You’ve probably heard someone use the phrase ‘getting rogered’, to mean going through something unpleasant or being chastised for something. I had a conversation with a friend recently where she used the word and while I’ve heard it used before, something about the context or the way she said it, made the word stand out, and I found myself pondering its origins.
The two contexts in which I’d come across the word were as a name (Roger), and the verb, the way my friend had used it.
I like to try and guess word etymologies before I look them up. In the case of rogered, I began with two assumptions: 1. That it was related to the name ‘Roger’ (I safe assumption, I thought) 2. That it’s use as a verb was a fairly recent one (based purely on the fact that I could’t remember seeing it in any period movies or books.
My guess was that it was derived from a particularly powerful/dominant ‘Roger’, some famous warrior, general, or perhaps even an athlete? (i.e. Andy Roddick got totally Rogered at Wimbledon).
I looked it up, and while my reasoning was pretty far off the mark, both the name and the verb are related. Roger’s roots lie in the Germanic Hrotger, meaning “famous with the spear”. Hruod (fame or glory) and ger (spear) are its roots.
You can probably see where this is going now.
The name likely originates from the the literal meaning of the phrase and has been around since the early 1600s. The verb form was first observed around the early 1700s (thought I sincerely doubt that nobody thought of the joke in the intervening 100 years) and means, obviously, ‘To Fuck’.
Now, there is one other situation in which I’ve heard the word used, and that’s in radio communications. When a character in a war movie hangs up the field telephone, he doesn’t say “Theek Hai” or “Ok”. He says “Roger”. That particular usage of the word first appeared during the second world war, and is probably directly connected to the name (which was in common use by that time). The phonetic alphabet used by the United States armed-forces in the 1950s used ‘Roger’ as the ‘R’ equivalent (instead of ‘Romeo’ as they do now). In this case, the ‘Roger’ is shorthand for ‘Message Received’.