Filthy English, page 17
Oddly, shit – which is, after all, something really, really real – is often used to imply the unreal. No shit! Are you shitting me? Bullshit! Which is exactly the same thing as horseshit but not chickenshit (scared) and not batshit either (mad).
Shit: it’s our first product. Psychoanalysts place great significance on our relationship to our own shit. For them, a child’s ability to shit or not shit is the first major act of control in a world which till then has been entirely beyond their control. No wonder the word has such a vast possible range of meanings.
It is, though, one of the select few words banned from the English Parliament. Using one of these words, by mistake or on purpose, will result in your being asked to retract it by the Speaker of the House. If you refuse to, you will be asked to leave the chamber. Always, with no chance of appeal. Well, almost always. On Monday, 8 January 2007, Fiona McTaggart, the MP for Slough, used shit in a speech about the contents of her constituency’s sewers. Which was okay, it turned out. It was a mirror image of Bono’s problem with the word ‘fucking’. When he said that word on US TV, he was okay because he’d used it in a non-sexual way – which, inherently, could not be obscene and was therefore fine. McTaggart MP was okay for the exact reverse reason – because she was talking about the thing itself rather than the word itself. Shit as the shit we shit. That’s not ‘unparliamentary language’. If, however, she’d used the word not literally but metaphorically, she’d have been in trouble. Shit! say. Or: isn’t the weather shitty? Well, that would have been ‘unparliamentary language’ and she’d have been ordered from the chamber. As she would have been if she’d accused another MP of being a liar or suggested ‘false motives’ or misrepresented something they’d said or used ‘abusive or insulting language’. Such as? Such as calling them a blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, ignoramus, liar, rat, sod, swine, stoolpigeon, traitor or wart. Or if she’d accused them of doing ‘crooked deals’ or having taken drugs.
The Celtic ‘shite’ is the same word, merely a variant, perhaps an older one. The odd thing, though, is the way it’s been taken into standard English in recent years. Personally, I blame Shane MacGowan, lead singer of the Pogues. I knew him before he was Irish, when he was an amusing, irritating little big-mouth, not long out of the elite Westminster School and helping out on a record stall in Soho Market. It was the late 1970s and his accent was still mostly Lahndan – though, as he drank and slurred almost as much then as he does now, it was hard to be certain.
He used shite. Not just as a word but as the word. He used it incessantly. This was shite, that was shite, and that, too. Not only did he use it all the time – he invested it with the poetic quality that the land of saints and scholars can bring to even the most daily of daily English. Shite gave rhythm and shape to his speech. It was the defining word and sound in the MacGowan idiolect.
I’d heard other Irish speakers talking shite, of course. When I spent a summer with my Irish family, the place was waist-deep in shite. Never before had I heard so much shite, from motormouths of all ages. Gobshites (1948), all of them. No-one ever stopped talking in my mother’s hometown of Portalington. For a population of a few thousand, the town had more than forty pubs. They needed that many for them all to have a chance at talking – according to age, inclination and quantity of stout consumed – complete shite, utter shite or complete and utter shite.
Shane MacGowan didn’t get the British talking shite all by himself, of course, but he was the point-man for a certain kind of Irish culture. Britain was slumped in a depressive view of itself through the 1980s and early 1990s – particularly the political left and the bohemian masses, both of which saw themselves as exiles in their own country, Thatcher’s victims. They looked beyond the Channel and the Irish Sea for emotional props. They wore keffiyehs, they drank Nicaraguan coffee and they took to using the word shite a lot – as if they were Irish (with their republican opposition to ‘the English state’) or Scottish (with their vehement socialistic antipathy to ‘Thatcher’). Shite was always standard in Scots English. But you didn’t hear it that much, particularly when in England. For years now, though, it’s a rare Scot’s conversation that doesn’t include the word. I wonder if Scots started feeling that the Irish had stolen one of their words from them and so started using it a lot to re-establish a sense of historical ownership.
