the heck?

So the other night when I was awake in the middle of the night, I started thinking about heck.

Seriously, the word “heck.” This is what goes through my head at 3:27 a.m.

I’m fascinated by the idea that heck regularly stands in for “Hell” and all the angry, even nefarious, connotations that come with that word, yet somehow manages to maintain a squeaky clean, almost wholesome image. I especially find it amusing that people think they can say “heck” instead of “hell” and somehow by changing two letters—but not the intent or meaning—it will “fool” an omnipotent, omniscient god. “Oh, I was going to smite that young fella there, but he *did* say “heck” while breaking the Fifth Commandment and trashing his parents, so I’ll let it go ….”

Or that media censors make TV shows and movies use “heck” even though EVERYONE watching knows that whoever is using the word really means “HELL. ” Do they think they’re fooling anyone, or that children haven’t heard their parents use worse language? Just ridiculous.

The late, great George Carlin has done a few bits on political correctness and how changing the word we use to describe something, or finding a new euphemism to describe it, doesn’t change the thoughts associated with it. He famously talks about how referring to someone as “differently abled” instead of “crippled” doesn’t really change the situation, and that it’s “a verbal sleight-of-hand” to make it sound like something has undergone some sort of more noble transformation, when in effect, that’s not the case.

So from what “pure” mind did “heck” even spring in the first place?

According to Urban Dictionary, it’s a fusion of the words “hell” and “fuck.”

It is used by saying “What the heck!” as a stand-in for hell or fuck but is really worse than saying “What the hell!” or “What the fuck!” You are really saying “What the hellfuck!”

“Hellfuck?” Really? That’s new to me. Let me officially call “Shenanigans!” right here and now as I sincerely doubt the veracity of that definition. Then again, who the heck am I to argue with such a learned source as Urban Dictionary? Nonetheless, I’ll be putting that in my back pocket for later; even if it’s a completely made-up answer as I suspect, it’ll still be fun to break out “Oh, HELLFUCK!” at the proper moment.

One source I found suggests that “heck” was first recorded in 1865 as a polite euphemism for hell—the Oxford English Dictionary claims its first appearance was “Well, aw’ll go to ecky, he cried,” with a clearer use in 1887: “What the heck are yŏ up to?”

Another source suggests that the word is Scottish:

hech is a Scots interjection of surprise or shock, and is ultimately the same word as hey (or heigh).

I found a little more corroboration that it might be Scottish—although that doesn’t make it all that much clearer.

Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary

• n Heck hek (Scot.) a rack in a stable for hay, &c.: a grated contrivance for catching fish: a contrivance in a spinning-wheel, and also in a warping-mill, by which the yarn or thread is guided to the reels

And to dig even deeper, here’s a definition from the 1828 edition of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, which might dispute the idea the word first appeared in the 1860s …

HECK, n. [See Hatch.] An engine or instrument for catching fish; as a salmon heck.

1. A rack for holding fodder for cattle.
2. A bend in a stream.
3. A hatch or latch of a door.

Sooooo …. what does all this determine? Not a heckuva lot, other than the word has a muddled past. It appears to have had a start referring to various actual objects that indicated some sort of impediment, and then seems to have evolved from there, taking on a negative connotation along the way.

Still, no matter how it got here, I still do find myself using it on occasion.

For example—the other day buddy Steve actually texts me: “Putting on my orgy shorts—where are you? I’m getting warm over here. Mask is hot.”

Now my first instinct would be to exclaim, “What. the. HELL?!” (as it might be yours), but to me, that sort of just adds another pained voice to the nightmarish chorus of horror that’s already been raised. But a measured response of “What the heck?” takes me to a different place, one sort of straddling acceptance of the disturbing and a desperately-wishing-to-be-earnest denial. Like, if I can force myself to be gee-whiz-golly wholesome, it somehow keeps me on the high road, well above the horrid mental image that has been thrown at my mind’s eye ….

Or not.

Oh, hellfuck!