Filthy English, page 19
Sister insults are probably the closest in power to mother ones. Which is why both mother and sister insults were used as part of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi, was threatened with a dog named Zeus, forced to wear a bra, stand naked in front of a ‘female agent’ and do dog tricks. He was also ‘told that his mother and sister were whores’, according to Susan J. Crawford, the Bush administration official in charge of deciding which inmates should be taken to trial. Qahtani was hospitalized twice for bradycardia – when your heartbeat drops below 60 bpm. At one point, his was down to 35. As a consequence of this treatment, despite being certain that Qahtani was guilty – probably of involvement in preparations for 9/11 – Crawford declined to have charges pressed. (Some of the American blogerati doubt the efficacy of such torture, referring to the inmates subjected to mother/sister insults as Jihadi-woosies.)
The implication of the mother/sister insult, as ever, is twofold – that the interrogator somehow has sexual possession of the interrogated’s mother/sister and that the interrogator knows that this is also the interrogated’s secret, shameful, incestual desire. The interrogator has – in words, anyway – both defiled the prisoner’s most treasured human relationships and forced the prisoner to face (and evade) the (shameful) truth about why he so treasures those relationships. And around the time that this vulnerability to slurs against our mothers and sisters was being exploited behind the locked doors of Guantanamo, there was another example played out in front of watching millions.
Zinedine Zidane was the child of Algerian Berbers who emigrated to France twenty years before he was born. He grew up in a poor part of Marseilles. He has described himself as a non-practising Muslim. He is the most expensive football player in history. In 2001, Real Madrid paid Juventus €76 million to sign him. As captain, he led France to victories in both the European Championship and the World Cup. He was, for a while, the most important footballer in the world. David Beckham might have had the haircut, the wife and the sarong but Zidane was the one with heroic and cultural resonance for Europe’s poor and darker-skinned immigrants. Hence Zidane, Un Portrait Du 21e Siècle, the 2005 film made by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, using seventeen cameras to track the player through every moment of a Real Madrid vs. Villarreal game. Zidane is a brooding, almost isolated figure for most of the game. Then suddenly, five minutes from the end, he gets involved in an arguing crunch of players – and he’s sent off. It’s never quite clear why.
The following year, in the closing minutes of the 2006 World Cup final and just minutes from his retirement, he was sent off again, for headbutting Italy defender Marco Materazzi. Why? Accounts still vary but both butted and butter agree that Zidane wasn’t reacting to a slur against himself, his country or even his own sexuality. What, then, did he react so violently to? An Anglo-Italian lip-reader claimed it was ‘son of a terrorist whore’. Materazzi denied this: ‘I am not a cultured person and I don’t even know what an Islamic terrorist is.’ He took both the Daily Star and the Daily Mail to court over this claim and was awarded substantial damages both times. Nor was it a mother thing, though. ‘I certainly did not talk about Zidane’s mother,’ said Materazzi. ‘For me, mothers are sacred.’
A Brazilian lip-reader reckoned it was a sister thing: Materazzi had told Zidane that at the end of the match, instead of the traditional shirt-swap, he’d rather have the French captain’s sister Lila. Zidane himself has declined to detail the insult but has insisted it was ‘very harsh’, adding, ‘I would rather have taken a punch in the jaw than have heard that.’ The point is that, despite the varying accounts, they all agree on one central fact: that the insult was a reference to female members of Zidane’s family. And that the slur angered Zidane to the point of immediate and self-defeating violence. Fighting words.
Mother and sister insults range right across the Romance language world. Spanish and Portuguese mother-insults focus on parentage – son of a whore, hijo de puta (Spanish) and filho da puta (Portuguese). Though it’s a major, central swear in both languages, there’s a certain ambiguity to it. It’s used all the time but can be either very strong or almost friendly. In English, ‘you cunt’ is similar – context and tone are all. In 2007, Jose Mourinho, then manager of Chelsea, tried to explain why he’d informed an official that he was a son of a whore. He found himself tripped up by the way the phrase’s strength varies according to context and intent. ‘The word can be abusive if you perceive it to be abusive,’ he said. ‘I say it to myself. I say it to my players, that word which I don’t want to repeat.’
