Filthy English, page 12
Somehow though, despite several invites to see it, I’d missed it. Maybe I avoided it because I was worried I’d feel awkward or that I’d be put out by what I imagined would be its obviousness. I’m not sure I felt at all confident about being in a theatre full of people gleefully breaking their own boundaries. Or, even worse, being gleeful about their boundary-breaking.
Somehow, too, I’d not noticed quite how wide its reach had spread – way beyond its downtown arty origins. The theatre in Truro was no marginal arts venue but a recent National Lottery-funded refurbishment of a former picture house right in the middle of the city. The Hall for Cornwall is the centre for all kinds of arts activity for the whole of England’s most western county. Over the following couple of weeks, it would host Maasi warrior jumpers, Robert Cray’s blues, the Cornish proms, a Noel Coward play, a children’s show and All You Need Is Love (‘A FAB celebration of the swinging sixties! Beatlemania is back!’).
Its Vagina Monologues featured three British TV stars, all familiar from soaps and sitcoms. Two white, one Asian. One working class, two middle-class. One a single mother, one with a politics degree – the same one, the Asian one. All in modest black and bare feet.
The audience, out for the ‘ultimate girls’ night out’? The hall was almost full. Teenagers, middle-aged professionals, what looked like groups of librarians or lawyers, lesbian couples, older women with their husbands, book groups, drinkers, smokers on the quayside at the interval. All were dressed up. A good number were in the Cornishwoman’s traditional summer costume – halter-neck cotton top and Pantone 129 tan. That aside, it could have been a pollster’s cross-section of women in any non-metropolitan town or city.
There were not many men. Aside from me and my daughter’s boyfriend and a few husbands with the older women, virtually none. Yes, it was odd being the odd men out. I didn’t feel excluded, though, just ignored.
It felt like it was serious fun for these women. They had come to break their own boundaries and they sure as hell were going to. They were loud, raucous and determined to laugh. They chanted ‘cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt’. Six nights, eight shows – and the same number of cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt chants. This was happening in a tiny, provincial English city, which is about as far as you can get from London without falling off the edge. But I’m certain it would have been pretty much the same in any number of other small cities and towns in the English-speaking world.
No matter what the surveys say about cunt being the worst word in the English language, it can’t be viewed as truly terrible any more. Not if so many women – so many very different women – can chant it out loud in a public place – the theatre in which some of them would, a week or two later, see CBEEBIES with their children. Our sense of the word’s meaning has clearly changed, is changing. It’s still a cunt, of course, but what we make of that word seems to have changed. Some of the poison has drained from it.
What does this mean? It’s certainly a reflection of wider change. Women are swearing more – and happier doing it. I think it was something deeper, though. Was it a change not just in our words but in our relationship to the parts of ourselves those words represented? I decided it was. These women were significantly less self-conscious about sex than they would have been twenty years ago. Their – and so, I suppose, our – relationship to sex really does seem to be a little less shuttered. I thought of something Eve Ensler said about Tina Turner, of whom she’s a big fan. ‘She’s a woman who fully inhabits her vagina.’ Maybe that’s what these women were doing.
The show pretty much ends with a joke. On this evening in Truro, it was cracked by an actress who I first remember seeing in an early 1980s comedy drama series set in the Second World War. In that show, she played a young girl who, if the subject of vaginas etc. absolutely had to be raised, would have talked about her ‘bits’. This night in Truro, she let the audience quieten, then asked a question, assertively but not aggressively: ‘Did you just call me a cunt?’ A pause. A gasp from the audience. Then, smiling wide, she said: ‘Thank you very much.’ A big laugh. No gasp. Except a silent one from me. Cunt might not be quite mainstream yet but if that’s how a hall full of not-untypical Englishwomen react to it, then its savage power is clearly and rapidly draining away. Maybe the time will even come when the cover of an English teenage girls’ magazine can inform us that all blokes are cunts.
† As the RSC’s 2008 Hamlet, David Tennant made the joke unmissable by putting a long, long pause between country’s two syllables – much to the delight of my friend Rob, an English teacher in Stoke who’d taken his students to Stratford as an evening’s extension and consolidation of their A-level studies.