There was an authenticity to shite. Which is not just a fantasy – though it is that, too, of course. Shite does have a different sound to it. The vowel is longer and more nuanced than shit’s. The final consonant is somehow softer. Shite sounds more, well, more philosophical. For young Englishmen and women, talking shite went along with celebrating St Patrick’s Day when you weren’t even Irish – and with buying Pogues records, too. To be Irish was to be cool, Finn MacCool. From being a bunch of ignorant bog-trotters (the classic English view), the Irish became a kind of anti-bourgeois oppositional force. The not-English. Irishness became a font of all the good things in life, particularly night-life. Within weeks, it seemed, there were Irish bars – and all the paddywackery that goes along with them – everywhere. Not just in England but everywhere you went in the world, there was a pub with a name that started with a capital O and an apostrophe.
Yet now, the word shite has faded again from English English. I wonder if it’s a Celtic Tiger thing. So long as Ireland was a poor, beaten-up quasi-theocracy on the fringe of Europe, its partying status was secure. When it became a major base for US multinationals and started making real money, it also started looking all grown-up and serious, like the rest of us. It’s hard to put ‘shite’ and ‘leverage’ or ‘pension plan’ in the same sentence. Unless, of course, you are actually Irish. And the MacGowan feller would never foul his mouth with such abominations as ‘leverage’ or ‘pension plan’.
There are turds, too, and crap. Turds are almost as old as shit but have been thought rude for a few hundred years longer. It’s also possible that nerd, for an overly studious student, is a euphemism for turd. In the 1950s and 1960s, nurds were American testicles – though dictionaries make no link to the newer nerd. Crap, despite having a distant Latin mother in crapula, is considered just as vulgar. It’s certainly not, though, derived from the surname of Mr Thomas Crapper, the Victorian sanitary-ware pioneer. Crap, as synonym for shit, preceded the arrival of the toilet bowls with his name on by a few decades at least.†
More than just about any other body part or product, our anus and our faeces have been wittily transformed by rhyming slang. Pony: pony and trap: crap. Richard: Richard the Third: turd. Two bob: two-bob bit: shit. Winnie: Winnie the Pooh. Tom tit: shit. And judgement: Judgement of Paris: aris: Aristotle: bottle: bottle and glass: arse. Truthfully, the only person I ever heard use judgement was pop singer Ian Dury, a man of such linguistic facility and so many verbal felicities that he may well have made it up on the spot. Only the meanest mind could not be charmed, though, by such a spectacularly contorted derivation – particularly from the mouth of a polio-victim who’d commonly refer to himself as a raspberry. Raspberry ripple: cripple. Aris itself is certainly a common-enough buttocks-word and bottles are lost in the politest of company – with the fundamental origins of the phrase rarely known.
Shit happens (1983) everywhere. Shitting, too, obviously. When anthropologist Donald E. Brown’s studies of humankind throughout the world (and history) led him to the concept of a Universal People, one of the things he found that we all have (and have always had) in common is a ‘discreetness in elimination of bodily wastes’. None of us have – or have ever had – much good to say about shit, it seems. Understandably so. Shit is dangerous, it does spread diseases. In fact, our collective attitude towards shit seems to have long preceded Dr John Snow’s belated, nineteenth-century proof that putting it in our drinking water was a scientifically demonstrable way of spreading cholera.
Human constant that it is, though, shit is not the same everywhere. German uses scheisse almost as much as that other Germanic language, English, uses shit but the emphasis is different. It’s somehow more physical, more redolent of the actual stuff and generally negative. Anscheissen means to shit on, literally and figuratively. It also means to scold, to berate, to tell off, to bollock or even to report. Not just any old reporting, though, but a particular kind of reporting, as in Er schiss mich bei der Polizei an – he reported me to the police. Bescheissen, which also translates as to shit on, means to cheat. Beschissen is shitty, fucked-up. A Klugscheisser is a smarty pants, not as clever as he talks.
