Filthy English, page 29
Second, Alexander Pushkin, poet, Romantic and ‘founder of modern Russian literature’. He extended Karamzin’s work, creating what linguistics professor John McWhorter called ‘a dynamically depressive and flexible mixture of folk and elegant language [that] is today known as Standard Russian’.
So modern Russian was little more than sixty years old when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace. It’s as if the English we use now were quite different from the one spoken in the Second World War. And the written one was the same age as Elvis Presley’s first national hit – 1956 was when Russian spelling was last reformed. Before that it had already been modernized twice, once at the turn of the twentieth century and again in 1918. A further reform proposed for 1964 proved too controversial and was therefore withdrawn.
By contrast, mat first appeared in print in the Middle Ages and its roots are in Russian’s proto-Slavic predecessor. It’s generally accepted that it’s a relic of pre-Christian Russia and that its given name emerges from that era’s curse, pyos yob tvoyu mat’ (a dog fucked your mother). To Russian pagans (or shamanists), dogs were the devils’ ambassadors on earth. The idea here is that, in suppressing pagan beliefs, Christianity effectively suppressed sexuality itself. So the language of sex became a potent and pungent linguistic taboo.
Catherine the Great issued a decree which outlawed the word bylad’. Under the 1649 Romanov Ulozhenie (code of law), you could be put to death for swearing – particularly when God was involved. Under the Soviet government, the use of mat in public could get you fifteen days in the jailhouse. It’s still a public order offence – under article 20.1.1 of 2001’s Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation. One regional politician has tried (and failed) to ban mat altogether.
Mostly, it’s been the language of the worker rather than the boss – a lexicon of resistance, like Polari and maybe even rhyming slang. In the army, it was the shibboleth which united recruits from a multilingual empire. In the Second World War, troops screamed out slogans in mat as they launched assaults on the German front line – some say that, in combat, swearing is the same as praying. On the ice, mat is the battle cry language of the Russian hockey team, particularly when their red is up against Canada’s red and white.
But it’s also been used by the aristocracy. When Kremlin guards launched an uprising against the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Tsar, Peter the Great, he executed them personally. It is said that, as he sliced off their heads, he shouted out a seventy-four-word mat curse. In Karelia, on the Finnish border, there is a town called Kem. In 1666–7, there was a major schism in the Russian church. The dispute involved the usual deeply significant stuff – whether to use two or three fingers when you cross yourself, for example. Lem lore has it that when Peter had to authorize documents exiling ‘Old Believers’, he’d write ‘k ebannoi materi’ – send them to the fucked mother. He had to write so many of these exiling letters that he acroynmed the phrase, to Kem.
Mat has been widely used by pretty much the whole canon of Russian writers. In A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky said that a Russian could express anything and everything he wanted to express with just one word – though he didn’t actually say which word, we can guess he was thinking of pizda. That’s certainly the word Pushkin was referring to in his poem ‘Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters’. Pushkin, Turgenev and Chekhov all used mat in poems or letters. For his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn created an obviously disguised version of mat – essential for the book’s authenticity as mat is the lingua franca of gulag world.
Erofeyev has called it, variously, the ‘bawdy national argot’, ‘the matrix of the Russian unconscious’, ‘linguistic theatre, verbal performance art’ and ‘a language of dissidence, of protest against official ideology, both political and religious’. Perhaps more than any other language, Russian swearing is sex-based. Unlike, say, German, there is no place for scatology in it. No shit, literally.
In early Christian times, its sexuality was a secret, underground rebellion against the new order. In the Soviet era, it was a private statement about communist rule. Using mat announced: my rulers are not just wrong but ridiculous. And: this is the part of myself, of my life, which will forever remain out of your stupid, prying reach. According to Anatoly Baranov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of the Russian Language, ‘Obscene words began to function as markers of authenticity’.
