windfucker

English

A windfucker or common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus; sense 1) in flight

Etymology

If the term is a compound of wind +‎ fucker, it may preserve an old sense of fuck (“to beat, strike”) which is also found in cognates (for example, Bohuslän Swedish fokka (“to fuck; thrust, push”)) but was otherwise lost from English, and it can be compared to the regional synonym fuckwind. (Wright's English Dialect Dictionary compares fuck in the latter word to fjúka (“be driven (by the wind); fly”) instead, while Liberman says the Norse word "has no [other?] cognates anywhere in Germanic".) However, the synonym windsucker is almost as old, and was rendered in older texts as windſucker using a long s, so some scholars think windfucker is a misreading of windſucker; others think windſucker is a bowdlerization of windfucker. Compare the later term windhover and the Orkney term windcuffer.

Modern attestations of the second, vulgar sense may be unrelated to the bird.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈwɪndfʌkə/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈwɪndfʌkɚ/
• Hyphenation: wind‧fuck‧er

Noun

windfucker (plural windfuckers)

1. (archaic) The common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus).
   • 1598, John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English, London: Printed at London, by Arnold Hatfield for Edw[ard] Blount, →OCLC, page 405:

     Succhia capra, a kinde of bird which is ſaid to ſuck a goates vdder. Some haue taken it for the winde-fucker. [...] Succhiéllo, an augre, a percer, [...]. Alſo a bird called a winde-fucker.

   • 1599, [Thomas] Nashe, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, […], London: […] [Thomas Judson and Valentine Simmes] for N[icholas] L[ing] and C[uthbert] B[urby] […], →OCLC, page 49:

     The kiſtrilles or windfuckers that filling themſelues with winde, fly againſt the wind euermore, for their ful-ſailed ſtanderdbearers, the Cranes for pikemen, and the woodcocks for demilances, and ſo of the reſt euery one, according to that place by nature hee was moſt apt for.

   • 1611, Homer, “The Preface to the Reader”, in Geo[rge] Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. Neuer before in any Languag Truely Translated. With a Com̃ent uppon some of His Chiefe Places; Donne according to the Greeke, London: Printed for Nathaniell Butter, →OCLC:

     But there is a certaine enuious Windfucker, that houers up and downe, laboriouſly engroßing al the aire with his luxurious ambition and buzzing into every eare my detraction [...]

   • 1622 (first performance), William Shakespeare; William Rowley [probably by William Rowley alone], The Birth of Merlin; or, The Childe hath Found His Father. As it hath been Several Times Acted with Great Applause. Written by William Shakespear and William Rowley, London: Printed by Tho[mas] Johnson for Francis Kirkman and Henry Marsh, and are to be sold at the Princes Arms in Chancery-Lane, published 1662, →OCLC, Act IV, scene i:

     Yes, and a Goſhawk was his father, for ought we know, for I am ſure his mother was a Wind-fucker.

     In an 1869 version, the word is indicated as wind-sucker.

   • 1648, Henry Hexham, “een Krijter, ofte Steen-krijter”, in A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie Composed out of Our Best English Authours. With an Appendix of the Names of All Kinds of Beasts, Fovvles, Birds, Fishes, Hunting, and Havvking. As also a Compendious Grammar for the Instruction of the Reader. Het groot woorden-boeck, gestelt in't Engelsch ende Nederduytsch. Met een Appendix van de namen van alderley Beesten, Vogelen, Visschen, Jagerye, ende Valckerye, &c. Als oock, een korte Engelsche Grammatica, Rotterdam: Gedruckt by Aernovt Leers, →OCLC:

     een Krijter, ofte Steen-krijter, A Caſtrill, or a Windefucker.

   • 1991, Geoffrey Hughes, “A Cursory Introduction”, in Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (Language Library), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, →ISBN:

     The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shiterow, and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece.

   • 2006, Michael Longley, Collected Poems, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, page 210:

     I wanted her to scan the motorway's long acre / And the tarmac and grassy patches at the airport / And undress her prey in the sky and beat the air / Above grasshopper and skylark as the wind-fucker.

   • 2008, Sascha Aurora Akhtar, The Grimoire of Grimalkin, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, →ISBN, page 57:

     A cock-up of monumental proportions arming this overgrown embryo & so the stars align & geomancers tell of time being ripe to catch the big fish of desiderare before the windfucker does.

   • 2011, Stephen Moss, “April”, in Wild Hares and Hummingbirds: The Natural History of an English Village, London: Square Peg, →ISBN, page 89:

     As a devout Catholic, [Gerard Manley] Hopkins might have been shocked by an even older name for the kestrel: the wind fucker, [...]

2. (often archaic, derogatory, vulgar) A term of abuse.
   • 1648 May 16 – June 2, Parliament-Kite, volume II, page 9; quoted in Gordon Williams, “windfucker”, in A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, volume III (Q–Z), London; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: The Athlone Press, 1994, →ISBN, pages 1540–1541:

     Let Parliament Jone [nickname of a woman acting as an informant for the authorities to identify seditious or unlicensed printing presses] (the Devills windefucker) flie after me if she can; beware Lewis, I have need to mute.

   • 1667 June 17, Samuel Pepys, “June”, in Robert [Clifford] Latham, William Matthews, editors, The Diary of Samuel Pepys. A New and Complete Transcription, volume 8, London: George Bell & Sons, published 1971, →OCLC, page 275:

     This Hollis [Frescheville Holles], Sir W[illiam] Batten and W[illiam] Penn say, proves a very wind-fucker, as Sir W. Batten terms him; and the other called him a conceited, idle, prating, lying fellow.

   • 1980, Nicholas Grene, “Monstrous Regiment”, in Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière: The Comic Contract, London, Basingstoke, Hampshire: The Macmillan Press, →OCLC, page 117:

     ‘Windfucker’, with all its associations, is Sir Amorous La Foole, (and Sir John Daw for that matter) to the life [in Ben Jonson's play Epicœne, or The Silent Woman]. [...] They are windbags, all talk and no performance. [...] Exeunt windfuckers, disconsolate.

   • 1987, Jack Womack, chapter 10, in Ambient, New York, N.Y.: Grove Press, →ISBN, page 167:

     We speak to the new world, await solution for the trials bespoken. For oppro to set loose over the windfuckers who troubled then and trouble now.

   • 1987 January, Cooper McLaughlin, “The Order of the Peacock Angel”, in Edward L[ewis] Ferman, editor, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, volume 72, number 1 (number 428 overall), Cornwall, Conn.: Mercury Press, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 63, column 2:

     Smart grabbed the man and pulled him close. He stuck his beaked nose close to Smitty's face. "You windfucker. You've been slopping the gin."

   • 2016, Adam Selzer, Just Kill Me, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, →ISBN, page 254:

     What a bunch of windfuckers. But then again, I suppose that when you stay in your small town, you are probably safe from being killed for the sake of being an attraction on a ghost tour.

Synonyms

• fuckwind
• windhover
• windsucker

Further reading

• common kestrel on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “windfucker, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1926.