Filthy English, page 15
Around the world, similar analogies are made. In Mexican Spanish, testicles are, variously, avocados, meatballs and pumpkins. A Georgian mother or father might, as an endearment, say to their son: ‘Šen qverebs venacle’. Literally, it translates as ‘Let me be your balls’. A Majorcan Catalan oath is ‘collons de deu’, testicles of God. A common farewell in Dutch is ‘de ballen’, the balls. The idea is: be careful out there – in particular, with your testicles. When the Dutch want to slur their middle-classes, they call them klootjesvolk – people with tiny testicles. And when a Farsi-speaker wants to insult someone, they might tell them they have tukhmih jin – the testicles of the jinn (a kind of non-angelic angel), meaning a clever dishonest person. The assertion is that you are, at least partly, non-human.
Having got to here, having made my way through all those many, many penis and testicle words, I found myself stuck. I couldn’t figure out where to go next. For the longest time, there was a big gap in this chapter, right here, where these words are now. At first, I only sensed something was amiss. Then I realized something was missing. But I still had no idea what that something was. I finally found it in Brooklyn, on a Sunday afternoon in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It’s in the Brooklyn Museum, on the fourth floor along with a handful of preserved seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses. To get to it, you have to pass a parental warning sign. Its centrepiece is Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. ‘The first truly monumental work of American art, conceptualized by a woman to survey the contributions of women to western civilization,’ says a sign by the entrance. The day I visited was the gallery’s second anniversary. There was a lecture about women’s judo in America going on in an adjacent room.
I’d seen the piece when it came to London in the 1980s but not since. I looked at the thirty-nine ceramic vulval dinner plates. Kali’s is purple and white. The one for Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth-century abbess composer of ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’, features, with depressing predictability, a stained glass window. Elizabeth I’s is purple. Poet Emily Dickinson’s is pink and lacy. Virginia Woolf’s is knobbly and giant – they get bigger and bigger as the present day approaches. Georgia O’Keefe’s looks like one of her paintings, of course.
On the way out, I had a look in the shop. There were no Dinner Party mugs or T-shirts, not even postcards. Vulvas are still clearly that shocking in Brooklyn. It was then I realized what was missing from where these words now are. It was penises and testicles. Or, rather the representation of penises. Or, to be even more specific, the representation of pricks and dicks and cocks. All that cunt art, by Tracey Emin and Sam Taylor-Wood, yet – Gilbert and George aside – where’s the prick and dick art? The word ‘cunt’ and images of vulvas are constant art world presences – a feminist or at least feministish perspective on anatomy, destiny, psychology and sociology etc. etc. But it’s impossible to imagine a modern male equivalent, isn’t it? The Cerne Abbas giant’s giant penis, yes. A dinner party table of penises, no. A ‘cunt’ necklace given by a gay male pop star to a straight one, yes. A ‘prick’ bracelet given by a straight male one, no. Obviously, given the history of the occlusion and elision of female sexuality, both object (vulva) and word (cunt) carry weight that male parts and words don’t. But still … ‘While men and women alike think little of constantly dismissing the male genitalia as silly, funny and of little consequence,’ wrote Deborah Orr in her 2006 Vogue piece on ‘The C-word’, ‘everyone at least acknowledges that the female sexual tackle is powerful and complex and important.’
As swear words and curses go, the slangonyms for penises and testicles have remained obscene, but not obscenely so. You wouldn’t call someone a prick on TV but it’s far from being the same thing as calling them a cunt. Essentially, penis word insults generally indicate foolishness that can’t be helped. Testicular insults indicate stupidity, particularly knowing stupidity. That the word ‘bollocks’ has seemingly been subject to more days in court than, say, cock or dick or prick is, I’m sure, primarily a result of the fact those penis words can and do mean other things whereas bollocks are bollocks are bollocks. Of all the swears in this book, penis and testicle ones seem not to have changed much in their offensiveness. Fuck has certainly become more publicly acceptable over the past thirty years but prick and cock and balls and bollocks are still pretty much where they were when the Sex Pistols released Never Mind the Bollocks – and ended up in court for it. There just doesn’t seem to be much movement in these words’ power and potential to offend.