† An underground press monthly (or so), Oz took its name partly from its Australian origins and partly from the wizard sought (and found) by Dorothy, her dog and her three companions on the yellow brick road. The magazine’s cultural programme was, essentially, more sex, more drugs, fewer police. The obscenity prosecution was for its Schoolkids issue of May 1970, in particular for a sexually graphic version of Rupert Bear, the cartoon stalwart of the extremely ungraphic Daily Express. Found guilty, the magazine’s editors were jailed but then acquitted on appeal. (Dorothy and her friends can also be found in the homosexual chapter.)
† This was not Sam Taylor-Wood’s first piece of work featuring such words. In 1993, she photographed herself in a T-shirt printed with the words ‘fuck’, ‘suck’, ‘spank’ and ‘wank’. The work was entitled Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank. In the Tate Gallery’s view, this ‘may be read as a feminine re-appropriation of terms often used with derogatory connotations against women’.
† Frank Kermode wrote of Lawrence’s attempt to reclaim dirty words: ‘They can hardly be said to have acquired a tender, let alone a numinous quality … Mellors’ use of them, though it may impress liberal bishops, strikes most people as a bit comic, doctrinaire almost.’
† The poem was ‘Vanity of Vanities’, a satire aimed at Sir Henry Vane the Younger, governor of Massachusetts and MP. Vane was beheaded, for treason, on 14 June 1662. Samuel Pepys was there that day and wrote in his diary: ‘in all things appeared the most resolved man that ever died in that manner, and showed more of heat than cowardize [sic], but yet with all humility and gravity’.
† The subtitles of nouvelle vague director Jean-Luc Godard’s first great international success, A bout de souffle, render con as ‘son-of-a-bitch’. For his later, more dyspeptic film, Weekend, it was translated as ‘twit’.
† In that part of the city, there is also a restaurant called Foxtrot Oscar – international alphabet of radio operators for ‘fuck off’. Since 2008, it has been fittingly owned by Gordon Ramsay, host of TV’s The F-Word. The Sunday Times restaurant critic wrote: ‘Foxtrot Oscar is a talismanic example of why a certain style of English public schoolboy will never be fit for anything except dying in braying waves on barbed wire, shagging the staff, doing Sean Connery impressions, singing thirteen verses of the Good Ship Venus and being auctioneers. They can, at a push, also manage to run small, louche restaurants.’
† As someone who, in the course of his work, covered a dwarf-throwing contest, in Croydon, I can attest the accuracy of the image, if not its tastefulness.
‡ The tit in tit for tap has nothing to do with breasts. It’s a variation of tip for tap – with both words meaning some kind of blow. That great biology class giggler, titmouse has nothing to do with either breasts or small rodents. It’s a joining of an old word for a little thing – titta is a Norwegian dialect word for small girl – with another old Germanic word for bird that evolved into the mouse bit.
† Charlie Chester was an old-style British comic, with tightly combed hair and a nose like a plough. Like many another celebrity, he entered the lexicon of rhyming slang – though he may not have known it and if he had he would, in all likelihood, wished he hadn’t. As Gary Glitter for shitter (i.e. toilet), so Charlie Chester for child molester. Some decades earlier, he had his own, presumably deliberate encounter with rhyming slang. He decided to call his radio show A Proper Charlie. Worried about this name, the BBC took advice from Denis Norden and his writing partner Frank Muir. They felt the BBC was taking unfair, unpaid advantage of them. ‘So we told them A Proper Charlie was okay: there was nothing suggestive or obscene about it. The series carried on, life didn’t stop. As far as I know, there were no letters of complaint.’
Chapter Three
Penises and Testicles
As a teenager, I lived in a large village in Sussex. When we first moved there, it was astonishingly culturally isolated – particularly to a snotty teenager used to the high-life and culture of Hemel Hempstead. There were hardly any cars. Lots of people there had never been to London – an hour on the train. Some had never been to Tunbridge Wells, about ten miles to the north. My parents ran a pub so I got to know all kinds of people and all kinds of things. Down the road from the pub was a dell with a few houses in it. A middle-aged man in an old tweed coat and a flat cap lived there. He was a farm labourer, I think. Unmarried, he still lived with his parents. That’s what happens, I guess, when they name you John Thomas.
