Filthy English, page 40
Postscript
Afterglow
I’m writing this in the British Library, at a light oak desk with a dark green linoleum worktop, warm and soft to the touch. There is a brass reading lamp and a brass-finished socket for my laptop. I’m in one of the second floor reading rooms. It’s quiet and studious, with its usual mix of professional researchers, book writers, students and obsessive eccentrics. I look up to think. A young woman, a student I guess, is sitting opposite me. She is wearing a black short-sleeved T-shirt. On it, written in cursive script, is the message ‘Don’t piss me off! I’m running out of places to hide the bodies.’
In 1973, Dr Olga Penavin, feminist, philologist and prominent figure in Yugoslav academia, announced that swearing was all capitalism’s fault. Socialism, she said, would inevitably resolve all those societal tensions and conflicts that were the cause of swearing. There would, therefore, in Yugoslavia’s bright new socialistic future, be no need for swearing. Well, as predictions go, in terms of both linguistics’ and socialism’s capacity for conflict resolution in Dr Penavin’s neck of the world, that really did turn out to be something of a load of old Balkans.
As Dr Penavin would have found out a year before she died in 2001. A conference was held in her home-town, Novi Sad, to celebrate her jubilee. It turned into something of a jamboree destruction of her 1973 thesis. A paper by Dr Biljana Sikmić, for example, sought to measure equivalence between Slovene and Serbian obscenities. Dr Sikmić demonstrated, to her own satisfaction at least, that when a Slovene tells you ‘ni vreden pol kurca!’ (‘you’re not worth half a cock’), it has the equivalent emotional and linguistic weight of a Serb informing you that ‘ne vrediš ni pola pizde vode’ (‘you’re not worth half a cunt of water’). Tanja Petrović studied the slogans shouted by anti-Milošević marchers. A noted favourite referred to the then President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s sinophilia: ‘marš v materinu Kinu’ (‘march on your mother’s Chinese cunt’). In an article about the conference, Bernard Nežmah, a local academic, journalist and dissident, reported a phrase spoken to him by one of the many whose life and livelihood had been destroyed by the Balkan wars. ‘Da bi šel v pizdo materno.’ ‘If only I could crawl back into my mother’s cunt.’ Nežmah’s point, of course, was the simple one, the same one I found in psychological and scientific studies: swearing springs eternal. Because it refers to the deep, core parts of our selves.
Where are we now, though? Swearing has clearly changed over the last thirty years. Its acceptability has, broadly, widened and, again broadly, the potency of sexual swears have diminished. In 2000, the writer and TV presenter Stephen Fry echoed Dr Penavin, though with a different argument. He said swearing would soon disappear because ‘almost every swearword now is more-or-less acceptable in broadcasting … it is impossible to imagine that there will be any taboo words which are unsayable, unless you invent new disgusting parts of the body that we haven’t thought of yet!’ Was he right? Does swearing have a past but no future? Can that be calibrated, though? Has ‘fuck’ gone the way of ‘bloody’? Is ‘cunt’ really the new ‘fuck’? What about ‘nigger’?
I’ll start with the ‘fuck’ question. It’s a toss-up. There are two moments at which you could say that ‘fuck’ had, to most intents and purposes, ceased being a serious swearword in English English. You take your choice. I’ve made mine. The first option would be at some point between September 1999 and February 2006. It was in September 1999 that Conservative Future, ‘the youth wing of the Conservative Party’, decided it was now called CFUK. It was an obvious tribute to FCUK, as French Connection rebranded itself in April 1997. The clothing company always claimed FCUK was merely an acronym of French Connection UK. It damaged the cogency of its argument somewhat, though, with such T-shirt slogans as ‘too busy to fcuk’ and ‘mile high fcuk’. That the young Conservatives were ordered, almost immediately, to drop their new name was of no consequence. What mattered was that French Connection pretty much dropped the FCUK thing in February 2006. They didn’t do it because it was causing offence or outrage but because it wasn’t. When the Conservative youth group was forced to reverse its rebranding, ‘fuck’ was still widely seen as offensive but by the time FCUK debranded itself, it no longer was. That’s the first option for the precise moment when ‘fuck’ lost its power.