Ariel Arango, Argentinian psychoanalyst author of Dirty Words, suggests that the son-of-a-whore insult draws its power from the same emotional well as maricon, the Spanish homosexual insult that derives from Maria in the sense of the Virgin Mary – though few know or acknowledge this. For Arango, a son-of-a-whore and a virgin mother are two sides of the same thing. In both cases, the father is unknown and the mother’s otherwise undeniable sexuality thereby ablated. Which, says Arango, leaves space for the son’s taboo desires. A son born of no father is free to play mothers and fathers with his own mother. For him, hijo de puta, filho da puta and maricon are all Oedipal insults, unwanted reminders of the insulted’s uncomfortable truths.
There is no equivalent English word or phrase to these son-of-a-whore insults, though there was one in the fourteenth century. Even then, it wasn’t really English but a calque, a literal, word-for-word translation from another language, of the Anglo-French fitz a putain†. It’s there again, as ‘son of a whore’ this time, in Middleton and Rowley’s 1617 play Fair Quarrel. There, it’s used jokingly, indicating that, like many another swear, it could be as light or as harsh as the situation made possible – or required.
Which leads to the US and the American English equivalent – son of a bitch. And to H. L. Mencken, the second great man of American journalism – Mark Twain being the first (in my spiral-bound notebook, anyway). In 1936, Mencken published The American Language. A robust man, particularly in his own self-image, he had a low opinion of American swearing. He thought that, compared to other nationals, his fellow countrymen just weren’t very good at it. He complained about their lily-livered language, with its oppressive euphemisms – ‘inexpressibles’ for trousers, ‘public comfort station’ for toilet. He wailed that Americans had ‘nothing properly describable as a vocabulary of indecency. Our maid-of-all-work in that department is son-of-a-bitch’. Which is not fully fair of him. It can be a word of precise power. ‘I didn’t think Diefenbaker was a son-of-a-bitch,’ President Kennedy famously said of the Canadian prime minister. ‘I thought he was a prick.’ Or rather, Kennedy was famously said to have said that. Most likely, it’s apocryphal – but it does indicate son-of-a-bitch’s specific gravity as being somewhat heavier than a penis-insult.
It’s a phrase, though, that as English as it is, is barely ever used in English English – only ever, in fact, when imitating an American English-speaker. This transatlantic difference is centuries old. Mencken quotes Alexander Hamilton – not the Founding Father but a Scots traveller. In 1744, Hamilton found himself in New Jersey. In his diary, he made a note about the way his landlord shouted at ‘his Negroes’. In particular, Hamilton noticed that the ‘epithet son-of-a-bitch was often repeated’. It was obviously a new phrase to Hamilton. Yet it had once been around in English English. As early as 1330, there was biche-sone. In King Lear, Kent tells Oswald he’s ‘nothing but the composition of a Knave, Begger, Coward, Pandar, and the Sonne and Heire of a Mungrill Bitch’. By the mid eighteenth century, though, the son-of-a-bitch formulation seems to have disappeared from English English – while thriving in American English.
Bitch itself has been around in English since c. 1000, as a word for a female dog. It first appeared as a woman-insult c. 1400: ‘Whom calleste thou queine, skabde biche?’ The reference was canine. The English English bitch didn’t then and doesn’t now have anything to do with whoredom. Which makes it a quite different insult to hijo de puta.
I’d occasionally thought about this transatlantic disparity but had never found an answer. Then, one day, my friend Thomas, the English-as-a-foreign-language-teacher, asked me, rhetorically and quite spontaneously: ‘Americans use son-of-a-bitch all the time. We don’t. Why?’ He answered his own questions. ‘It’s the Latinate influence on America.’ The French in Louisiana. The Spanish in Texas and California. Thomas reckons the force and urgency of ta mère and hijo de puta were welded to an already existing English phrase. ‘My students always want a lesson on swearing, particularly the ones from countries where they speak languages with Latin roots. They always ask about son-of-a-bitch. They’re looking for an equivalent for, say, hijo de puta in English but don’t hear it when they’re in the pub or wherever English people are swearing. They assume son-of-a-bitch is the same as hijo de puta in English. They’re familiar with that kind of phrase from their own language so therefore they think bitch means whore. I have to explain that it doesn’t. That, in English, a bitch is a person who says nasty things about other people, mostly women about other women.’
