Filthy English, page 18
How pants come to mean rubbish was also easy to figure out. As the White House stands, synecdochally, for the President and Downing Street for the prime minister, so pants stands for shit – a geo-anatomical relationship. Not that this is apparent to everyone. Though students in Croft Dutton’s study of university evangelical groups, were, as you might expect, vehemently anti-swearing, some at least were regular and enthusiastic users of ‘pants’ – as marked in the paper’s title, ‘Bog Off Dog Breath! You’re Talking Pants!’
It’s not easy or straightforward working out what the right words to use are – as I found out when I hit my thumb and shouted ‘Fuck!’ Words and their infinitesimally subtle meanings shift, constantly and uneasily, according to location and personnel. Poo-poo might be fine at home, but it’ll get you smiled at, indulgently, by the teacher and teased for a decade or two by your fellow pupils. Shit might be just the word with your mates but not something you’d want to say in front of girls. A simple poo might be okay with teachers and girls but you wouldn’t want to use it in front of your mates. That’d put you right in the shit.
That’s not a personal memoir but it could easily have been. Like all of us, I am sure I only missed such ignominy by the finest of margins. A misplaced vowel or syllable here or there and I could have been stuck with a nickname dogging my entire school-life. Slowly or a little less slowly, every child learns that there are words to use at home, words for the wider family, words for the playground, words for the schoolroom. They learn, too, that the words should be kept apart, that they’re not just different sounds for the same thing. They might seem to mean the same thing but they don’t.
When my two older children were at primary school, I was struck by the chants and rhymes they sang and skipped to in the playground. Some had changed since I was their age. Some were just the same. Together, we collected as many of these rhymes as we could. We wrote them down and made a little book of them, with pictures. I remember one in particular:
Miss, miss
Gotta go piss
Don’t know where the toilet is.
Three lines, one rhyme, thirteen words. Yet it’s all there: the essence of a child’s first, anxiety-suffused encounter with the wider world. The recognition of a new authority figure – miss, not mum. The discovery of new words and their power. The fear that they’ll wet themselves. The challenge of a new world in which you don’t know where something as basic as the toilet is. Knowing when and where to announce you’re off for a wee-wee, a wee or a wazz is a big thing. Exploring and figuring out the delicate boundaries of language is one of the great tasks of the primary school child. It’s not really about the words themselves, of course. It’s the relationship expressed and given shape and emotional content by those words. No-one is more sharply conscious of the need to put childish things away than the young child. ‘All margins are dangerous,’ wrote Mary Douglas. ‘Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its specially vulnerable parts.’
Ta-ta, da-da. Good morning, dad. Bye-bye, wee-wee and willie and nu-nu. Morning, piss and dick and fanny. Goodbye, poo-poo and botty. Hello, shit and arsehole.
† This book is described as ‘An abolitionist tract. Poorly written. Pictures the condition of the slaves and the moral state of the whites in darkest colours.’ It inspired its own book-length response three years later, The Lying Hero by Samuel Augustus Matthews, presumably an anti-abolitionist. Matthews dismisses Moreton as ‘an ignorant, disappointed adventurer’.
† Particularly popular in the world of football – said variously of an Oxford supporter striking club owner and grandiloquent thief Robert Maxwell, of Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson being attacked and racially abused by a homeless drunk at a railway station, of Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough punching an unruly spectator, of Manchester United player Eric Cantona drop-kicking a Crystal Palace supporter (in his seat). Further back, in the world of theatre and My Fair Lady, it was the comment supposedly made by Stanley Holloway (Mr Doolittle and a famously nice man) when Rex Harrison (Professor Henry Higgins and famously, well, a shit) got himself walloped for rudely refusing to sign an autograph.
† Craps, the dice game? I’ve seen two different derivations, neither having anything to do with its vulgar homonym. One suggestion is that it’s a variant on crab eyes, the name for the game’s losing throw, a pair of ones. The other is that crap is a word for money and craps is a game involving money.
† Or khazi, as I always spelled it, seeing a link with another military import, the Urdu-derived khaki.
