Filthy English, page 20
Two, however much men and women do or don’t swear, they favour different words. Tony McEnery has studied this – and other aspects of swearing, too. A working class Liverpudlian and former accountant, McEnery was given a Sinclair QL computer by his father in the summer of 1987. He quickly realized ‘how great it would be to pair up linguistics and IT’. Parlaying this insight into an academic career, McEnery is now a professor in Lancaster University’s Department of Linguistics and Modern English. In 2003, he and his colleague Zhonghua Xiao published a paper, ‘Fuck Revisited’. It was an analysis of occurrences and frequencies of the word ‘fuck’ in the British National Corpus, the ‘100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written.’ Their results were unequivocal. British men are twice as likely to write ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’ as women. There are age differences, too. The age group most likely to write ‘fuck’ is 35–44 while 15–24 year olds are most likely to say it. In another study, of speech, McEnery found other sex differences. Women were more likely to use God, bloody, bugger or arse while men were more likely to use cunt or Jesus.
Another English study by Claudia Berger had the men favouring ‘wanker’ and ‘cunt’ while her women said they used ‘bitch’, a word that none of the men used. None of Berger’s women would call another woman a cunt but 4 per cent of them said they would say it of a man. That aside, men and women – at least, the students in the study – seemed to use the same swear words, except that ‘some female students think it more appropriate to use “shit” because it is generally regarded as the milder and more acceptable variant of “fuck”.’ Another interesting finding in this study was that both men and women said their father was likely to call other men ‘poofs’ whereas their mothers never disparaged homosexuals.
An American study found that men use ‘fuck’ the most and women ‘God’ the most. In the Midwestern study I quoted a little earlier, men were 40 per cent more likely to use fuck and 60 per cent more likely to use motherfucker. Ah yes, motherfucker …
In a 2000 survey, Britons rated ‘motherfucker’ as the second most severe word in the language. It’s new to English English, though – a few decades old at most. I can’t be sure where or when I first heard it but it wasn’t in Stoke Newington and I’m certain I was wearing long trousers. Wherever I first heard it or read it was a thrilling moment, though. Immediately, I thought of it as the great American profanity. Even elbowing its incestual accusation aside for the moment, it has a great rhythm and sound to it. Duh-duh, duh-duh. You can put the accent on the third syllable and the stress on the act of sexuality or you can place it on the second syllable, stressing the incestuous quality of the insult.
I reckon it made the transatlantic crossing only in the 1960s. Maybe I first read it in an underground paper. It was a big word in the world of hippie political activism. I know now – but didn’t know then – that in 1960s New York there was a bunch of anarchistic activists who called themselves The Motherfuckers. They distributed free food to street kids, invaded the Pentagon to protest about the Vietnam War and had regular punch-ups with Stalinists and Trotskyists. They took their name from a poem by black writer Amri Baraka, ‘Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers’. It’s a line that was repeated in the opening shout of the MC5’s ‘Kick Out The Jams’ – which was bleeped out for the radio-play single version. It’s also in Jefferson Airplane’s ‘We Can Be Together’. When the band played it, live, on the Dick Cavett Show, it was the first time a ‘fuck’ word appeared on US network TV – 19 August 1969.
In time, I came to understand why these white radicals and rock groups were so fond of this word, motherfucker. It was because it was originally a very black word, something I couldn’t have known at that physical and cultural distance. To call someone a motherfucker was not just to insult someone, colourfully, but to make yourself a little hipper, cooler … blacker. It’s not, as I first thought, the great American profanity. It’s the great African-American profanity. It occupies that central, polymorphous place that one swear word can have in a language – kurwa in Polish, ‘fuck’ and its compounds in English. So ‘motherfucker’ in black American English†.
As I really had confirmed for me in the spring of 2008, by black American comic Chris Rock. I’d gone to see him on the Saturday night in a week’s run of arena shows in London. The crowd was something of a surprise, to me at least. There were a lot of Afro-Caribbeans, of course. I’d expected that. There were a fair number of twenty- and thirtysomethings with a taste for drink. I’d expected them, too. They’re the standard comedy show audience. What I hadn’t expected was the astonishing number of middle-class Asian families – the parents, the teenagers, the children, the grandparents, all out for a night in the big tent at the end of the Jubilee line. My teenage son was with me and he explained: they were fans of Everybody Hates Chris, a cable TV ever-present.