Telling someone they’re a hijo de puta means they were born of a woman who had so much sex with so many different men that, therefore – and this is the point and punch of the slur – they are effectively fatherless, illegitimate both literally and metaphorically. It’s a legitimacy insult, placing the insulted beyond society. Telling someone they’re a son-of-a-bitch, though, means they are man born of dog. It’s a species insult. To call someone a son-of-a-bitch is to imply they were born of a domestic animal – implausible, if not impossible – rather than of unknown fathership – all too plausible and possible and therefore inherently far more pungent.
Bitch is now a relatively mild insult in Britain but it wasn’t always so. In 1811, a dictionary described it as ‘the most offensive appellation that can be given to an Englishwoman’. Currently, it’s also homosexual prison slang for the weaker partner. Yet, like queer and dyke, it’s a word that plays both sides of the street. There is a US feminist magazine called Bitch. There were, though, bans placed on the 1997 Prodigy song, ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. Despite its obvious ironic intent, the promo video was barely shown on TV and then only after midnight. Radio 1 played only an instrumental version. The World Service referred to it as ‘Smack’. In August 2007, Brooklyn councilwoman Darlene Mealy tried to get the word banned but only eighteen of her fellow fifty-one councilmen and women voted with her. The main reason for her failure was probably the word’s delicate polymorphousness. My work is a bitch: that’s one thing. My workmate is a bitch: that’s another. My workmate is bitchin’: that’s something else, too. My workmate is bitching at me: yet another.
In French, there is putain. A central word in the language, it translates as prostitute or whore but is used far more, far, far more widely than a non-French speaker might expect. I know a French-born teacher at a London pre-school who uses it all day. It’s putain this and putain that and putain over there. For her, it has no more power than, say, ‘Blast!’ She would, though, never use its shortened version, pute. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is really serious. It’s horrible.’ There is another French whore word, salope, but that’s so mild, she explained, ‘it’s almost friendly’.
Richard, a friend of decades and more, now lives in the south of France, in the Midi. His – eventual – command of putain marked his acceptance into the community. ‘The word has a special significance as a badge of the Midi. It happened at a meeting of the local Cercle Occitan, a language and culture group who like a hearty nosh with a great deal of wine, too. I was moved to tell a joke – the one about the breathless young woman on the bus who’s been pregnant for … thirty minutes. In the course of which I used the defining expletive, quite without thinking. I got a round of applause.’ It’s a distinctly positive swear. If you like the taste of something in a French market, you’ll say: ‘Putain, mais c’est bon!’ An indication of mild surprise, no more. Richard: ‘I wonder at the reaction if you said “By the whore, that’s good” in the Pantiles.’ (Richard and I were at school together in Tunbridge Wells. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, we used to be disgusteds but now we’re just amuseds.)
The Irish have hoors. This is a really odd one – to English and American ears, anyway. Though obviously a local pronunciation of the English ‘whore’, the Irish hoor is not only ambisexual in meaning but generally has nothing to do with prostitution or even sexuality. A ‘cute hoor’ is someone who does whatever they think they can get away with. This cute harks back to its origins. It’s a shortening of ‘acute’ and meant sharp-witted – still there in an American parent telling their child not to get cute with them. The epitome of the cute hoor was Charlie Haughey, the three-times Taioseach who embezzled his Fianna Fáil party to the tune of a private island, a mansion, a stable of racehorses and a yacht. He also stole money collected for his friend’s liver transplant. Yet he was still given a state funeral and admired for his cheek. This is known as the cute hoor syndrome. At the 1998 National Crime Forum, a sociologist claimed that this syndrome might explain why no-one had been imprisoned for tax fraud in Ireland since 1945.