Chapter Five
Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers†
It was sometime in the early twenty-first century. I was sitting at my own dining table, with Pearl and Jean, old friends of my wife and so of mine, too. Both Pearl’s and Jean’s parents migrated to London from the Caribbean island of St Lucia. They’ve been friends since childhood. I’ve known them since they were teenagers and I was a decade or so older. My wife was their dance teacher at school. They now have careers, partners, children, mortgages etc.
We were talking about something, I can’t remember what, but it was lighthearted, inconsequential. In response to something either Pearl or Jean said, I interjected: ‘Your mum.’ Nothing more than that. The room went quiet. Pearl looked at me. Jean looked at me. I looked at my wife.
‘Pete!’ said Pearl.
‘Pete!’ said Jean.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You know what,’ said Pearl.
‘I don’t.’
‘Pete!’ said Jean, irritatedly. I realized she thought I was deliberately teasing them. I might well have been, but I wasn’t. I really had no idea what they were on about.
So I said: ‘What?’
‘Come on, Pete. Stop it. You do know: your mum.’
So again, I said: ‘What?’
They turned to my wife. ‘Tell him!’
‘What?’ she said.
‘Your mum,’ they said.
‘My mum?’ she said.
‘Your mum,’ they said.
‘What’s my mum got to do with this?’ she said.
‘Not your mum,’ they said. ‘Your! Mum!’
And that’s how I first came across ‘Your mum!’ A simple two-word phrase that is an ultimate insult for a generation of London school playgrounds. Not round where I live, though. I checked it later with my children and they were as ignorant of ‘your mum’ as I was. Not that our pleasant and liberal neighbourhood is without its nastinesses. When Pearl stayed with us for a while, she was shouted at in the street more than once, for not being white.
A few weeks later, I was sitting in the entrance hall of a west London Catholic boys’ secondary school. I was interviewing the deputy head about an environmental project. We were doing the interview in the entrance hall because there was nowhere else to sit. It was that kind of place. It wasn’t the kind of Catholic boys’ school that prime ministers fight to get their sons into, more the kind that caring parents fight to get their sons out of.
As we talked, we were surrounded by what was clearly endemic, low-level, noisy chaos. Suddenly, the basic, daily noise and chaos ratcheted up a couple of notches. Two young teenage boys were swept past me. I guess they were twelve or thirteen years old. Surrounded by an attentive group of friends, they were crying inconsolably. They weren’t obviously timid or small for their age. They didn’t look like victims in search of a bully. They were just regular black teenage boys in black blazers and floods of tears. I asked the deputy what was going on. ‘Oh,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘Just a couple of “your mum” incidents.’ Then she shrugged – nothing to worry about or even think about, this stuff happens every day. She assumed, blithely, that I knew what she was talking about.
A ‘your mum incident’? What’s that when it’s at school? One child had said to another child: ‘Your mum!’. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing more. Two simple words that were – in the clichés of childhood and teenagehood – the worst thing that anyone could ever say to you. There is a North American legal concept of ‘fighting words’. It was established in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire (1942). The idea is that a verbal insult can be so nasty that it justifies a physical assault on the insulter. According to the US Supreme Court, ‘fighting words’ are such that they ‘by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace’. Say that to me, I’ll thump you – and the courts will find in my favour.
Actually, as Randall Kennedy, a law professor, shows clearly in his book Nigger: The History of A Troublesome Word, US courts don’t like accepting a fighting-words defence. Legally, linguistically and philosophically, it’s very hard to define or to justify. There are many difficulties but the most obvious one is calibrating the reasonableness of an individual’s reaction to an insult. Call me a nigger and I’d laugh. Call Pearl a nigger and she’d be upset, at the very least. What if she hit the insulter? With her hand? With her handbag? With a handy bottle? What if the bottle were a broken one? How much blood could, legally, be allowed to flow before ‘fighting words’ ceased being a reasonable defence?
As an emotional and psychological concept, though, fighting words has great power and meaning. We’ve all probably said something like ‘Say that again and I’ll hit you’, even if only as a child – or when the child that we were invades and takes over the adult that we are. In many London schools, ‘your mum’ is as close as you can get to fighting words. Pearl’s friend Jean was a teacher. She’d had to deal with it. ‘Nothing helped,’ she said. ‘It was the worst thing, especially for the boys. It was a heavy issue. It got them crying.’