Ukrainians separate shit into four distinct grades. In descending order of awfulness: d’ermo, srach, hivno, kaka. That last word is familiar, isn’t it: from the French caca to the English cack. My friend Mick, who has spent his work-life escorting groups of travellers all over Europe, tells me it’s everywhere. ‘Wherever I’ve been anyway. It’s common to nearly all European languages – except Basque, Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish.’ None of which has a proto-Indo-European root.
French merde is not at all the same kind of shit as the English stuff. Merde is welcome at all but the most fastidious of dinner parties. It’s barely stronger than: Well, bother! Canadian French shit differs, though. The Quebecois word for it, marde, is as strong as English shit. The Spanish stuff, mierda, is a little stronger than the French but not much – as the English have shitty weather so the Spanish have tiempo de mierda.
Italian has both stronzo, the most common violent insult in the language, and merda, used for something of no value. If you want to call someone a piece of shit, try ‘tu sei un pezzo di merda’. Yiddish goat-droppings have given us nothing: bubkes. Dutch has the phrase volgescheten palingvel, a shit-filled eel-skin – i.e. a skinny person. Dutch shit has given us poppycock. Poppekak: doll’s excrement. Poppe: like poppet. Kak: cack. As in the Geordie: I nearly cacked meself. Or cack-handed for left-handed. Or the Old English cac-hus.
No-one calls it a cack-house any more but it’s a good one, isn’t it. It does have a certain ring – particularly if you’re one of those who like a bit of punch to their word for the place where they go to, well, go. As with all our words related to these private bits of our bodies and their products, we lurch almost blindly from the maiden-auntly euphemistic to the aggressively dysphemistic, from the little boy’s room to the shitter, from the powder room to the crapper. Broadly speaking, these euphemisms tend to be used by women while dysphemisms are at their most common among groups of men. To euphemize is, of course, an attempt to deny the very existence of such basic human essentials. To dysphemize is to insist, more or less violently, on all our base humanity. As in that wonderful dysphemism, he thinks his shit don’t stink – or, maybe even more powerful, she thinks her shit don’t stink.
There are national differences, too. Americans have, to British amusement, long favoured elaborate euphemism – comfort stations, bathrooms etc. The British, to American amusement, favour loo. Not at my schoolhouse by the loo, though. There, it was always the bogs – and at my home, its singular brother, the bog. The Irish favourite, jakes, is old, from 1538, of uncertain origin but probably from the male name Jack or the French Jacques – making it a cousin of the later, American john (1932).
As compulsory members of the school’s army cadet force, once a year we went on (also compulsory) camp where we were shouted at by real soldiers. They taught us about shitters and lats – short for latrines. Maybe it was at camp, too, that I first heard the word karzy†. To the OED, it’s a variant of the Italian casa, for house – or brothel. Allan and Burridge disagree: they think it’s from a word meaning work in the East African language Kiswahili that was brought back by soldiers – the link is with the work of digging latrines.
They also offer their own etymology for loo. It’s not the one that links it with making sure you pee from the lee (lew) of a boat. Nor is it from gardez l’eau. It’s certainly not a mistaken 100 on a hotel toilet door. Nor is it the hoary tale of Lady Louise Hamilton. On a visit to Dublin in 1870, a card with her shortened name, Lou, is meant to have been placed not on her bedroom door but, in error, on the adjacent toilet door. Nor, say Allan and Burridge, is it from Waterloo – though there is a link to the second part of that name, the French word for water, l’eau. For them, it’s from bourdalou(e). This derivation may or may not be right but the story behind it is itself worth a detour. The word bourdalou being absent from the OED, their main source is the definition in Fleming and Honour’s 1977 Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Art. A bourdalou is an eighteenth-century ‘type of oval slipper-shaped urinal or chamber pot intended mainly for the use of ladies when travelling, sometimes said to have been carried in a muff’. It took its name from a Jesuit preacher at the court of Louis XIV, Père Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704). His sermons were extremely popular – Voltaire was a fan and he was described as ‘le plus grande orateur dont le siècle se vante’. So the fancy would turn up early to get a good seat – hence the portable potty. (The Catholic Encyclopedia entry on him does not mention this other use of his name.)
