A synthetic word forced by editors onto authors during the days of strict censorship in the publishing industry as a replacement for the expletive "fuck", it usually is seen in novels published in the 1940s and '50s. While
Ernest Hemingway resisted resorting to "fug", his fellow Nobel Prize winner
John Steinbeck did use it. The word "fug" was most sensationally used in
Norman Mailer's 1948 best-selling war novel "The Naked and The Dead".
"Doc, that's a fuggin' lie," Mac said.
--
John Steinbeck, "Cannery Row" (1945)
The actress Tallulah Bankhead claimed she met
Mailer at a party and said, "So, you're the guy who doesn't know how to spell fuck." (The story is sometimes told with
Dorothy Parker as the speaker.) Mailer told an interviewer he never met Tallulah Bankhead, and in any case he knew how to spell four-letter words--the euphemism was used in order not to offend the sensibilities of readers in 1947.
