Filthy English, page 4
Florio offers fuck as one of five alternative translations of fottere, the Italian cousin of the French foutre. In Henry IV, Pistol cries out, ‘A foutra for the world.’ A fuck for the world, the obscenity being euphemized by the use of a foreign language. In fact, according to swearing historian Geoffrey Hughes, foutre can still be found in English itself, buried away in the first syllable of the word ‘footling’, meaning ‘of no consequence; silly’. The OED does not agree with him, though, preferring a derivative of footle: to potter around.
Florio’s other four synonyms? Sard, jape, swive and occupy. Sard? It’s there in the Lindisfarne Gospel (c. 950), at Matthew 5:27 – the bit about how we shouldn’t sard other people’s wives. But it had gone from the language by the seventeenth century. Swive? It’s there in Chaucer. Derived from the Old English swifan, meaning to move or sweep, it was the standard, non-rude word for the act till about 1700. Then it disappeared. Jape? As in jolly japes? Sort of. Jape’s sexual meaning faded – around the time Florio noted it – to be replaced by another, less grown-up idea of fun. Why did swive and jape disappear while fuck thrived? While experts generally don’t think that a successful swear is dependent on particular mixes of consonants and vowels, at least one expert has suggested that fuck’s success may – may – be explained by its phonological pattern, of consonant + vowel + hard consonant (CVC).
Occupy? Originally, it meant what it means now – to have possession of. But the obvious carnal possibilities of that meaning were irresistible. So occupation became a sex thing, a switch documented by Shakespeare, playfully, in Henry IV Part 2, where occupy is described as ‘an excellent good worde before it was ill sorted’. Because of these sexual connotations, occupy virtually disappeared from formal written English for the next two hundred years, re-emerging, fresh and desexualized, just in time for the industrial revolution. We have our own modern equivalent, perhaps, in one of the most masculine of sex verbs, ‘have’ – as in ‘Djhava?’ (did you have her?).
Fuck barely appeared in print for three centuries. Its modern ubiquity, though, is more probably less a reflection of usage than an increased willingness to print it. Most likely, as ever, the written word is finally catching up with its older brother, the spoken language. Certainly, according to McEnery in his history of swearing in English, ‘the word fuck surged in popularity during the Victorian era’. In Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1864 thriller, Uncle Silas, one character says to another: ‘And why the puck don’t you let her out?’ There is more and earlier evidence in, of all places, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1847. Queen Victoria had been in power for a decade. The retreat from the relative bawdiness of Georgian England into the new industrial-age prudery was meant to be well underway. We know that Emily Brontë struggled with the raw facts of raw language. Two years after the author’s death, in 1848, her sister Charlotte wrote about this in a preface to a new edition of the novel. ‘The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does – what feeling it spares – what horror it conceals.’ It’s an argument that still has force and meaning today. The Guardian uses this passage in its style guide to justify its preferring to print fuck rather than f--- or f***.
There’s something more revelatory and interesting, though, in Wuthering Heights itself. There is a line in the novel which points indirectly but fairly obviously to a swear-filled world beyond the Brontës’ Yorkshire parsonage – a world that Emily was clearly familiar with. Familiar enough, anyway, to refer to it in her novel. The narrator, Lockwood, is recounting a pre-dawn encounter between Heathcliff (the anti-hero) and Catherine (the heroine). Heathcliff is caught speaking. ‘“And you, you worthless ----” he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash.’ It’s not really at all ambiguous, is it. Duck = fuck. Sheep = shit. Emily Brontë might not have written the actual words but she made clear what they were – and knew that her supposedly prudery-wracked readers would, too.
There are a great number of other swears in the novel, all shielded behind dashes but still clear – and central to the book in general and Heathcliff’s character in particular. For example, the brooding anti-hero is reported as having promised that if the curate came into the house he would ‘have his ------ teeth dashed down his ------ throat’. Damned teeth and throat probably but it could easily be ‘fucking’. He calls Isabella a ‘mere slut’ and Catherine an ‘insolent slut’. Isabella also recalls one of his threats: ‘“You’d better open the door, you ----” he answered, addressing me by some elegant term that I don’t care to repeat.’ As the dashes can’t represent damn, it’s suggested that the dashed word is indicated by the use of ‘elegant’ – a rhyme for cunt.
