Wednesday 9 April 2014

Is H a dirty letter?

I was reading a book "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering". It said there that the author would've wanted to call the book "Fifty-Five Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts and a Few Fallacies", and people would then call it "The F-Book". But the publisher said that F is a dirty letter, and while D and H are also dirty, F is clearly the dirtiest letter of the alphabet and this is unacceptable.

I can understand why F is a dirty letter, and I can also somewhat understand why D is a dirty letter, but I have really hard time coming up with any frequently used dirty words that begin with H. The only ones I can think of are "ho" and "hump", but I think I'm missing something... native speakers (or non-native speakers), please help me out!