Nowadays, I suppose this penis name is best-known from Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Mellors’ John Thomas to her Lady Jane. It’s been around for a while, though, at least since the nineteenth century. Why John Thomas? In his great slang dictionary, Jonathan Green suggests an extension from a former meaning of the name – a liveried servant. He explains: ‘like the former, the latter stands in the presence of a lady’. I think he’s pulling my plonker – a penis word since the 1910s, from plonk, hitting something with a wet, sploshy sound.
A good number of penis words involve the naming of the part. The old man, the old feller. Some are purely personal ones. A man called George, for example, might refer to his penis as Little George: I am my penis, my penis is me. Or at least a mini-me. Or from another, perhaps, female point of view: his brain’s between his legs. In the intimacy of the sexual encounter, this naming of the parts is, I guess, another part of the arousal dialogue. (Which might explain why American researchers have found men not named Elvis but who do have a Little Elvis.) Beyond the bed, though, it can be something different. It’s hard not to think that by giving a personality to a penis, you are also giving it autonomy, an independent life beyond the rest of the body’s control. Desire is outsourced and can therefore be partly disavowed. It wasn’t me, guv. In the 1980s, there was a series of comic books about a man and his Wicked Willie. It was a dialogue – mostly about women, of course – between the two. Its irony is that the ‘dreadful little trouser mole’ is by far the sharper of the two brains.
Willie has been around since the late nineteenth century but no-one seems to have satisfactorily explained its origins. It’s surely unlikely to be a contraction of William – even if Margaret Thatcher did pay tribute to her colleague, William Whitelaw by saying ‘Everyone needs a Willie’. I reckon it’s a version of wee-wee and a cousin of that nursery favourite, winkle – the OED has it derived from the chewy little mollusc but I do wonder if it’s a joining of willie and tinkle. There is john, johnny or johnnie. Or rather there was. While john survives as a generic word for a man – as in Alexei Sayle’s 1984 comedy hit, ‘Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?’ – its penile sense has dwindled down to ‘johnny’ for condom, short for ‘johnny bag’ or ‘rubber johnny’. The American penis-word johnson is only indirectly a name. It’s a reference to a large railway brake lever.
There’s percy, as in the 1971 film of that name – it’s a comedy about a penis transplant – and in the Australianism, point percy at the porcelain. And there’s peter, generally in America, rarely in England, thank God. This meant my childhood remained unblighted by my given name – unlike that John Thomas down the road or all those girls called Fanny. Presumably, both peters and percies are minced penises – like fiddlesticks for fuck. In 1928, an American dialectician wrote: ‘The proper name Peter … is so universally used by children and facetious adults as a name for the penis that it never quite loses this significance. Very few natives of the Ozarks will consider naming a boy Peter.’
A peter meter is what doctors call a penile plethysmograph. It measures blood flow, as good an indication of desire as I can think of. It was developed in 1950s Czechoslovakia to check if army call-ups were lying about being gay to avoid being conscripted. The idea was that you could show them a picture of a sexy woman and if the blood started to flow, they weren’t gay. Using it was the idea of Dr Kurt Freund, a holocaust survivor who had just one son – called Peter. Al Goldstein, of Screw magazine, rated pornographic films according to his own peter meter – presumably metaphorical rather than an actual plethysmograph. Goldstein’s peter meter gave Deep Throat 100 out 100. ‘Gulp!’ is all he wrote.
More generally, there’s dick, the favoured word of rappers. ‘Suk My Dick’ entreated Dizzee Rascal in 2007. Strangely, while it has meant fool since the eighteenth century, its first penile appearance was in 1888. Few people realize that the penis dick really is linked to the man’s name Dick even if they sometimes find themselves embarrassed by a mere mention of the name. This penis dick is derived from the name Dick, as in ‘every Tom, Dick and Harry’. That is, like Jack, Dick is a word that just means ‘man’ – as in jack-of-all-trades. A clever Dick is a showy-offy everyman, not an educated penis. A dickhead, though, is a fool who has a penis where his brains should be – as is a dork, a word which, as recently as the 1960s, meant penis but which has since entirely shed its genital origins. Such retrospective amnesia is not unusual. A sucker was once a cocksucker. A jerk was once someone who jerked off. A friend, Lucinda, who was schooled to be a young lady, told me she really didn’t swear. Then, in the next sentence, she described someone as a ‘scuzz bag’ – a condom, maybe even a used one.