In the post-Soviet times, it has become a subject for serious academic study. Alexei Plutser-Sarno is gradually producing a Large Dictionary of Mat. So far he’s managed two volumes. One (390 pp.) is entirely devoted to khuy. Volume two (534 pp.) is just about pizda words. And that’s just the basic nouns. He’s only just got started on the huge range of adjectival and verbal derivatives. Mat has even become fashionable. More than that, according to Erofeyev, ‘For the youth of Moscow and other big cities, it is often merely an instrument that enables them to discuss openly the matters of gender and sexual activity. They use it not to chastise or to punish or to shock; they use it because it’s useful. A prick is a prick. A cunt is a cunt. And Russia will have to come to terms with this. Mat is the language of the body repossessed; it could soon be the language of passion. The new generation may yet transform a love of mat into a mat of love.’ A switch from the metaphorical and conceptual to the actual and physical. So, in English perhaps, from ‘fuck you!’ to ‘fuck you?, from ‘fuck me!’ to ‘fuck me!’
Perhaps the most intriguing of national swear patterns – and how and why it came to be that way – is that of Hebrew, which took most of its swears from another language. The Hebrew spoken in Israel today is one of the world’s newest major(ish) languages. It is an almost complete reinvention of something that had barely been a daily language since some point shortly after 586 BCE, when the first temple – Solomon’s – was destroyed, by Nebuchadnezzar II, builder of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Jews of Jerusalem were captured and taken east into exile in Mesopotamia. Psalm 137: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.’ Those lines were written – or at least written down – about 150 years later, when much of the Bible was put together by God (if you believe) or three men (if you don’t).
By the time the Jews got themselves back home to Jerusalem, half a century had passed. They were invited to return, in 538 BCE, by Cyrus the Great, the Persian emperor and great Satan of the classical Greek world whose armies had defeated the Babylonians the previous autumn. He himself entered the city on 29 October 539 BCE. The dominant language in the Jerusalem area was by now Aramaic, a relative of both Hebrew and Arabic. It was already the lingua franca of the whole Near East. Cyrus’ successor Darius made it the official language of his empire. The Jews took to speaking it. Though the Torah – the Pentateuch, the first five chapters – was written in Hebrew, about ten later chapters were in Aramaic, including the story about Daniel and the furnace. Aramaic was what Jesus spoke.
Hebrew was the liturgical language of the Torah, the Bible, and the Talmud – the commentaries on it. As Latin was the language of the Catholic Church for hundreds of years, so Hebrew was for the Jewish diaspora – used by the educated elite for all kinds of written and formal cross-national communications. That aside, Jews spoke the local language or their own variant of it – Yiddish, for example.
Some say Hebrew stopped being a daily tongue in the fourth century BCE. Some give it another eight hundred years of marginal survival. Whichever it was, it was certainly in eclipse for more than 2,500 years, from the destruction of the temple to the late nineteenth century. It only truly came of age on 23 September 1922. That was when Article 22 of the British Mandate for Palestine made it an official language, giving it equal local status with English and Arabic. It was also the year of the death of the man primarily responsible for creating modern Hebrew, Elizer Ben-Yehuda – though he never actually learned to speak it fluently himself. Cecil Roth, editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, wrote: ‘Before Ben-Yehuda … Jews could speak Hebrew; after him, they did.’ In thanks, they named a main street in central Jerusalem after him – a pedestrian-only link between, suitably, King George Street and Zion Square. Not that the Russianborn Ben-Yehuda did it all by himself. He was helped out by others, including my wife’s great great grandfather, Zeev Yaavetz. They named the parallel street after him. It’s a lot smaller.
This modern form of Hebrew is, by far, the most successful of the nineteenth-century language revivals. Gaelic and Celtic were given a new lease of life – the various Celtic languages are now spoken by 1.2 million people. Hebrew, though, is the daily language of at least five million and spoken or understood by up to two million more. The reason for this almost unique success is easily found in the adage: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. (This statement made its public debut in Yiddish, on 5 January 1945 in New York. A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot. It appeared in a speech by Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich to the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO). He doesn’t claim it as his own, though, rather that it was said to him by a Yiddish-speaking Bronx high school teacher who’d come to America as a child. The Bronx educator has yet to be found.)
Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) is not the old Biblical language. It’s a whole new one. It had to be. It had to work in a new world. There had to be new words. The Zionist-inclined Victorian academics did a thorough job of figuring out new Hebrew words for things that just didn’t exist when it was a living language: no telephones, then, no cars, not even any printing presses. They adapted them from Yiddish, English, German, French, Russian. Some say they, accordingly, grafted a European mindset on to an ancient Middle Eastern language. Yet Ben-Yehuda also ensured modern Hebrew adopted the local pronunciation – not the east European Yiddish-inflected one but the Sephardic/Arabic one. Which perhaps might explain the central, dominant role that Arabic plays in Hebrew swearing.
Originally very much the creation of scholarship rather than the street, modern Hebrew was inevitably lacking in the rich lexicon of slang and swearing. Men in suits and ties and pince-nez don’t tend to spend their time figuring out new words for the central bits of our bodies and the acts we do with them. They operate according to the principle of linguistic parsimony. One thing, one word. It makes everything easier. Only the rest of us – including the human part of language-builders, too, I should imagine – don’t think that way. We all want lots and lots of different words for these things that are so near to us, so dear to us – and for things and people we hate, particularly if it casts doubt on things such as their hygiene habits, their genetic ancestry or the price of their sister.
Hebrew got its slang, though, and quickly, too. Interestingly, it didn’t find it in Yiddish, the mother tongue of the majority of the new Hebrew speakers. Which is a surprise given all those useful swear words and anatomical references in Yiddish, a number of which have been adopted by English-speakers – shtup (fuck) and dreck (shit), for example. In particular, there are all those penis words – shmuck, shlong, shvantz and putz. Yet, rather than incorporate all that Central European Yiddish wryness, Hebrew instead looked for its slang and swearing exactly where you’re most likely to find it, on the local corner. Shmock aside, it rejected Yiddish penis-words and found its own in the seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet – zayin, a relative of the Greek zeta. As well as providing rich opportunities for confusion and amusement with its official lexicographical self, zayin occupies the kind of central role in Hebrew swearing that fuck has in English. Zayin! Fuck! Lech tizdayen! Fuck off! Lezayen! Get fucked! Ziyun: a fuck. Mizdayen: a fucker.
Most modern Hebrew swearing, though, comes from Arabic. How much exactly? I asked Assaf, Israeli writer, cousin-by-marriage, bilingual in Hebrew and English. ‘It’s not true, as it’s sometimes said, that all Hebrew swears are from Arabic. There are also English, Yiddish and more recently Russian influences on both the whole language and specifically on swears. But, yes, I would say Arabic words are very dominant in Hebrew slang. I would guess that in the top ten Israeli swears, you would find about seven in Arabic, two in Hebrew and one in English – shit.’
Popular Arabic Hebrew swears include chara (shit) and kach’ba and sharmuta, both meaning whore and neither the kurveh of Yiddish. There is absolutely no doubt which swear tops that ten, though: an Arabic one, kus emak, cunt of your mother. In The Actor’s Studio is a long-running US cable TV show with an extremely simple format. A benign but interested man with a beard and glasses, James Lipton, interviews a famous actor, director or screenwriter – the people we pay to enact our dreamworlds. In it, Lipton asks each of them exactly the same ten questions. Question number seven is: what’s your favourite curse word? Israeli-born actress Natalie Portman, the one who gave Julia Roberts a ‘cunt’ necklace, said, unbleeped: kus emak.†
Assaf thinks the fact that kus emak is the ‘worst’ Hebrew swear points to a significant difference between English swearing and Israeli/Arabic swearing. ‘We don’t swear directly at the subject but at his or her parents or mentors. Not just kus emak but also the Hebrew ben zona (son of a whore) and the Arabic yinaal rabak (your teacher or rabbi). The mother, father, teacher or rabbi is damned. Plus, there are variations on the sister, too, of course. To an English-speaker, these swears may seem less direct but in these cultures they’re more hurting. They’re what we say when, in English, you’d be more direct – asshole, fucking bastard, shithead and so on. In Hebrew/Arabic there’s not a lot of ass mentioned, by the way.’