I favour a second moment, though. That can be dated even more precisely, to Saturday 18 October 2008. Or rather, in the aftermath of what happened some time after 9 p.m. that night, on Radio 2. Comic presenter Jonathan Ross, in the company of comic performer Russell Brand, left a message on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs, the comic actor who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers. Ross’s message was that Brand had ‘fucked’ Mr Sachs’ granddaughter. This seems to have been factually correct.
There were, initially, just two complaints, one from Mr Sachs (via his agent), one from a listener. Which is what you’d expect. Anyone choosing to listen to this show would have known the kind of stuff it included – laddish sex discussions were not unusual. When, though, the story of the phone call was repeated a week later by the Mail on Sunday, the complaints rushed in. By the next day, there were more than five hundred. Even the Prime Minister and the Attorney General both found time in their busy schedules to register their disgust. A week or so later, the complainants totalled 37,000. The final total was 44,790 – just over two thousand short of the record, for Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2005.
The complaints weren’t about language, though, or even sexuality. They weren’t concerned about words or acts. They were upset or angry at three things. One, that a cherished actor’s privacy had been traduced. Two, that his granddaughter’s sexual history had been made public, without her knowledge or consent. Three, that this had been done as public entertainment, in a smutty, self-loving way by a pair of self-loving smuts. What no-one complained about or cared about was that Russell Brand had had sex with Andrew Sachs’ grand-daughter. Even more significantly, they didn’t care that he had ‘fucked’ her. It was attitudes that were the problem, not the act or even the language. You could have changed ‘fuck’ to ‘sexual intercourse’ or even ‘make love’ and there could easily have been just as many complaints. It was the act and the thought that counted, not the word used to express them.
‘Fuck’ was the dog that didn’t bark. The word had finally, definitively gone mainstream. No one gave a fuck about Ross’s ‘fuck’ – or Brand’s fuck. It was the telling of the tale that angered, not the language chosen to tell it.†
Not even Ofcom gave a fuck. The regulator’s final judgment on the affair was handed down on 3 April 2009. The BBC’s wrists were slapped and slapped again. It was fined £150,000 – a very serious fine, the maximum being £250,000. It was criticized for all kinds of things, right down to the appliance of compliance forms and the fact that the show’s executive producer had failed to attend a BBC Safeguarding Trust training course. The swear word itself, though, is quite clearly not the issue. It is referred to just once in the thirty-seven-page report.
The battle we’d fought on the music papers in the late 1970s had clearly been won, for better or worse. If I were to hit my thumb with a hammer now and shout ‘Fuck!’, I doubt my parents would feel the need to move house. But what if I shouted ‘Cunt!’? Will ‘cunt’ soon go the way of ‘fuck’ and become almost completely publicly acceptable? In early 2009, I went to see a play at the National Theatre, England People Very Nice, a two-hundred-year narrative of Britain’s multi-racial immigrations. One of its main characters is an East End barmaid whose race and religion change as the years pass by. Now she’s Huguenot French, now she’s Whitechapel Jewish. There’s a lot of racist language in the play – used to good and pointed effect. There are a lot of ‘fuck’s, too, particularly in the barmaid’s mouth. Late in the play, she stands over the open grave of a loved one and says: there is only one word for this moment. We, the audience, half-laughed, knowing what was coming next: her favoured swear, fuck. Only she didn’t say that. She said ‘Cunt’ – and the actress playing her milked the silence. No one gasped or walked out or shouted: ‘Shame!’ But, still …
While a ‘cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt’ chant might be fine at a performance of The Vagina Monologues, the word is clearly still in a different league to ‘fuck’. ‘This is something that I talk a lot about,’ said The F-Word author Jesse Sheidlower. ‘I don’t think “cunt” is the new “fuck”, mainly because its application is so much more limited. Also, in England, “cunt” is much more widely used than here in the US. It’s very unusual to use it here in reference to a man, for example. Thus in America it’s even more restricted.’