Chris Rock took the stage and told us that he’d only been in London a day or so. ‘Boy,’ he said. ‘You sure do like to drink alcohol here. Ain’t there no water in this motherfucker?’ Everyone laughed. The Afro-Caribbeans, the twenty- and thirtysomethings with a taste for drink, the generations of middle-class Asians. Me, too. Everyone. Later, I thought: I’ve never before heard – or even thought of – motherfucker as a synonym for ‘London’. Nor had the rest of the audience, I guess. But we understood straightaway.†
Motherfucker has obviously been around a while but, as usual with slang, it’s not at all clear how long. In The F-Word, Jesse Sheidlower gives the first reference to motherfucker as 1918 but the example he gives doesn’t include the whole word, just a phrase from a ‘bawdy’ ballad: ‘****ed his mother and sister too’. The first actual written citation of the full motherfucking word is a definition from a 1938 compendium, Americana Sexualis. ‘An incestuous male. The most intense term of opprobrium among the US lower classes. Probable Sicilian origin. C. 20. Urban communities only. No sexual connotation; used merely as an epithet.’ No sexual connotation? Well, maybe, though I doubt it. That’s where the word gets its potency from.
Sheidlower cites a 1935 reference, quoting a book, Paul Oliver’s Blues Tradition: ‘He’s a dirty mother fuyer, he don’t mean no good’. It’s a line from ‘Dirty Mother for You’ by Memphis Minnie, a blues singer and guitarist (from Algiers, Louisiana) who worked with her guitarist husband Kansas Joe McCoy (from Raymond, Mississippi). For some, Memphis Minnie’s 1941 hit, the equally suggestive ‘Me and My Chauffeur Blues’, is the first rock and roll record. It’s been said that her ‘Dirty Mother for You’ is a sanitized version of an earlier never-recorded blues standard called ‘Dirty Mother Fucker’ but, if it is, no-one’s ever found that one.
The mother fuyer thing became a black music staple, though. ‘Dirty Mother Fuyer’ is a 1947 jump blues by Dirty Red, the nom de double entendre of Nelson Newborn – an ‘amiable alcoholic’ guitarist. Red Nelson and Roosevelt ‘The Honeydripper’ Sykes cut it, too: I got to put this mule to jumpin’ in yo’ stall. I’m a lovin’ muther for ya. In 1949, Sticks McGhee had a big hit with ‘Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee’ – a song he said he learned in the army, as ‘Drinkin’ Wine, Motherfucker’. In 1972, Chick Willis had a three-million seller with the blue blues ‘Stoop Down Baby Let Your Daddy See’. On the flip was ‘Mother Fuyer’: ‘I feel my mule kicking in your stall, he’s a hot dog that will never go cold. It’s a huge mother fuyer.’ I swear I’m telling the truth. In 1977, B. B. King cut his own version of ‘Mother Fuyer’, funnier, less obvious. ‘A Real Mother for Ya’ was a funk smoothie from the same year by Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson – the ‘gangster of love’ and a real-life part-time pimp, (on account of how it ‘paid better’ than playing guitar). Although only a minor chart hit, it was a big radio hit on both sides of the Atlantic. I have a delightful memory of English dee-jays either clearly not knowing or deliberately affecting not to know what the song’s title was alluding to.
There are a couple of far earlier motherfuckers, though – both near contemporaries to Freud’s first notes on the Oedipus Complex. They were found by Fred R. Shapiro – lecturer at Yale Law School, major contributor to the OED and former member of the MIT tiddlywinks team. He reported them in the autumn 2002 edition of Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, in an article entitled ‘The Politically Correct United States Supreme Court and the Motherfucking Texas Court of Criminal Appeals: Using Legal Databases to Trace the Origins of Words and Quotations’. An electronic archeologist of words, Shapiro had already traced ‘human rights’ back to 1787 and ‘politically correct’ to 1783 – the OED amended its entry accordingly. He trawls through what he calls the JSTOR internet. (A contraction of ‘journal storage’, JSTOR is the online archive for academic journals.) His researches there moved the first recorded ‘Different strokes for different folks’ back from Sly Stone to Muhammed Ali.
