用字母頂替那個不說出口的字
同一個字母，被拿來當那個髒話的替身；聽的人照樣補得出來，所以力道幾乎沒有減少。
verb · C1
A milder stand-in for the strong swear word 'fuck'. People say eff, effing or effed when they want the force of that word without saying it in full.
髒話 fuck 的替代說法
核心畫面
You can think of this 'eff' as one small move: say the letter instead of the word. F is the first letter of a word many people do not want to say out loud, so they stop at the letter and let the listener finish it in their head. The name of that letter, written out, is 'eff'. Everything else here is built on that move — 'effing' in front of an angry noun, 'eff off' thrown at someone, 'effing and blinding' describing a stream of it. The cloth over the word is thin, and it is meant to be: the hearer is supposed to know exactly which word is underneath.
可以想成這個 eff 只做了一件事：把字母說出來，代替那個字。F 是很多人不想說出口的那個字的第一個字母，於是話只講…更多收起
可以想成這個 eff 只做了一件事：把字母說出來，代替那個字。F 是很多人不想說出口的那個字的第一個字母，於是話只講到字母就停住，剩下的讓聽的人自己補完。這個字母的名字寫下來就是 eff。後面所有用法都疊在這一步上：effing 放在生氣的名詞前面、eff off 丟給對方、effing and blinding 形容一連串的髒話。蓋在那個字上的布很薄，而且本來就要薄——聽的人本來就該知道下面是哪個字。From the word’s history
The Wiktionary entry supplied in this packet derives the rude verb 'from the name of the letter f, the initial letter of fuck', and points to 'pee' as the same kind of formation. The noun sense is given as an alternative spelling of 'ef', the letter's name.
這份資料說粗話的 eff 來自字母 f 的名字，也就是那個髒話的第一個字母，並拿 pee 當同類例子。名詞用法則被記為 ef（字母名稱）的另一種拼法。可以想成整組意思都從「只說字母」這一個動作長出來。
Wiktionary entries for 'eff' (etymology 1 noun; etymology 2 verb) supplied in this evidence packet (source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:573387704 and :573390160)
One branch
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
effverb詞源 2/ɛf/
- 1
slangSynonym of fuck.
- Eff off!
- And he kept saying, "Effing this, effing that."
effverb詞源 3/ɛf/
- 1
To put into words; to express.
- […] and perhaps also because what we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail.
- They, no more than we, found it hard to eff the ineffable, but they, you see, needed to console themselves more.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。