Another day, I found myself talking about this with the photographer Rankin, whose fortieth-birthday party invite was a self-portrait mask with ‘I’m a cunt’ written on it. ‘I was brought up to not swear but I love the word “cunt”,’ he said. ‘I think it’s an amazing word, I could talk about that for hours. I love the fact that it causes such an enormous reaction in people who think it’s inappopriate. And it’s a nice-sounding word. “He’s a right cunt.” I love saying that.’ Would he use it for the actual thing, though? ‘Never.’
And what if I shouted ‘Nigger’? Not perhaps as I hammered my thumb but at a playmate. Would my parents feel the need to move house? Well, whatever they might feel and think, others might insist they did. I asked Jesse Sheidlower about this: ‘I usually say that “nigger” and other racial epithets have taken over the offensiveness-space previously occupied by fuck. A politician getting caught using “nigger” even once would find his career in tatters.’
He’s right, I’m sure. Football manager ‘Big’ Ron Atkinson did more than most to advance the progress of black players in the English game. Yet when, in 2004, he let slip, off-air, his belief that the elegant and effective defender, France international Marcel Desailly was a ‘lazy thick nigger’, his media career was over, overnight. Not that he’d even have to use the word ‘nigger’ itself, as is shown by what happened to David Howard in 1999. An openly gay (and white) administrator in the (black) mayor’s office in Washington DC, Howard told his staff that, such was the state of the budget, he’d have to be ‘niggardly’ about spending it. There are, of course, no etymological links with ‘nigger’. Nonetheless, after a whispering campaign, Howard offered his resignation – which was accepted. Opinions divided. One columnist asked how Howard would have felt about someone in the room suggesting they toss a faggot on the fire. He was, though, supported by Julian Bond of the leading black organisation, the NAACP. With a good gag, too: ‘the Mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on this issue’.
It is impossible here not to raise the subject of ‘political correctness’, in the shade of which the debate about racist words – or racist-seeming words – is conducted. It’s become a debate of ever more delicate intricacies. (For many years, the British Sociological Association drew up an ever-changing list of ‘racially sensitive words’. It has now been withdrawn. It had become ‘rather sensitive’.) Crudely, the debate has two positions. On one side is a belief – touching for a writer, particularly – in the all-powerfulness of a word: in the example above, the non-existent ‘nigger’ in ‘niggardly’. On the other, there is an equally unworldly conviction that, as the Arabic proverb has it, a thousand curses never tore a shirt. Which the Moor Othello echoes in the first act of his Venetian tragedy play, swearing that ‘words are words. I never did yet hear/That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear’. Yet, of course, that is exactly what does happen – Iago’s words do pierce his ears and bruise his heart. Because they were intended to. Only a naif thinks either that words have no conquences or that those consequences are inevitable.
In early 2009, the BBC carpeted and canned Carol Thatcher for describing a black tennis player (reportedly the French Jo-Wilfried Tsonga) as looking like a golliwog – or perhaps a ‘golliwog Frog’. Or rather, the BBC sacked her because they didn’t think her apology was fulsome and grovelling enough. Only she knows for sure whether or not her comment was racist in intent or implication. I did mischeviously wonder, though, if anyone at the BBC bothered to check out golliwog’s entry in the OED. There, they’d have learned that, appearances to the contrary, ‘golliwog’ has nothing to do with the certainly racist ‘wog’. Rather, it’s most likely a reptile thing. Yes, a golliwog is a black, curly haired doll but it’s not a racist construction. According to the OED it’s probably a joining of ‘pollywog’, an American dialect word for tadpole with ‘golly’ – ‘by golly’ was, in the dictionary’s words, orginally a negro euphemism for ‘by God’.
Not long after the BBC dumped Carol Thatcher, another presenter got into trouble over pejorative language. Jeremy Clarkson, whose salary is clearly inflated by his capacity for pricking the bubbles of the self-inflated, called Prime Minister Gordon Brown a ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’, in Australia. Isolating the exact offence is an interesting and indicative exercise. One-eyed and Scottish: these are both facts. Idiot: agree or not, that’s what lawyers call fair comment. The offence is not in the words or the meaning of the words but, as is so often the case with any language, in intent. If Clarkson were a policeman giving a description of Gordon Brown, then ‘one-eyed’ would not only be fine but extremely helpful. But he’s not a policeman, is he.