Shapiro’s first motherfuck? Well, the first ‘mother-f-----g’ was recorded in 1889 by the Texas Court of Appeals from a report of Levy vs. State. The defendant was described by a witness as ‘that God damned mother-f-----g, bastardly son-of-a-bitch!’ The first unblanked ‘mother-fucking’ was in the 1897 proceedings of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Fitzpatrick vs. State. The issue at stake here was, essentially, whether being called a ‘mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch’ meant that, when you then killed the person who said it to you, your charge could accordingly be reduced to manslaughter. A fighting words defence. The appeal failed. I guess Fitzpatrick was hanged.
So motherfucker is clearly American and doesn’t seem to be particularly Sicilian – or even solely black, if the names Levy and Fitzpatrick are anything to go by. Where, though, did the word come from? It’s not there in English English so it must be expressing something that’s not felt necessary to express in the British Isles – or, I grant, something that can’t be expressed here. The OED doesn’t comment but the BBC does. Its website tells us motherfucker was ‘coined by Africans to describe the slave owners who had raped the slave’s mothers. Simple as that.’ Which makes it non-incestual. Which seems highly improbable, frankly. Simple as that.
So why was there no relevant English English motherfucking phrase? Till ‘your mum’ came along, anyway. Why from Shakespeare’s time onwards was there seemingly no thought of insulting someone via implications about their mother? Where did ‘your mum’ come from and why is it now needed when it wasn’t before?
When I first heard about ‘your mum’, I called Jonathan Green, compiler of the great Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang. I knew he lived no more than a couple of miles from the school where I saw for myself its power to reduce teenage boys to tears. ‘Nope,’ he said, slangily. ‘Never heard it.’ He made a guess about its roots and origins, though, referring me to page 1308 of his dictionary:
Your mother! excl. [late 19C+] (US mainly teen.) a rejoinder to an insult, implying that whatever that insult is, it applies most to the speaker’s own mother. (cf DOZENS). [euph. for GO FUCK YOUR MOTHER!]
‘Your mum’ as a transatlantic derivative of ‘your mother’? Well, maybe. But more likely not, I think. It leaves too much unexplained. It doesn’t account for how the phrase crossed the Atlantic – and changed in the crossing. Enormous amounts of teenage and black slang make that crossing, mostly via TV, movies and music but ‘your mum’ has yet to appear in any of them. I’ve never heard ‘your mother’ in that milieu, either. Nor is it quite the same thing. In black America, ‘your mother’ is not a direct insult but a specific response to something someone else has said.
As in ‘Ya Mama’, the phrase which hip-hoppers The Pharcyde used to such great effect in 1991 when their song of that title landed them a record contract. It’s a contemporary take on the dozens† – the black American ritual insult-exchange, referred to in Green’s definition of ‘your mother!’ above. The mother is often the target in the dozens. In the Pharcyde song, ya mama is so fat that Taco Bell staff have to handcuff her to stop her eating more burritos – she’s already had twenty-two. She has wooden legs with real feet and her looks are such that, when she takes up prostitution as a trade, she walks the street with a 99 cent sign on her back. There’s a 1930s novelty blues, by Kokomo Arnold, called ‘Twelves (Dirty Dozens)’, in which the singer tells the subject of his taunts that he likes ‘yo mama’, the sister and the father – well, he did, till he discovered that ‘poppa’ was ‘funny that way’. Long established though it might be, it’s not a ritual without risk. In the 1970s, Edith Folb studied the language of black American teenagers. She recorded one as saying ‘We don’t play d’mommas dozen too often. That starts confusion … Don’ shoot on d’moms less’n you fittin’ to fight’. Fittin = intending.
Another suggestion is that ‘your mum’ came from an early 1990s British TV comedy sketch show, The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Rob Newman (from Hertfordshire, long-haired and political) and David Baddiel (from north London, Jewish and scatological) played a pair of whiskered, buffery Oxbridge professors appearing on TV, presumably in the graveyard, Open University hours. They would start a scholarly discussion about something like, say, romanticism and industrialisation but quickly, the tone would move from the senior common room to the playground. In particular, Newman’s character would describe something horrible, then say to Baddiel ‘That’s your mum, that is.’
