Filthy English, page 41
General books on language and linguistics: John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel offers the basics of how language developed and grew around the world. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct is a clear and authoritative introduction to Chomskyan-style linguistics – the chapter on how language develops in children is particularly good. David Crystal’s How Language Works is a close-to-encyclopedic beginner’s guide to its subject matter. Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue is a fun tour of the English language.
Of the many recent general books on swearing, I found these the most useful and readable. They’re listed in order of publication. Ashley Montagu’s The Anatomy of Swearing (1967) is authoritative and wide-ranging, if sometimes a little scholastic and long-winded. Hugh Rawson’s Dictionary of Invective (1989) is engaged and engaging but obviously a little dated. Geoffrey Hughes’s Swearing (1991) is sound, extensive and robust. Mark Morton’s Dirty Words (2003) is Canadian and extensive if somewhat list-y. Ruth Wajnryb’s Expletive Deleted (2005) is Australian and, while mostly interesting and informed, sometimes uneven in focus. Geoffrey Hughes’ An Encyclopedia of Swearing (2006) is a series of mini-essays covering similar ground to both Rawson’s and his own 1991 book.
I also found Maledicta invaluable. Describing itself as a ‘scholarly journal dedicated entirely to the study of offensive language’, it’s been published since 1965 by Reinhold Aman, an often deliberately offensive German American. It’s a deep and mucky trough of all kinds of abuse, invective, insult and filth from all around the world, with a tone that varies wildly from the senior common room to the bike sheds, sometimes in the same essay. There have been thirteen volumes. The final – and last, Aman says – appeared in 2005.
Online, Wikipedia was another source, obviously, in particular for basic biographical details and the international lexicon of swearing – though always, of course, with an eye or more on the number and quality of the references, citations and cross-references.
Chapter One: Sexual Intercourse and Masturbation
Fuck books: Christopher M. Faiman’s Fuck is free and easily found online. A new edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word was scheduled for publication in September 2009.
Fuck essays: Leo Stone’s ‘On The Principal Obscene Word of The English Language’ (1954) appeared in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. As is the case with the other psychoanalytic papers I refer to, it’s not easily found outside major or specialist libraries – or the paid-for online psychoanalytic database, PEP.
William Dunbar’s poetry is easily found online, as is Robert Burns’ Merry Muses. Bernard Levin’s The Pendulum Years remains a witty and clear guide to the moral debates of the 1960s. Geoffrey Taylor’s Changing Faces: A History of the Guardian 1956–88 gives a clear, wry account of its first fuck. Lynda Mugglestone’s Lost For Words gives a wry outline of the OED’s fuck struggle. William Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry is available in a Nonpareil Books edition that’s as elegant and pleasing as the words inside.
Chapter Two: Vulvas, Vaginas and Breasts
An extensive source here is the thoroughly extensive ‘cunt’ website, run by a gay man with the surname Hunt – matthewhunt.com. Pauline Kiernan’s Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns is more serious than its title would lead you to expect. The psychoanalytic papers on the clitoris by Blau and Kanner are entertaining (not always consciously so) and most easily found on PEP – see above. Ruth Todasco’s An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Dirty Words offers a window into the early days of the feminist attack on the dick-tionary. Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke is worth a dip or two, though maybe not much more.
Chapter Three: Penises and Testicles
Julian Franklyn’s A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang (1960) is old enough to capture the London (and Australian) argot before it was taken up by the wider world. The older blues songs referred to are often out of copyright so can be found online. The Little Willie Littlefield track is available on Kat on the Keys (Ace). For blues lyrics, try Michael Taft’s Blues Lyrics Concordance at dylan61.se. Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish is old now and its memory is not always what it could be but it’s still one of the best companions there is for a long-haul flight. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert’s The London Encyclopedia is an extensive, accurate and reliable guide to the city’s streets and what Londoners have got up to on them.
Chapter Four: Anuses, Faeces, Urine and other Excreta
Keith Allan and Kate Burridge’s Euphemism & Dysphemism veers enjoyably between the scholarly and the schoolboyish, the top table and the dunny. Charles Hodgson’s Carnal Knowledge catalogues our anatomical lexicon. The story of Captain Beefheart’s old fart is told, enthusiastically, in Kevin Courrier’s Trout Mask Replica. Edward Croft Dutton’s study ‘Bog off Dog Breath! You’re Talking Pants! Swearing as Witnessed in Student Evangelical Groups’ appeared in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture and is easily found online.
Chapter Five: Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers
Ariel C. Arango’s Dirty Words: The Expressive Power of Taboo is the most extensive Freudian text on the subject, perhaps a little too extensive and Freudian for most. The McEnery and Xiao paper, ‘Fuck Revisited’, can be found online, as can Fred Shapiro’s ante-dating of motherfucker. Roosevelt Syke’s ‘Dirty Mother For You’ is on the compilation Dirty Blues (Allegro) which also features Memphis Minnie’s ‘If You See My Rooster’, Lil Johnson’s ‘Press My Button’ and Monette Moore’s ‘Two Old Maids In A Folding Bed’.
Chapter Six: Homosexuals, Male and Female
Robert Graves’s Lars Porsena: The Future of Swearing and Improper Language (1927) is poetically eccentric but still wry and smart. Oscar Wilde’s sexual tastes, language and adventures are explored briefly in Richard Canning’s Oscar Wilde and fulsomely in Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. Tony McEnery’s Swearing in English: Blasphemy, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present is as academic as its title indicates but presents its case powerfully, if not conclusively. The life of (and in) the Van Dykes was outlined in a March 2009 New Yorker piece by Ariel Levy.