At least that’s what I thought till the day after my Brooklyn epiphany. I was having lunch with Ira, the man who first published my writing. He’s now a broadcasting executive, with an office in Radio City Music Hall. We were in a barbecue joint just off Times Square and talking about dicks. Over chopped pork sandwiches and Brooklyn Brown beer, he said: ‘And isn’t “suck my dick” so much more powerful when it’s said by a woman to a man?’ This was a new one on me. It’s obviously an American usage, one that upturns the language. You can immediately see just how offensive it is. Its anatomical impossibility is surely what gives it its power. ‘What kind of women say that?’ I asked. ‘My ex-wife,’ he said. ‘To you?’ ‘No, to other men.’
† Kicking against the pricks has nothing to do with penises, by the way. Those pricks were sharp sticks that kept oxen in their place. So someone kicking against the pricks was someone resisting authority but harming themselves in the process.
† You can, though, feminise it to une con, in which case it means homosexual. There was once a semi-public row between the French Marxist philosophe, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst whose name is often pronounced in English as if he were Monsieur Le Con – and who kept hidden in a cupboard in his house the world’s most famous painting of un con, Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (now in the Musée D’Orsay). Lefebvre felt Lacan’s analytic treatment had really harmed a friend of his. So he told Lacan he was un con. In response, Lacan told Lefebvre he was une clune. A clown. Lefebvre could have called Lacan une con, of course, but one French thinker would never do that to another French thinker. He’d sooner call him an Anglo-American empiricist.
† Often spelled schmaltz. Yiddish words can be spelled that way but ‘sh’ makes more sense to me. It is, after all, Yiddish not Deutsch.
‡ In Poland, they also have shmaltz on restaurant tables, only it’s pig fat, and it’s called smalec.
† In The Life of David Gale, the Kevin Spacey character claims that a shmuck is the foreskin – i.e. the bit left over from the briss, the ritual circumcision. This is not true. A shmuck is a shmuck is a penis.
Chapter Four
Anuses, Faeces, Urine and Excreta
My secondary school was next to a toilet. Or rather, I went to the schoolhouse by the loo. That was a line in our school song, belted out (under duress and threats of detention) at each term’s first and last assemblies (plus high days and holy days). The song was late nineteenth century, I should imagine – that was when the school was founded. The tune was muscular, Christian. The words were part English, part Latin. The Latin was in the chorus: floreat sodalitas, dalitas pardorum. This translates, loosely, as: may brotherhood flourish, particularly amongst us leopards – a reference to the animal-skin trading company that endowed the school. There was another Latin line of pure public schoolery which translates as: sentiment is more than skill.
There were three verses. All I can remember of any of them is one line: ‘the School House by the Lew’. It rhymed with ‘blue’ and never failed to raise a giggle when we sang it, of course. The masters never failed to tut black-gowned disapproval. Again and again and again, we were told that this Lew was not a loo. It had nothing to with either excretion or urination. It was a reference to the school’s topographical position. Lew, the black-gowned masters told us, was a variant on lee, as in the lee of a hill or a ship – i.e. the side that faces away from the wind. Which raises two thoughts. One, the school wasn’t actually on a hill at all so there was nothing it could be in the lee of. Two, one theory about the lavatorial loo is that it is a derivative of the nautical lee/loo – i.e. if caught short at sea, it’s the side all sensible people choose to piss over. So we giggling pupils were right all along. There was a link between Lew and loo. Words slip around. Like people.
Throughout the world and its history, mankind and womankind have used their most intimate bodily parts and functions for oaths, curses and swears. We are all clearly as attached to the meaning and significance of these parts as we are to the parts themselves. As with penises and vaginas etc., humanity has, by and large, taken to using as swears words for those two other anatomical parts that are common to all humanity – our anus and the fatty, muscly bits surrounding it. Plus the words for the liquids and solids which come out of us – but not all of these secretions and excretions, though. Piss off, yes. Snot off, no.
I’ll start at the end, all our ends. At the beginning, too, with the first letter of the alphabet. The English have had arses for at least a thousand years, according to the first OED citation. Americans have had them since the English arrived there. Arse or ass, it’s the same word, just pronounced or spelled differently. It’s the basic English word for it, derived from a common Teutonic root word – as is the German arsch. Your ass (or mine) has nothing to do with donkeys – that’s from another ancient word which appears in the Latin asinus and the French âne. Arse/ass is far from the only English word with this twinned form. There is also, for example, girl/gal, tit/teat and, of course, curse/cuss, all of which have also been found on both sides of the Atlantic.