The lexicographical history of fuck is outlined, with wit and wryness, in the essential text on the subject, The F-Word by Jesse Sheidlower – who is also the man the OED puts you in touch with if you ask them, as I did, any kind of question about bad language. After its debut in Florio’s book, fuck was still there in An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) compiled by Nathan Bailey. Like Dr Johnson, who nominated fucking as life’s greatest pleasure, Bailey was a lexicographer with a taste for the possibilities of life beyond the book. His church, a Seventh Day Baptist congregation, censured him for ‘frequent light and low conversation with two single women, he being a single man and a high professor … and they in principle and practice being so unfit company for his diversion and pleasure.’ His dictionary was more discrete than he was, though, using lexicographer’s Latin to define fuck: Foeminam Subagitare – to have illicit sexual intercourse with a woman. The most popular dictionary of its day, Bailey’s work was a major source for Dr Johnson’s far more famous – and shorter – Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which didn’t include fuck (something of a hypocrisy, given both Johnson’s own use of the word and opinion of the activity). It did appear, though, in John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1795) – as did cunt. But it was excluded from Johnson’s transatlantic cousin, the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), crafted by Noah Webster, a man of such worryingly delicate sensibilities that he would change stink to ‘offensive in smell’ and substitute buttocks with ‘hind-parts’.
Fuck’s first appearance in a modern reference work came in Farmer and Henley’s 1891/3 Slang and Its Analogues – cunt was also in it. But when the editors of the OED reached their fourth volume and the letter F in 1900, they too left it out. In 1934, philologist Allen Walker Read wrote an essay about it, ‘An Obscenity Symbol’, without once using the word itself. Even Eric Partridge, the great twentieth-century writer on non-mainstream English, asterisked it as f*ck in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937). In 1961, it got as far as being typeset for Webster’s Third New International Dictionary but was then removed, at the last moment, on the orders of the publishers, G & C Merriman – though, oddly, cunt was included. It almost made it into the 1966 Random House printing, but didn’t quite, having to wait its turn till the 1987 edition.
As far as regular dictionaries were concerned, it only became a modern English word in 1965 when it appeared, finally, in the Penguin English Dictionary. It made its official entrance into American English in 1969 when it was included in the American Heritage Dictionary. Cunt also debuted in both dictionaries. Both defined it with the same Latin word, though the English one favoured the plural (pudenda) and the American the singular (pudendum).
It first appeared in the OED – again along with cunt – in the 1972 revision. But the debate about its inclusion began many years earlier. The dictionary’s editor, New Zealand-born Robert Burchfield, told the story in an article in the Times Literary Supplement when the word did finally appear. Burchfield recalls that, as early as 1933, lexicographer A. S. C. Ross wrote in a review of the OED that ‘it certainly seems regrettable that the perpetuation of a Victorian prudishness … should have been allowed to lead to the omission of some of the commonest words in the English sexual language’. The review being in an academic publication, Ross used the actual words, too. When Burchfield took over at the OED, in 1957, he consulted his predecessor, C. T. Onions (the man whose lexicographical expertise is probably the source of the phrase ‘know your onions’, he once described the English language as ‘a rum go – but jolly good’). They agreed that ‘the time had not yet come’ for cunt and fuck’s inclusion in ‘general dictionaries of English’ – i.e. non-slang ones. Perhaps he was guided by the fact that two years earlier, in 1955, a British bookseller was sent to jail for two months for selling a book containing this word – D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Five years later, when Penguin decided to publish Lady Chatterley – which had been banned in Britain since its first printing, in 1928 – the publisher ended up in court. It was the first book to be prosecuted under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. In the words of Bernard Levin’s The Pendulum Years, a dryly mordant history of the decade, ‘the Sixties began with an attempt to stop the decade entirely and replace it with an earlier one’. As Burchfield himself acknowledged, the motor for the inclusion of fuck (and cunt) came with this trial – which introduced the word fuck to the British breakfast table.