Whore insults are fairly universal. More often than not, they lean into being more general accusations of sexual promiscuity. ‘Scarlet woman’ was originally an extremist Protestant insult for Catholics, a reference to the cardinals’ red hats, and aimed not at women but the Church of Rome itself. It’s only been a whore or whoreish thing since around 1900. Tramps have been tramping since 1922 and vamps have been vamping since 1911 – it’s a shortening of vampire.†
Here’s a short alphabet of modern English male (and female) attitudes to female promiscuity – or even just sexual behaviour. Bint: 1855, as the Arabic for daughter; 1919, for girl; a big favourite of my father’s. Bird: c. 1300, for woman, as a corruption of ‘bride’; 1852, for man; 1915, for woman again, this time as avian analogy; the Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’, 1965. Bit of fluff: surprisingly old, 1847; in Charlie Chaplin’s film A Little Bit Of Fluff, the woman of the title is an exotic dancer played by the most popular actress of the day, Betty Balfour, ‘Britain’s Queen of Happiness’. Chick: 1927, an Americanism; chick flick, 1988. Popsy: 1855, also popsy-wopsy; Margaret Nolan’s Popsy to Sid James’ Sid Plummer and Kenneth Williams’ W. C. Bloggs in Carry on at Your Convenience, 1971. Crackling: 1949, presumably from the word for roast pork skin – charmed, I’m sure; another favourite of my father’s. Scrubber: 1959, prostitute; ‘A scrubber was a girl who slept with a jazzman but for her own satisfaction as much as his,’ wrote George Melly in 1965. Skank: American, 1964; skanky, 1982; Big Youth ‘S-90 Skank’, 1972 – nothing to do with women, just a Jamaican dance. Skirt: a 1914 metaphor; ‘It’s no go the Yogiman, It’s no go Blavatsky/All we want is a bank balance, and a bit of skirt in a taxi,’ wrote poet Louis MacNeice, 1937. Slag: objectionable man, 1943; a Sweeney to a blagger, ‘Shut it, you slag!’ etc.; the OED’s ‘slatternly, promiscuous or objectionable woman’, 1958. Slapper: 1988, perhaps from its earlier, northern dialect meaning of a big, strapping person, or from the Yiddish shlepper, ‘slovenly or immoral woman’. Slut: a real oldie; ‘the foulest slutte of al a tovne’, 1402. Sort: 1933 in the OED; two decades earlier in Green, as originally Australian. Totty: older than I, for one, thought; first spotted by the OED in 1890, for ‘a fast girl’; Mahonie in Joyce’s Dubliners has three totties; derived, perhaps dubiously, from earlier meaning of small child.
There are also the individual female names used to stand for all women: judy, 1885, perhaps from Punch’s wife; the Australian sheila, 1832, the south London doris, around, to my own knowledge, at least since the 1970s, but not yet in the OED.
A computer analysis study found that English has 220 terms for sexually promiscuous women and only 22 for men. Georgian has two very similar words, one for each sex. For women, it is bozikali, a loose woman. ‘This is a negative term,’ according to my source, Elementary Georgian Obscenity. For men, it is boziḳaci, womanizer. ‘This is not a negative term.’ It was almost a cliché of feminist thought that sexual slang was patriarchal oppression or occlusion of female sexuality. Some have suggested that slang itself is a primarily male thing. What does the evidence say?
There has been a good deal of research into differences between male and female swearing. The results should probably be treated with some caution. As with so many research projects of the kind, the studies are of college students – close-to-hand and cheap for researchers but not exactly a typical social grouping. Still, they do seem to show a couple of things.
One is that, contrary to what you might expect, men and women swear about the same amount. Certainly, that is what the most recent studies have shown, particularly the English ones. Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton did a study of swearing on the online community, MySpace. Why MySpace? ‘Where once the only swear words young people wrote might have been furtively scribbled on the walls of public toilets, now they type them casually onto a computer screen.’ He found that the young men and women of MySpace swear equally.
Older studies, particularly American ones, do find a difference, though. A study of Midwestern college students found that ‘Female students recognize fewer obscenities, use fewer obscenities, and use them less frequently than males.’ A late 1970s study – of ‘human sexuality students’ in Nacogdoches, a small town in east Texas – also found that men don’t like women swearing, particularly in front of men.
