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Gotta love how they write an article about the word fuck yet censor it throughout the article.
Yes they quote fuck verbatim but censor shit and fuck when they say it. Sidenote: Oh what a world when deplorable violence and torture and borderline pornographic scenes are okay to show on TV and yet swearing is very taboo (I first realized this watching the show Firefly)
s/what a world/what a USA/

In the UK (for example) the rules are significantly less unbalanced.

Isn't the Mail a UK publication?
Yes, but my comment was in reply to a comment about TV.
It might be software-based; the clbuttic mistake. My favourite clbuttic error was "consbreastutional"...
Similar to this is the "cupertino" effect: there's a number of examples in the first few minutes of this episode of RadioLab (and a few more scattered throughout):

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91721-oops/

IT's when a legitimate word is mistakenly auto-corrected or switched out by a filter - apparently named after the word "co-operation" being mistakenly corrected to be "Cupertino". One of the examples given is a christian website which bowedlerised* the word "Gay" to "Homosexual" and posted an article about talking the 100m sprinter "Tyson Homosexual"

Apparently it's now known as the Scunthorpe Problem for obvious reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
I hoped this adjacent HN discussion [1] was about a new updated version of the word fuck, but was disappointed:

F* reworked and released as v0.9.0 (lambda-the-ultimate.org)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10217199

It’s not certain yet that this is an antedating. OED editor Jesse Sheidlower calls it ‘putative’: https://twitter.com/jessesheidlower/status/64305138542510899... and slang lexicographer Jonathon Green concurs but finds it probable: https://twitter.com/MisterSlang/status/643060037221515264

If it is, it’s big news. But bear in mind that ‘John le Fucker’, recorded 1278, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Fucker) would be a further antedating from a personal name if it were somehow to be confirmed as a use of the word.

FWIW, the antipenultimate paragraph mentions le Fucker and its ambiguity.
I have to admit that after reading this thread, I did a double-take when I saw another post on the home page:

"Ask HN: Anyone in NYC area want to --ck?"

There's an even earlier record of a man named John le Fucker from 1278. It's unclear whether this is an instance of the word "fuck", or whether it's just a variation of some other surname like Fulcher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Fucker

I think the story here is it's first use in a sexual context. As you say, John le Fucker's name is probably just a corruption of another word.
Perhaps it was an early example of a movable typo :)
By the time it got to a court case obviously it was long since established as normal. Therefore the oldest use must predate 1310.
Indeed, we modern people are incredible pussies when it comes to the more entertaining usages of certain words. If you applied today's political-correctness filters to medieval (or older) language, all you would hear was a single long beeeeeep.
I dunno...I'd imagine it wasn't too much different (barring the introduction of broadcast and other mass communication). There was polite, "courtly" speech and there was "vulgar", common speech. Just like today, you can go to any bar or playground or even plenty of workplaces and hear people swearing or using other language among their peers which would deemed impolite in other situations. In the same way, medieval citizens probably wouldn't call the local lord a fucker to his face or swear in church (or to their grandma) but they certainly did among peers.

How you talk to friends versus how you talk to those in positions of authority or respect is probably one of the first examples of "code switching" many of us learn as children.

And they also broke people on the wheel. Usually progress is a good thing.
Re-capcha that identifies this writing would be cool.

I'd spend time just on a recapcha page if it helps digitise this stuff.

We changed the URL from http://www.vice.com/read/this-historian-just-found-the-oldes.... The story came up a couple times over the weekend and (strange as this may sound) the Daily Mail version seems to be the best source.
First time for everything...
This might be better: http://www.medievalists.net/2015/09/10/the-earliest-use-of-t...
That one seems to contain less information.

If the Daily Mail is the best source, the Daily Mail is the best source and HN should have it on the front page regardless of its reputation. A similar recent case was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131399.

Not that this should necessarily be HN policy, but I think I'm probably not the only person who would prefer to read it from a marginally worse source than give page views to the Daily Mail.
On the other hand, getting visitors from HN wouldn't necessarily increase any revenue for them as being the nerds that we are, I doubt that many of us use a browser without an ad blocker ;)
So the 'Daily Mail' makes the front page of HN. Interesting times.
I can't click on principal. UK red tops are toxic here and contribute towards an ill-educated society that eats up propaganda without even chewing.

Not to be a _total_ buzzkill...

It happens every few months. See https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dailymail&sort=byPopularity&pr... .
For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge
In the words of Vice President Joe Biden, "This is a big fucking deal."