The first fuck appeared in a British or American newspaper – knowingly, anyway – on 4 November 1960. Naturally, it was in the Guardian. The previous afternoon, a jury had decided that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not obscene and Penguin Books could therefore go ahead with its publication. This first ‘fuck’ appeared in an opinion piece written by Wayland Young, a writer, novelist and journalist. Young thought the jury had made the right decision, of course – ‘a triumph of common sense’. For him, the trial had turned on the evidence of defence witness Richard Hoggart, then a fast-rising academic and cultural commentator. ‘The hero’, Young called Hoggart. ‘I think he made history.’ A sentence that slyly prefigures Young’s own history-making in his very next sentence. ‘In his evidence, using the word in its correct and proper sense, he said the point Lawrence made was: “Simply, this is what one does. One fucks.”’†
This put the paper’s editor, Alistair Hetherington, in a quandry that he’d successfully evaded throughout the trial. Though called as an expert witness, Hetherington had little in common with most of the book’s other defenders. His area of expertise was military – he’d written a monograph for tank warfare. His idea of a good time was fell-walking. He was something of an ascetic. If he was that night’s duty editor, he would not have cream with his lunchtime fruit salad – ‘to keep his head clear for the evening’. Throughout the trial, he’d ensured that the paper by and large avoided using either the words themselves or their asterisked versions. ‘This restriction created some difficulties,’ he recalled in his autobiography. ‘But it seemed the most expedient course.’
Like a medieval papacy, the Guardian’s editorial offices were then split between its historic base, Manchester, and its future base, London. Hetherington was in Manchester. Young filed his piece in London. It was teleprinted to Hetherington. There were just ninety minutes to go before the piece was due ‘off-stone’ – i.e. sent to press. Advice was sought from the paper’s London-based libel lawyer, John Notcutt. His judgement was also telexed to Hetherington. Not unusually for a libel lawyer, he expressed himself in the language of the race track. If, like Lady Chatterley, the paper was charged under the Obscene Publications Act, he gave the chances of a guilty verdict as ‘6 to 4 against’. Up against the clock and disinclined to censor Young’s copy, Hetherington took the bet – and laid it off a little by hastily composing a short leader headed ‘Vulgar or not?’ In it, he wrote: ‘The short answer is not.’
There was not a single reader complaint about this first fuck but the Press Council was not amused. It ‘rebuked’ the Guardian, as well as the Observer (which also printed ‘fuck’, in a piece by Ken Tynan) and the Spectator (in a piece by Bernard Levin which didn’t include ‘fuck’ but did have ‘shit’ and arse’ in the first sentence). ‘Both objectionable and unnecessary’, it harrumphed. The Times concurred with that sentiment. On the trial’s outcome, it was suffocatingly itself: ‘A decent reticence has been the practice in all classes of society and much will be lost by the destruction of it.’ The New Statesman was similarly self-parodic, describing the verdict as ‘a triumph for a working-class writer’.
In the aftermath of the trial, Burchfield wrote an internal report on the possibility of including fuck and cunt in the OED. He decided against but his reasons are weak: written evidence of usage was scanty and they were already in slang dictionaries. You can tell his heart isn’t even in his own argument. At a 1928 dinner to celebrate the completion of the first edition of the OED, politician Stanley Baldwin said it laid bare the soul and the mind of England. But not completely – as Burchfield well knew – while it continued to leave out a couple of the nation’s most central words (and thoughts).
So Burchfield did the sensible thing. By 1962, he’d started drafting the entry for cunt himself. Shortly after, he started on fuck. Philip Larkin, therefore, was quite correct – in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ – in placing the arrival of sexual intercourse in the British Isles as somewhere between 3 November 1960 (the delivery of the verdict in the Lady Chatterley trial) and 11 February 1963 (the formal start of the recording sessions for the Beatles’ first LP).†
Five years later, on 5 January 1968, the Delegates of the Oxford University Press gathered to discuss the progress of the forthcoming supplement to the OED. In particular, they discussed fuck and they discussed cunt. They decided to include them. Or rather, in the way lexicographical academics do, they ‘approved in principle the inclusion of these two four-letter words’.