There was no ‘your mum’ in my childhood playgrounds, though. Nothing like it, either. Playground insults change with the years and the generations. If spazz – for spastic – was the major one of my childhood, other playgrounds used the same word to create another derivative, spacca. Hence the particular sting of music magazines’ nickname for Sir Paul McCartney – Macca.† Children growing up in the 1970s developed the equally cruel – though more imaginative and more metaphorical – Joey. It came from Joey Deacon, a man born with severe cerebral palsy who spent most of his sixty-one years in Caterham Mental Hospital. His short autobiography, Tongue Tied, was published by the charity Mencap as part of their Subnormality in the Seventies series – oh, how language changes. He was the subject of a prize-winning Horizon documentary in 1975, and another for Blue Peter in 1981 – which is how children became so familiar with him. He died later the same year. Another 1970s favourite with the people in the playground was Benny – after Benny Hawkins, a slow, thick character in the TV soap Crossroads. Even later, it seems, came mong – short for mongol. Retard is now popular. In Stoke-on-Trent, I’m informed, children also use renard – derivation unknown but certainly nothing to do with foxes, most likely a childish mishearing of retard. Stoke children also have the wonderful renius – retarded genius. No mother insults there either.
So I found myself thinking: what is the thought that counts behind ‘your mum’? And why does it count now while it didn’t in my own playgroundhood or my children’s? I had a mother. My children have a mother. Everyone’s got (or had) a mother. But we don’t all get raged to tears and fists by someone saying ‘your mum’ to us.
On 10 May 2006, Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour reached and settled on the subject of mothers. ‘Mother can be the nicest word in the world,’ said the son of Beatty Zimmerman.† ‘It can also start a few fights.’ Your mum: it’s not exactly a universal insult but it’s certainly global. It comes in all kinds of variants, none of which are restricted to the playground. Sometimes it’s an exact equivalent. In Hungarian, it’s ‘anyad’. In Mandarin Chinese, it’s ‘ta ma de’. In the 1920s, Lu Xun, a Chinese writer, said that this phrase was so popular that, much as the peony was the national flower, so ‘ta ma de’ should be the official national swear. In French, it’s ‘ta mère’, an old taunt which had fallen from favour but which has made a comeback, particularly in the black and Muslim banlieus – there’s significance in that, too, I think.
This simple and plain ‘your mum/mother’ obviously draws its power from what’s implied rather than what’s said. So it’s clearly a curtailed version of a longer insult. What, then, is the missing or unstated bit of the insult? Well, sometimes the maternal insult is overtly sexual. Its particular flavour varies language by language, country by country. In Cameroon Pidgin, it’s ‘chuck yu mami’ (‘fuck your mother’) or ‘yu mami i pima’ (‘your mother was promiscuous’). The most common swear in Macedonian is ‘picka ti mater’ – ‘let me fuck your mother’. Macedonians say it when an English-speaker would say ‘shit!’ or ‘fuck!’. The Farsi equivalent is similar – ‘kiram tu coseh nanat’, ‘my prick is in your mother’s cunt’. The Hungarian variant has an uncomfortable pungency: ‘az isten bassza meg a bu’do’s ru’csko’s kurva anya’dat’ (or az isten bassza meg a büdös rücskös kurva anyádat) which means ‘May God fuck your stinking wrinkly whore of a mother’. Nothing if not clear, direct and detailed.
Romanian mother-insults have a baroque splendour. The most popular translates as ‘fuck your mother’s throats’. The plural is incorrect Romanian but it’s what they say, the idea being that it refers not just to the mother’s mouth but all her body’s other entrepots. Other popular Romanian motherisms include ‘fuck your mother’s onion’ and ‘fuck your mother’s dead relatives’. There is also an unusual combination of the sexual, the religious and the elliptical. It translates as ‘your mother’s Easter and Gods’ – Easter standing, metaphorically, for Christ, Calvary, Catholicism. The actual insulting word remains unspoken or has been removed, though. It’s ‘fuck’, isn’t it: the idea being the forced sexualisation of the mother’s dearly held religious beliefs. Or is it? Is this ‘fuck’ a sexual fuck or a violent fuck? Or a combination of the two? Maybe, at heart, this fuck is a rape fuck. Maybe it often is. Maybe when we say ‘fuck you!’ we are evoking rape, that the sexual element is there even when it’s not obvious.