I think this ongoing debate – as entertaining as it is – misses the point. Three points actually. First, the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of words like ‘paki’ was in good part simply a reaction to a wave of immigration – exactly as such words proliferated in the early-twentieth-century US melting pot. Even a word like ‘paki’ didn’t necessarily start out racist – newspapers in Bangladesh regularly use the very similar ‘pak’. When new groups arrive or emerge in society, it’s necessary to find a word to describe and categorise them. Sometimes, probably too often, that word fixes on a simple, caricature notion of that group – whether it’s greaseball or Sloane. It’s rough and tough and not exactly pleasant but it’s human and not necessarily racist. Or, at least only to the extent that, in the words of that Avenue Q song, everyone’s a little racist. What makes words like ‘paki’ racist is their appropriation by racists – as always, it’s the thought not the word that counts. Second, there is real significance in the reappropriation of ‘nigger’ – ‘queer’, too. As unpleasant (and confusing) as such usage can seem – to both outsiders and insiders – it does reflect a real desire for groupness, to place oneself in the comforting arms of belonging. Which leads to the third and major thing about the undeniable rise in sensitivity about racist – or at least racist-seeming – words. As God once was to the swearer, so sex was for many centuries. Now its focus and power has moved from the spiritual and genital to that other source of selfhood – community. Hence the new awfulness of ‘nigger’ and ‘paki’. Swearing and the taboos around it are extremely important ways of pointing to, protecting and dramatising our most private and essential selves. In a time of unprecedent social, religious and skin-colour collisions, it’s not really a surprise that that’s where the swearing action is.
Things could still change, though. The language pendulum could swing again, in more than one direction. A new Puritanism could sweep in. Or sexual slang could become if not completely acceptable, at least as open as it was in Chaucer’s day. Or religious insults could again become as powerful as they were in the eighteenth century when quakers were q---ers. Or the public divide could become ever wider, with, say, ‘cunt’ mugs on sale in Camden Lock while the BBC and British broadsheets less wide-minded than the Guardian take refuge in periphrasis. It’s possible. I’ve already seen ‘the word that rhymes with witch’. On the other hand, we might even manage to achieve what seems to have been something of a linguistic Holy Grail – finding words for sexuality and sexual parts that don’t force us to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class.
Will we always swear, then? And will others try to censor cursing with asterisks, bleeps, Cif, dashes and euphemism? Yes and yes, of course. Much as the words may change, the meaning behind them remains the same. Our need to swear, our drive to swear, our determination to express otherwise inexpressible parts of ourselves, that will never go. It’s a pointer to our emotions, to our secret passions – not just sexual but more generally personal. It’s a window into the hidden narrative of us all. Even euphemism and minced oaths – and those who use them – are back-handed acknowledgments of swearing’s power and significance. If – impossible thought – swearing were to disappear, we would lose an essential, ancient part of what it means to be human. We are, in a way, what we swear. Which, of course, is also why swearing so often gets bleeping asterisked out.
† My favourite remark in the whole affair did, though, concern ‘fuck’. Jana Bennett, the director of BBC Vision, said: ‘The c-word goes to me, actually. That was one of the surprising aspects of the job when I got it. F and MF are referred to controllers.’
Further Reading
Recommendations and sources are listed by the chapter they first appear in.
Foreplay
First is the last word: The Oxford English Dictionary. Not just a way to waste an afternoon swimming in words but a justly renowned resource. Unless otherwise indicated, it’s the source for the first date of a word’s appearance. It’s now online and regularly updated. My local library ticket lets me use it for free – along with the Dictionary of National Biography and the Grove Dictionary of Music, which I also consulted.
Slang definitions, citations and etymologies: as well as the OED, I used three other major sources, all blessed with the capacity to distract you from work for an hour or ten. Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Historical Slang set the standard. Jonathan Green’s Dictionary of Slang brought it up to date and is sometimes entrancingly discursive – see the entry on ‘bloody’. John Ayto and John Simpson’s Stone The Crows: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang is as irreverent as its title and as scholarly as its subtitle, with a particularly engaging index of words arranged by subject matter.