Shakespeare preferred ass. It gave him more opportunity for puns. Yet, though the English arse was there well before Guillaume le Conquérant crossed the Channel and Frenchified our language, the word has rarely appeared in print. It never even got started in print terms. Presented with Le Morte D’Arthur, the first great English printer, William Caxton (?1422–1491), cleaned out its arses. In the story of the Fair Maid of Astolat, Sir Lancelot has been attacked with a cudgel, so violently that it has become embedded in his side and has to be pulled out. The earlier ‘Winchester manuscript’ version has ‘the blood burst out, nigh a pint at once, that at last he sank down upon his arse, and so swooned down, pale and deadly’. Caxton changed it to ‘upon his buttocks’. Why did he do it? Possibly for commercial reasons, not wanting to threaten sales by offending potential readers. In his prologue to another book, the great printer wrote, wearily, ‘Certaynely it is harde to playse every man bycause of dyversitie and chaunge of langage.’ It’s there in Swift but its first modern appearance was in Somerset Maugham’s 1932 novel The Narrow Corner. ‘I’m pretty nimble on my feet, but I nearly come arse over tip two or three times.’
We’ve had arseholes since 1400 – nostrils are contracted noseholes, incidentally. And we’ve been arsing about since 1664. Other uses are surprisingly modern. According to the OED, we’ve only been arsing things up since 1979. Its first citation of ‘arse’ for fool is 1968. For ‘my arse!’ it’s 1933. We’ve only been arsed – or not – since 1988, though we have been arsey (bad-tempered) since 1953 and arse-licking since 1912. ‘Load of arse’ and ‘arse!’ as alternatives to ‘fuck!’ and ‘shit!’ – they’re also both new. Bunch of arse, too.
The Jamaican ‘rass’, though, that’s old, with an OED sample from 1790. ‘Then missess fum me wid long switch, And say him da for massa; My massa curse her, “lying bitch!” And tell her “buss my rassa!”’ It’s from Manners & Customs of the West India Islands by J. B. Moreton.† The word itself is a piece of metathesis. ‘The transposition of sounds or letters in a word’ according to the OED, which first records it in 1538. That is, the back-end of arse switched places with its front.
In all those thousand years of British arses, though, the English were never at all concerned by French ones. The French word for arse is cul – as in the pun of Oh! Calcutta!, and in LHOOQ, the letters that Marcel Duchamp added, along with a moustache, to his version of the Mona Lisa. LHOOQ: elle a chaud au cul: she’s got a hot arse. Bad English-speaking drivers can find themselves caught in a cul-de-sac – arse-end of a bag. The fashionable (or unfashionable, according to taste and calendar year or week or day) can choose (or not) to wear culottes – arsers.
The alphabet’s second letter is notably rich in arsonyms. Which came first, though? Behinds, possibly, though not in that sense. The word itself has been around since c. 1250 but the OED’s first citation with the arsical meaning is a wonderful late-eighteenth-century piece of loucheness. ‘Two young Ladies … with new Hats on their heads, new Bosoms, and new Behinds in a band-box.’ It’s from The Lounger, a ‘Periodical paper published at Edinburgh in the years 1785 and 1786’. The word itself is a collapsing of ‘by’ and ‘hind’ in the sense of back – hindquarters, for example.
Buttocks arrived around the same time as behind, c. 1300. In The Reeve’s Tale, Chaucer describes the miller’s pug-nosed but fair-haired twenty-year-old daughter as having ‘Buttokkes brode, and brestes round and hye’. She’s the one whose bed and body Alan, the Geordie Cambridge student, enters without permission, three times that night. Clearly, buttock is derived from butt the same way as ballock/bollock is from ball – with the addition of the diminutive -ock suffix. But the ock-less butt only made its first written appearance nearly two centuries after buttock’s debut. A c. 1450 cookery book has ‘Tak Buttes of pork and smyt them to peces.’
