compositor to confuse a long ‘s’ or an ‘f’ in the manuscript being set was an easy and quite common typesetting mistake.
My understanding is that it was not always a mistake, as such. In some cases, typesetters used f and long s interchangeably and in some cases, there wasn’t a separate type for long s.
It wasn’t always a mistake, but the exceptions you mention were very rare. Most compositors did distinguish between them because not to do so looked unprofessional and most sets of type in the standard fonts did have both. In contrast, misreading the copytext while setting at speed can be shown to have happened all the time. Particularly when the misreading made sense, or, more to the point, seemed to make sense to a compositor who probably wasn’t paying that much attention to the meaning of the text anyway.