Such places – the places we go to go – have also long been epicentres for the lexicon of scatalogy. Much of what is known about Latin slang and swearing comes from what was written on the brothel walls of Pompeii. Fortunatus futuet anthusa is still there from 79CE. Fortunatus fucked Anthusa. On 11 August 1929, American philologist Allen Walker Read, on a journey to Yorkshire, recorded this near Ripon cathedral:
One would think
By all this writing
That Shakespeare himself
Had been here shiting
I’ve seen much the same verse more than once over the years and, even though most of the graffiti collected by Read was American, I’ve been struck by how much of it was familiar to me. I’ve seen many of the same phrases and gags in English public toilets. I thought I’d collect some contemporary examples of lavatorial philosophising and see how – or if – it had changed. So, in the summer of 2008, I let my curiosity, professionally, lead me into a succession of public toilets in the South-west of England.
Like Read, I ‘did not go out of the ordinary course of my trip in order to collect the material, but … merely copied down whatever came to my attention as opportunity offered’. Or, as things turned out, opportunity didn’t offer. A six-hundred-mile round-trip, with another two hundred or so miles of side journeys. I studied the walls of toilets in motorway services, petrol stations, art galleries, museums, university buildings, parks, cafes and pubs. I didn’t find one piece of graffiti. Cheap ceramic tiles and half-hourly checks seem to have done for graffiti. No rhymes of think and stink, of walls and balls. No drawings of genitals, accurate or otherwise. No promises that Janet (or John) would be available for oral-sexuality at a given place, date and time. Not one piece of lavatorial artistry, wit or idiocy. All gone, banished by glassy surfaces, wiped away by J-cloths and Cif. Nothing.
Finally, almost by cheating, I found one, small example, in the Princess May Recreation Ground in Penzance. It’s a field opposite a school. There’s a skateboard bowl and a toilet with a separate bin for needles. Schoolchildren, skate punks, junkies – I figured there had to be some graffiti. There was, though not in the toilet. It was on the cream-painted wall children use to shelter themselves from the wind when enjoying a cigarette and a can of cider. I copied it down, on 21 August 2008. ‘John fucked his dog’, it said. Only it was half-scratched out and a different hand had written: ‘He shagged his rabbit.’ A week or so later, I returned to see if any new hands had added any new observations on John’s sexual adventures. The wall had been repainted.
One thing that reaches right across our language for all these excretory acts and products is an indisputable childishness. Poo-poo, ca-ca, wee-wee: the same nursery-age reduplication that is so universally common for breast-words. Little wonder really: from the breast to the potty, it’s the first chapter in all our autobiographies.
Which leads me to pants. It would have been sometime in the mid-1990s when I first heard the word ‘pants’ used as an adjective. My oldest friend Steve used it. Our children were at school together, in St John’s Wood, and we were waiting in the playground. We were talking about a film or a TV programme or a football match, something like that, the kind of things males talk about in school playgrounds, from the age of eight or so onwards.
‘Pants!’ said Steve, about the film, TV show or football match. He said it as if I’d know what he meant. I didn’t and I did. I’d never heard the word used that way before. Till then, pants had meant either heavy breathing or underwear – at least as far as the far side of the Scilly Isles, when it switched to meaning trousers. But I could guess what Steve’s ‘pants’ meant. They meant: rubbish! Only not in a bad way. Well, not in a very bad way. In a childish kind of way. And sometimes we all want and need to express distaste in a childish way – generally when we want to express a childish distaste but are adultly wary of admitting its childishness.
