Curse Words

Over at Mental Floss they explain the origin of curse words as such-

"A "curse" was originally just a bad type of prayer. Thus, the first curse word was likely "damn," as in asking God to damn someone to Hell, which was considered taboo because of the religious power it wielded.

Condemning people to an eternity of suffering isn’t something to let everyone just go around doing on a daily basis, so the government stepped in, leading to the first censorship laws. Among the first victims was William Shakespeare, whose works were considered quite racy for their time, and not just because he sent his fair share of characters to Hades. The Bard’s plays were littered with sexual innuendo, and eventually, these types of references became swear words as well.

Depending on what the sexual mores of the current generation were, formerly innocuous words could suddenly become unfit for polite company. The Victorians, for instance, instituted the practice of referring to the thigh meat on a chicken as "dark meat" because saying the word "leg" or "thigh" at dinner could be enough to give your hostess a case of the vapors.

And in the 17th century, the "c-word" that formerly referred to a certain barnyard fowl took on another, er, more inappropriate meaning, leading to the invention of words like "rooster" and "weathervane" to keep the newly dirty word from crossing genteel lips. "

As for the orgin of that dreaded, verb/noun/adjective/adverb/interjection, F...u...c...k, here is a good roundup, from the ever clever wikigods

"Early modern English fuck, fuk, answering to a Middle English type *fuken (weak verb) not found; ulterior etymology unknown. Synonymous German ficken cannot be shown to be related.

"The first known occurrence, in code, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, "Flen flyys", from the first words of its opening line, "Flen, flyys, and freris"; that is, "Fleas, flies, and friars". The line that contains fuck reads "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk". The Latin words "Non sunt in coeli, quia", mean "They [the friars] are not in heaven, because". The code "gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk" is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and two vs were used for w. This yields "fvccant (a fake Latin form) vvivys of heli". The whole thus reads in translation: "They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely" (a city near Cambridge). (Available, with minor adjustments to the translation, at The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition). The phrase was coded because of its meaning; it is uncertain to what extent the word itself was considered acceptable.

Other possible connections are to Latin futuere (hence the French foutre, the Catalan fotre, the Italian fottere, the Romanian fute, the vulgar peninsular Spanish follar and joder, and the Portuguese foder). However, there is considerable doubt and no clear lineage for these derivations. These roots, even if cognate, are not the original Indo-European word for to copulate; that root is likely *h3yebh-, ("h3" is the H3 laryngeal) which is attested in Sanskrit (yabhati) and the Slavic languages (Russian yebat`, Polish jebać, Serbian јебати (jebati)), among others: compare Greek "oiphô" (verb), and Greek "zephyros" (noun, ref. a Greek belief that the west wind caused pregnancy). However, Wayland Young (who agrees that these words are related) argues that they derive from the Indo-European * bhu- or *bhug-, believed to be the root of "to be", "to grow", and "to build". [Young, 1964]

Spanish follar has a different root; according to Spanish etymologists, the Spanish verb "follar" (attested in the 19th century) derives from "fuelle" (bellows) from Latin "folle(m)" < Indo-European "bhel-"; ancient Spanish verb folgar (attested in the 15th century) derived from Latin "follicare", ultimately from follem/follis too.

A possible etymology is suggested by the fact that the Common Germanic fuk-, by an application of Grimm's law, would have as its most likely Indo-European ancestor *pug-, which appears in Latin and Greek words meaning "fight" and "fist". In early Common Germanic the word was likely used at first as a slang or euphemistic replacement for an older word for "intercourse", and then became the usual word for "intercourse". Then, fuck has cognates in other Germanic languages, such as Middle Dutch fokken (to thrust, copulate, or to breed), dialectical Norwegian fukka (to copulate), and dialectical Swedish focka (to strike, copulate) and fock (penis). A very similar set of Latin words that have not yet been related to these are those for hearth or fire, "focus/focum" (with a short o), fiery, "focilis", Latin and Italian for hearthly/hearthling, "foc[c]ia/focac[c]ia", and fire, "focca", and the Italian for bonfire, "focere". But these words came from New Latin, centuries after Middle Dutch.

There is perhaps even an original Celtic derivation; futuere being related to battuere (to strike, to copulate); which may be related to Irish bot and Manx bwoid (penis). The argument is that battuere and futuere (like the Irish and Manx words) comes from the Celtic *bactuere (to pierce), from the root buc- (a point). Or perhaps Latin "futuere" came from the root "fu", Common Indo-European "bhu", meaning "be, become" and originally referred to procreation."

In conclusion, everyone has been saying fuck since the 1500's, or at least fukka.

For more information about fuck The Wikipedia article goes on for quite a bit more. You should also have a look at the Maledicta Journal, a scholarly journal dedicated to bad, bad words, published by Reinhold Aman [wiki] (a colorful character himself!).