Backside is a euphemism – it’s been around since 1500 or so. The earliest example is ‘With an arrowe so broad, He shott him into the backe-syde.’ It’s in Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads, now extant, relative to that Celebrated Outlaw (1795), which was put together by Joseph Ritson. Bottom, first noted in its arse meaning in the late eighteenth century, is a metaphorical borrowing of a word for the lowest part of a surface or a valley – as in that centre of power in Washington DC, Foggy Bottom. Bum, therefore, cannot be short for bottom as it preceded it in the language. While the first English bottom didn’t occur till 1794, the first English bum was in 1387, in reference to some poor arse’s piles. It’s probably onomatopoeic – your posterior is the most bumpable bit of you. Shakespeare uses it in Measure for Measure. When Pompey informs Escalus that his surname is Bum, Escalus replies: ‘Troth, and your bum is the greatest thing about you.’ Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796) recorded bum-fodder, a wonderful word for toilet paper. We still use it – rarely suspecting its scatological history – in its shortened form of bumf, meaning needless bureaucratic documentation. The American bum, for a no-gooder, is from the German bummler – someone who strolls.
Botty (1874) is, obviously, short for bottom, as is the Caribbean batty (1935). Oddly, the American booty was recorded as a sex-act word thirty years earlier (1926) than as a bottom diminutive (1959). The newest of these B words is probably the visual analogy, buns (1960).
And so to a quick-step through the rest of the alphabet, starting with C. Chuff dates to 1947 and is of unknown origin, nothing to do with the chuff in ‘He’ll be chuffed to his bollocks’ in Pinter’s Homecoming. At H, there are heinies – more common in the US than England and from neither German nor Yiddish but the backside of ‘behind’. J gives us jacksie (1896), from the name Jack – in its everyman meaning, of Jack Tar etc. K is for the Americanism keister (1931), a word of unknown parentage. At P, we have prats – first noted in a 1567 guide for swearers, as ‘peddlar’s French’ but of unknown origin. Tush, that is from Yiddish. It’s a Yinglishism of tochis, as in ‘tochis afn tisch’ – ‘arses on the table’ – the brutally witty Yiddish equivalent of the English injunction ‘put up or shut up’. W gives us wazoo (1961), American and again of unknown origin.
There is also ‘super-duper’. I’d long known that dupa was the Polish for arse and wondered if there was some kind of link. My friend Thomas, who teaches English to foreign students, raised the possibility that it emerged during the Second World War, when a lot of Polish soldiers and flyers were based in England. Perhaps, he suggested, English or American troops heard a Pole use the word dupa in the presence of an attractive women. They might not have known exactly what it meant but they’d have sensed its licentious intent. Then, much the way rhyming slangs are created for fun as much as anything else, someone added the common rhyming intensifier, super. So dooper, a word otherwise unknown, entered the language. As my father talked about berks and as the radio show A Proper Charlie elicited no complaints, so children of all ages became able to say ‘super-dooper’, sweetly innocent of its fundamental origins.
Keith Allan and Kate Burridge are Australian academics, university lecturers in linguistics. Both have lots of hair and wear glasses. In the late 1980s, they recruited a bunch of the usual subjects for social sciences experiments, university students and junior staff. They asked them which body parts they would mention freely in front of others – not the words for them but the actual part, so it’s a matter of anatomical squeamishness not bad language. The ‘least freely mentionable body-part’? The vagina – only 7 per cent of the study’s subjects said they’d be happy talking about it to anyone but a doctor, lover or close friend. Even more interesting and pertinent was the male–female split – 10 per cent of men were happy to talk about vaginas compared to just 5 per cent of women. Nor was it a matter of ownership – talking penis was okay for 25 per cent of men and just 8 per cent of women. In all, ‘women are somewhat more circumspect than men in speaking of such body-parts’. Private parts. Overall, the anus was the second most unmentionable, with 11 per cent – okay to 25 per cent of men but only 6 per cent of women. Even the mouth was only freely mentionable by 97 per cent.
They also handed out a list of the stuff that comes out of our body – all our bodies – and asked subjects to rate the things on the list in order of disgustingness, on a five-point scale. Ratings had a cultural variation but everyone found something revolting. To be human, it seems, involves feeling distaste for one’s own products. Let’s take Allan and Burridge’s hit parade of revoltingness in reverse order. Firmly anchored at the bottom were tears. In next to last place came breast milk. Then came hair clippings, blood from a wound, breath and nail clippings. Till this point, no-one reported being upset by the thought of these human by-products. After that, though, people started to feel revolted. So, next up was spit – to which 50 per cent of subjects just said no. Having stood in a shower or two of spit at a punk show or two, I can only suggest its low rating is related to lack of direct experience.