It’s an odd thought, isn’t it, that while most swearing divides nations and cultures by its details and specificities, here it does the exact reverse. Whatever else they find to disagree about, Israeli Jews and Arabs are united in this one aspect of language, at least – their attitude to their mothers’ vaginas.
But then swearing is an ineradicable constant across just about all languages. Even an invented language such as Esperanto has its own swears – fikigu is fuck you. You can swear in sign language, too. Touch your forefinger and thumb together, on your chin. Now move them away from your chin, forcefully. As you do, separate the two digits, again forcefully. Congratulations, you’ve just learned how to tell someone to fuck off in ASL (American Sign Language).
What is interesting and intriguing is how regularly a nation’s swearing is dominated by one word. I knew how this was true of English – damn having given way to bloody which was then eclipsed by fuck. I first began to grasp how universal this was on a 207 bus. The 207 is London’s busiest bus, probably Britain’s, maybe even Europe’s. Its hour-long journey runs thirteen miles west from Shepherd’s Bush Green to Uxbridge town centre and offers an intriguing language lesson. Some have claimed that, at heart, it’s a Bible story. More likely, it’s one about domestic animals. It’s certainly one that points to a strange central fact about the way we all swear.
The bus starts its westward journey from the south side of the Green – a half-mile triangle of sickly, greyish grass on the western edge of inner London. You don’t have to wait long for a 207. There are twenty-six an hour. Take one in the evening rush hour. It’ll be crowded. You’ll hear little English. There’ll be various African languages, mostly spoken by heavy-set women with a family of plastic carrier bags gathered at their feet. And there’ll be Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian. But above all you’ll hear Polish – the sound of London being rebuilt – spoken by men in weary anoraks. They’re making their daily journey from where their work is – in the affluent city centre’s homes and office blocks – to where their home is, in cheap but rarely cheerful shared flats in the city’s western reaches.
Listen carefully to these hard-grafting Polish men talk amongst themselves and you’ll hear one word in particular: kurwa. Pronounced koor-vah, it’ll rumble through the talk. Blah-blah, kurwa, blah-blah-blah, kurwa, blah-blah-blah. Blah-de-blah, kurwa. Kurwa blah. Kurwa blah-blah.
You can hear kurwa even more late at night, on Willesden High Road, say, or Brent Street, Hendon. Anywhere, that is, you find London’s Polish male workers gathering to drink cans of Żywiec or Tyskie, smoke smuggled cigarettes and swear. Kurwa is to Polish what ‘fuck’ is to English, a word for all meanings. And this is the strange central lesson this word has about swearing. It seems that nearly every culture’s swearing lexicon is dominated by one word. In English, it’s fuck – though it was previously ‘bloody’ and before that ‘damn’, as Don Juan discovered on Shooters Hill. In Spanish, it’s coño. In French, it’s probably putain – whore. In Italian, cazzo – penis. In Greek, malaka – wanker. In black American, it’s motherfucker and white American cocksucker. And in Polish, it’s kurwa.
Not that kurwa is exclusively Polish. You find it in other languages spoken in the same part of the world. In Belarusian, it’s kurva. In Serbian, kurvo razvaljena is a fucking bitch. And it’s not just a Slavic thing. In Yiddish – a Germanic language – it’s kurveh (pronounced: kur-vah). In Romanian – a Romance language, like French or Italian – it’s curve. In Hungarian – a Uralic language – it’s kurve.† You’ll hear it pretty much everywhere in Europe that’s east of 15 degrees east and north of 41 degrees north. Its frequency count varies country by country but it means the same thing everywhere – bitch, whore, prostitute, i.e. a word for women who you want to assault verbally via their excessive or pecuniary sexuality.