It’s probable that Newman and Baddiel popularized the phrase but my own (not very scientific) research dates it somewhat earlier than the early 1990s. One friend told me that, as long ago as the 1980s her child’s north London boys’ school had called a crisis assembly for the whole school devoted to the problems caused by ‘your mum’ taunts. My friend Dorothy first heard it around then, too, when she was teaching in a tough south London primary. ‘The children used to go berserk. There’d be enormous fights in the playground and I’d go over and ask what it was about. They’d say: “He said ‘Your mum’ to me, miss.” And I’d say: “So?” Eventually you worked out that it meant “Your mother sucks dicks” or something like that. And you tried to stop them saying it.’
What was its power, though? Why and how had it become a playground staple? What had changed since my own playgroundhood? Which bit of these children’s innermost world is ‘your mum’ burrowing into? I asked another friend, Mark, who happened to have taught at the Stoke Newington primary school I would most likely have gone to if I hadn’t said fuck and prompted my parents to move. Quite possibly, I learned that word from children at that school. Mark made a clear, unambiguous link to the home life of his pupils. ‘Most kids at my school don’t have dads. Some don’t know who their dad is. Some have no concept of “father”, other than as an occasional provider of domestic violence. Some have no contact. Some have some contact. The odd kid has regular contact. And there are very rare cases of children with two parents in an intact, caring and loving relationship.’ So the child’s relationship with the mother carries twice the freight. At least.
In a world of single families, saying ‘your mum’ to a boy is to attack his heart. It’s a wise child that knows his own father. But what if he doesn’t? What if he’s never seen him, hasn’t a clue about him? Then his mum is everything. So having ‘your mum’ shouted at him is the worst that can happen. (And that’s before you even start bringing the Oedipal desires into view.)
This places the rise of the phrase as a cultural – and religious – thing. There are simply (and not so simply, of course) far more single families than there were when I was young. Overwhelmingly, that means mother-only families. Also, historically, Britain has not been a matriarchal country, burdened with the mother-loving guilts and anxieties of Catholicism or Jewishness. Its history and culture are Protestant and patriarchal – in awe of the vengeful father rather than beguiled by the all-forgiving mother. Even though I grew up in a mostly Catholic environment, this seeped through to me. When I finally visited the family back home in Ireland, I was quite taken aback by the mariolatry and matriarchalism – in the home, anyway. Social gatherings were run for and by the women of the family. Men, even if they were university professors, were put in the corner with a pint or more of Guinness and expected to hold their peace while getting slowly and steadily drunk.
It’s certainly true that the arrival of Protestantism in England affected the acceptability of swearing. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, language restrictions were severely tightened. This is why there is so much swearing by pagan deities in his plays rather than by the Christian God – substitutions, too, as in ‘gog’. Maybe this offers a possible explanation for why sons-of-bitches seem to have disappeared from English English around this time, when Britain stopped being a Catholic country and became a Protestant one instead. Motherfucking is not such a Protestant concern, it seems. Or perhaps it’s so potent a one that it has to be excised from the language.
What’s it actually about, though? What is the venom behind ‘your mum’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘son-of-a-bitch’ and so on? Is it about sexuality or is it about illegitimacy? Illegitimacy is certainly involved. Bastard itself has been an insult since the thirteenth century. It came to English from the Old French ‘fils de bast’ – child of the packsaddle, i.e. conceived with a passing mule-driver.† For centuries, bastard was a grievously wounding insult, but not these days – moral and cultural change has seen to that. It retains some of its power, though. It’s still not bottom in The British Board of Film Classification’s hierarchy of word-awfulness – on which movie ratings are based. This goes: ‘very mild’ (damn), ‘mild’ (bastard), ‘moderate’ (prick), ‘strong’ (fuck), and ‘coarse’ (cunt).
There’s git, too. Originally, it was get – short for beget. It started out in Scotland then moved south, losing its power as it went. By the 1960s, it was acceptable enough for TV sitcom character Alf Garnett to call his Liverpudlian son-in-law a ‘randy Scouse git’. But not so acceptable that the Monkees didn’t think they were getting one over on their West Coast record label by using that phrase as a song title – it was a number-five hit in the UK but only under the alternate title, ‘Alternate Title’. Like most people, I suppose, I thought that because git rhymed with nit, it was some kind of horrid insect. One day in my mid-teens, for some reason, I checked the dictionary and found its true meaning. I can’t say I wasn’t upset by the discovery. As someone conceived beyond wedlock in Liverpool, I took it personally. I found it hard to watch Til Death Us Do Part after that. I still find it easier to call someone a cunt than a git.
