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It was not until Miss Poubelle went away to college in the North that she met her first frigger-- the roommate who described our dorm as a frigging dump, the food as frigging swill, and in general, anything he disliked as a frigging something or other.

"Frigging"for him served as a largely meaningless intensifier-- a politer version of "fucking" or "damned." The Internet shows many instances of such an intensifying usage: "I'm so frigging bored", "A frigging lawyer", or "too frigging cold" are typical citations.

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It was not till recently that Blanche thought to check the history and meaning of "frig." When she did so, she was surprised to discover that frig is an old term meaning 'to masturbate'. That's a use that seems to be almost completely obsolete, at least in American English.

In its earliest uses, frig originated as a verb meaning 'to move about restlessly', as in a 1598 quote "Marke how Seuerus frigs from roome to roome" (meaning 'Notice how Severus moves restlessly from room to room'). In this sense, frig seems to be very similar to the modern word "fidget" (and to an archaic variant of fidget, "fidge").

Frig was also used in some older sources to mean 'rub', and this seems to be the logical conduit between fidgeting and masturbation, since rubbing is a nearly essential part of masturbation.

From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the most common usage of frig referred to masturbation. The Earl of Rochester in 1680 wrote of some sad soul, "Poor pensive Lover, in this place, Would Frigg upon his Mother s Face." Hardly a pretty sentiment, but quite an image!

We see a similar use by the poet Robertson, who wrote in 1749 "So to a House of Office... a School-Boy does repair, To... fr his P there." The 18th century was not quite so bawdy as the 17th, so Robertson had to use initials in the last line of the verse instead of writing out "to frig his prick there."

Frig continued to be a popular term among the Victorians. The author of My secret life, that diary of a lifetime of sex, wrote around 1888, " I have frigged myself in the streets before entering my house, sooner than fuck her."

Use of frig for 'masturbate' seems to have gone into decline in the early 20th century-- there are a few citations, but they seem to be in fixed or idiomatic sorts of phrases, and in general it's hard to be sure that they truly refer to masturbation and not sex generally.

What shows up much more frequently, beginning in the early 20th century, is the use of frig as a epithet, roughly equivalent in meaning to 'mess up, screw (up)'. The first instance in the Oxford English Dictionary is from James Joyce (1905), when he wrote in a letter "Cosgrave says it's unfair for you to frig the one idea about love, which he had before he met you." We see many other examples of this use from the 20th century, including a 1958 example from the mystery writer Ed McBain, " 'He's telling us politely to go to hell.' 'Well, frig him,' Monoghan said."

Frigging in the way the word is used today first shows up in 1922, again from James Joyce, "Doing that frigging drawing out the thing by the hour." A similar use is found in John Dos Passos in 1930, "When does the friggin' boat go?"

But for most modern speakers, there's no longer any connection in meaning between frigging and masturbation. In current English, the word fucking has acquired a large range of intensifying meanings that have almost no connection to sex-- too fucking cold, un-fuckin-believable, and so on. The same thing apparently happened to frigging, but then the sexual meanings faded away, leaving only the intensifying usage.

Fans of the recent movie Master and Commander: The far side of the world may wonder if there is some etymological connection between "frig" and "frigate," the term for warships like those that show up in that film. But, alas, the words have different histories. Frigate is borrowed from a French word, and the phonetic similarity to English frig is just an accident.

Still, given the all-male crew of the ship in that movie, and the famous associations between sailors and sodomy, it's not too difficult to come up with some appealing fantasies that combine frigging and frigates. Perhaps Chi Chi LaRue could persuade Russell Crowe to demonstrate his mastery in some future sequel?