Sometimes, the mother-insult is specifically vaginal. In Argentina, it’s la concha de tu madre (your mother’s cunt). Throughout the Arab world, the most terrible thing you can say to someone is ‘kus emak’ – ‘your mother’s vagina’. The Hebrew equivalent is the same – about 70 per cent of Hebrew swearing is Arabic. I know a man who grew up in New York, the son of Israeli parents. I’ll call him Doron but that’s not really his name. I’ve changed it to protect his parents from his memory of the language they’d use in their arguments – ‘when they were really, really pissed off at each other’.
Mother: ‘Cus ima shelchah.’ (Your mother’s cunt.)
Father: ‘Cus aba shelach.’ (Your father’s cunt.)
Mother: ‘Cus saba shelchah.’ (Your grandfather’s cunt.)
‘If there was a way of doubling italics, I’d do it for the last swear,’ said Doron. ‘About 50 per cent of the time they’d end up laughing at each other – despite being absolutely livid just seconds before the exchange. Learning Hebrew entirely from my parents, no-one bothered to let me know what exactly they were saying.’ As a child, he confused ‘cus’ with the English ‘curse’ and so thought they were saying ‘curse your mother’ etc. ‘Which is, truth be told, more sensical.’ When he finally understood what they were saying? ‘I couldn’t take their arguments seriously any more.’
Argentinian Spanish can perhaps take it even further, with one phrase in particular – la reputísima madre que te recontra mil parió. Reputísima: puta (whore) plus ísima (superlative suffix) plus re (double). Recontra: against you, twice – an equivalent to saying, in English, the same to you, with knobs on. So a full translation of the full phrase is something like: your mother, who gave birth to you twice, was a whore two thousand times over, squared. These calculations were done by Mario E. Teruggi, senior professor in the School of Natural Sciences and Museum of La Plata. His maths: (2 x 2000, i.e. squared). So: your mother is a whore sixteen million times over. This might sound like a joke or something made up to tease foreign writers but it’s not. It’s a real insult, a powerful and serious one that can be used ‘by anybody, anytime, anywhere’ – according to my colleague Ariel, who lives just to the west of Buenos Aires. ‘In my opinion,’ he added, ‘it’s an insult that sounds better when said by an adult. No kid can manipulate so much hate, or have those strong cathartic skills.’†
In Swahili, there are a variety of phrases which translate as ‘your mother’s cunt’. Women, children and young men use it as an all-purpose exclamation for surprise, anger and pain. Where an English child might call another a spazz – or ‘your mum’ them – a Swahili one might say ‘Mama-ko atombwa’, your mother is fucked. A paper by Mark J. Swartz relates it to Swahili culture’s extreme ablation of female sexuality. The swear is a suggestion that the mother enjoys sex – a no-no in Swahili. ‘Even in sexual relations with a husband of many years it is better for a woman, Swahili male informants say, not to indicate that she enjoyed the encounter.’ So, unlike other swears of this kind, its power is a simply sexual thing rather than a matter of incest or genetic inheritance. Not that Swahili doesn’t have concerns about that, too. Its second most popular swear is mwana haramu – literally, child of forbidden, i.e. bastard.
Other languages broaden the scope of the insult. Tibetan swearing invokes the family but harks back to pre-modern practices. A common and very strong insult is phai.sha.za.mkhan – i.e., you ate your father. Bulgarian has your aunt’s cunt (pichkata). Indian languages favour insulting the insulted’s family – generally via an indication of incest. Bhehen chodh is a Punjabi favourite – sister fucker. The most common Hindi swear is bhen chowd – fuck your sister. (There is certainly sibling incest in some Indian mythology.) According to poet Robert Graves’ inter-war book on swearing, Urdu, Arabic and Swahili all have a brother-in-law expletive which means, he says, ‘I have been familiar with your sister, ergo, you are my brother-in-law’.