Penises and testicles. Almost 50 per cent of us have one of the first and a pair of the second. And, truthfully, we’re quite attached to them. The other half of humanity is mostly quite interested in them, too, at least some of the time. Yet our most ancient words for these well-beloved anatomical parts are also some of our favourite swear words. Penis and testicles: the triumvirate which rules so much of men’s lives: their family jewels, their crown jewels, their tackle, their meat and two veg. Or, from the observer’s POV, their lunchbox.
It’s been said that there are more than a thousand words for penis in English – and at least eight hundred for copulation. Which is interesting. It’s a cliché of linguistics that no language has much time for synonyms. There is, for example, just one word for table – table. We can add modifiers to it – dining table, side table, occasional table. But if we want to talk about something with four legs and a flat, level top, we have the word table, nothing else. The most basic and essential of human acts and equipment, though, that’s different. So many, many words for so few things and acts. They must be really important things and acts.
An Old Englishman could have called it his ‘lim’, the word which evolved into limb, adding an unexpected, pleasing irony to the Victorian taste for euphemising ‘arm’ and ‘leg’ into limb. Another favoured word of Old English-speakers was ‘weapon’. Since then, there has been a whole range of clear and obvious metaphors in which the penis is an instrument of some kind. There are tools, knobs, choppers and rods. Penile tools have been around since the sixteenth century. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, there is ‘some strange Indian with the great Toole’. Foolish tools have been around since the mid nineteenth century. Like so many slang words, the details of their usage can be oddly restricted. You can tell someone being foolish that they’re a tool or a knob or a prick but you’d never think of calling them a chopper. You could tell them to knob off but never to tool off. Chopper is never used to swear. Nor is todger, a variant of tadger – perhaps derived from tadpole.
Prick itself has been around since the sixteenth century. The insertion metaphor is obvious. Only in the twentieth century did prick come to be a favourite word for fool. You can get on someone’s wick, you can dip your wick and you can flash your hampton. Same thing, all three of them, from the same piece of rhyming slang about a west London suburb. Hampton Wick: prick.† You could create a rhyming physiognomy of place names. As well as his Hampton, there’s your Hampsteads, your Barnet, your khyber, your elephant and her Bristols. Hampstead Heath: teeth. Barnet fair: hair. Khyber Pass: arse. Elephant and Castle: arsehole. Bristol city: titty.
Rhyming slang has always been the most masculine of slangs. My favourite theory for its emergence is not the usual one that it was a way of concealing ill-doing from the bobbies, peelers or busies. Rather, it came about playfully, from the linguistic collision that occurred when Irish navvies joined English labourers on nineteenth-century London building sites. Impressed by the newcomers’ legendary – and playful – loquacity and determined not to be outmatched, the locals started to play around with language themselves, using rhyme. So it’s not surprising that it has so many words for masculine things. Allfor: (short for) all forlorn: horn (erection). Almond: almond rock: cock. Early: early morn: horn again. And for male attitudes to female things. Mustn’t: mustn’t grumble: grumble: grumble and grunt: cunt. Braces: braces and bits: tits. Heterosexual attitudes to homosexuals, too. Alphonse: ponce. Ginger: ginger beer: queer. Iron: iron hoof: poof.
Pecker is an American penis word with a hint of rusticness and a great compound-derivative – ‘pecker checker’ for navy doctor. Pecker comes from what birds do with their beaks. I don’t think, though, it’s got anything to do with the British phrase ‘keep your pecker up’ meaning ‘stay cheerful’. That pecker refers to the nose as a synecdoche for the head – as in ‘don’t drop your heads’. It also probably has little to do with the American use of pecker as a slur about poor white southerners. That’s short for peckerwood – as in the New Yorker magazine’s 1989 disdaining of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long as ‘a Peckerwood Caligula’. Dictionaries assure me that peckerwood is a jovial back formation of woodpecker, the idea being that poor whites, like the bird, came from the backwoods.