In April 1969, someone from the underground magazine Oz wrote to the OED complaining that they’d paid £7.50 for a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and registered a complaint. ‘It does not contain the word fuck. We would be interested to know the reason for this curious omission.’ In November – such is the hurtling pace of lexicography – D. M. Davin replied on behalf of the Delegates. The question is ‘a vexed one’, he agreed and cited commercial and ‘scholastic reasons’ for omitting it – i.e. sales would be hit by some people’s refusal to buy the dictionary. Mr Davin did conclude, though, by promising Oz that both fuck and cunt would appear in the next full OED.
When the two words finally made their way into the most authoritative record of written English, an OED press officer said: ‘Standards of tolerance have changed and their omission has for many years, and more frequently of late, excited critical comment’. Reviewing it, the Guardian noted the arrival of fuck – which it printed in full – but not cunt. The Times printed neither but noted their inclusion with a fabulous periphrasis: ‘very ancient, very popular words … that fall between A and G are faithfully recorded.’ They were joined by other sexual newcomers: come, condom, cunnilingus, fellatio, French letter, frig, frigging. Non-sexual arrivals included anorexia nervosa, goggle-box and ‘the new use’ of hopefully. (As in: ‘Hopefully, now the OED includes fuck and cunt, people will stop accusing us of being out-of-date’.)
If, in retrospect, it seems extraordinary that it should have taken so long for words that had been central to the language for at least seven hundred years to make it into the English dictionary of record, Burchfield himself provided a little perspective – and a correction to the suggestion that this is a result of English reserve. Equivalent words, he pointed out in his Times Literary Supplement article, had only just started to appear in dictionaries of other ‘Germanic’ languages while those for ‘Romance’ languages were still not including them.
The first time ‘fuck’ was said on British TV, it was late on the night of Saturday 13 November 1965 – a high-water time for 1960s London and its conflicts with the established order. The charts were headed by the Rolling Stones’ ‘Get Off My Cloud’. The Beatles had just finished recording their sixth album, Rubber Soul. It would be released two weeks later. One of the last tracks they’d cut for it had been their first drugged-up song, ‘The Word’. ‘Just say the word and you’ll be free …’ The previous Friday, The Who had released ‘My Generation’: self-consciously anthemic with a deliberately teasing reference to drugs and ‘fuck’. Roger Daltrey sings it as if he is so pilled up with amphetamines and rage that he starts to stutter – amphetamine can do that to you. ‘Why don’t you all f-f-f-f-f-ade away.’
Five days before the word known as ‘that word’ was said aloud on a BBC TV programme, that organization had announced that it had decided not to screen The War Game, a film commissioned about the aftermath of a nuclear war. It would be twenty years before the film was first broadcast – despite the best campaigning efforts of Ken Tynan. It might be ‘the most important film ever made’, said Tynan, critic, dandy, literary manager of the National Theatre, sadomasochist and the man who first said ‘fuck’ on British TV.
He said it with deliberateness aforethought. It was a coup de television he’d been preparing for many years. It was rational, considered, precontextualized. It came complete with footnotes and suggestions for its possible place in future dissertations. The headlines it roused, the op-eds and letters to the editor, the questions in the House, the pub and dinner party debates: all had had real and carefully elaborated lives inside Ken’s head long before he let the word itself escape from his mouth.
He said it on BBC-3, not then a channel but a sharp-witted chat show with a satirical bent which lasted one series and was presented by Robert Robinson, prematurely bald and prematurely avuncular. Its regular cast included John Bird and John Fortune impersonating pompous politicking politicians, something they would still be doing forty years on. An occasional performer on BBC-3 was comedy writer and TV presenter Denis Norden. He was there that night. He and Ken Tynan were guests on the programme’s chat show segment.