Chapter Seven: Popular Music
Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming was the first general history of punk and is still the best. I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol by Glen Matlock and Peter Silverton is also rather good, I’m told. Nick Tosches’ Country has a fine chapter on recorded smut. The Lucille Bogan story is best told and heard on Shave ’Em Dry (Sony). If the history of recording technology is your thing, Steven Lasker’s informative essay ‘What Made That Great Okeh Sound?’ can be found online. The entire Jelly Roll Morton Library of Congress sessions are only available as an increasingly rare and expensive box-set – though the notes are not all they could be, the recordings are fairly extraordinary. A forthcoming biography of Ian Dury by Will Birch promises much but till then his genius is best found collected on the best-of collection, Reasons To Be Cheerful. Oddly, though, it doesn’t include ‘Plaistow Patricia’ and its life-affirming obligato – you’ll have to go to the original album, New Boots and Panties, for that. The Clovers’ and Blenders’ tracks are on For Adults Only – which also features Screaming Jay Hawkins’ ‘Constipation Blues’ and Slim Gaillard’s ‘F**K Off (Dirty Rooster)’. Jackie Wilson and Lavern Baker’s ‘Think Twice’ (Version X) is freely available online.
Allen Walker Read’s essay ‘An Obscenity Symbol’ (1934) is in American Speech. His short book Classic American Graffiti is out of print but widely available second hand. The Geolinguistics of Verbal Taboo (1970) is another goodie. Actually, anything he wrote is worth a read.
Chapter Eight: Around the World
Though there are many collections of international swearing, they tend to the silly or smutty. Nothing, frankly, beats Maledicta and its four-decade tour of the subject. Online, Alternative Dictionaries is fairly reliable but hasn’t been updated for a while. By contrast, Urban Dictionary is updated all the time – so fast, by so many, in fact, that it’s often hard to gauge authenticity. Victor Erofeyev’s piece on Mat appeared in the New Yorker in September 2003.
Chapter Nine: Coloured People and People of Colour
Randall Kennedy’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word is a hallmark of intelligence, calm and poise in the face of anger and idiocy. Richard Dooling’s Blue Streak covers some of the same territory, if more briefly, more lightly, more angrily and less engagingly. Henry Louis Gates Jr’s Colored People is just a wonderful metaphor. Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World brings the clear eye of a (good) American writer to the game for gentlemen that’s played by ruffians, particularly aspects of it that it tries to avoid. Stone The Crows (see above) is particularly splendid on ethnic slurs and insults.
Chapter Ten: *********, Bleeps, Censorship, ------ and Euphemism
Noel Perrin’s Dr Bowdler’s Legacy is a modern guide not just to the man but to the rest of his family who did most of the actual work and to the wider history of English censorship. Most of the style guides quoted are on the individual newspaper’s websites. The Guardian’s and The New York Times’ are also published as books. The Ofcom Broadcasting Code can be downloaded from its website, along with other research papers. George Carlin’s Class Clown album is still available.
Chapter Eleven: The Couch, the Football Match and the Romantic French Poet
The story of Freud and psychoanalysis is well-told at some length in Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life For Our Time. Sandor Ferenczi’s paper, ‘On Obscene Words’ is in his collection, First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. Like most of the other psychoanalytic writings I refer to, including Bergler on the same subject, Ferenczi’s work is also available on PEP web. Dieguez and Bogousslavsky’s paper on Baudelaire appeared in Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience in 2007. The great poet’s life is elegantly detailed in Joanna Richardson’s Charles Baudelaire. Timothy Jay’s Why We Curse: A Neuro-psycho-social Theory of Speech is an academic but not dry exposition of the field. The chapter on swearing in Steven Pinker’s Stuff of Thought is as excellent and thought-provoking as everything of his I’ve ever read. The jamais vu experiment I refer to is as yet unpublished but its full Harvard-style citation is Moulin, C.J.A., O’Connor A.R, & Conway, M.A. (2006). Semantic satiation and subjective experience: The strange case of jamais vu. International Conference of Memory, Sydney, July 2006. ‘P** P* B**** B** D******’ is on The Complete Flanders & Swann.
Acknowledgements
Arseholes: Mal Peachey (agent), Stephen Guise (editor), Philip Gwyn Jones (chequebook), Christine Lo (editor), Ilona Jasiewicz (editor), Joanna Macnamara (proofreader).
Bastards: Jennifer (forebearance), Daniel (headwear), Lily (tea and empathy), Spike (football companionship, teenage argot), Bear (walking companion and confidant).
Fucking cunts: Agata (Nitecka), Ariel (H. Pillet), Assaf (Gavron), Ben (Olins), Claire (West), Damian (Janowski), Dorothy (Boswell), Elizabeth (Bradshaw), Ira (Robbins), Jean (Jean-Charles), Lucinda (Gresswell), Mariella (Scarlett), Mark (Hartley), Mick (Doherty), Paul (Rambali), Pearl (Jordan), Philip (Chevron), Richard (Robson), Rob (Hooson), Roger (Armstrong), Satu (Ylisaari), Spike (Williams), Steve (White), Tamara (Oliven), Tanja (Neidhart), Thomas (Lane), Vicky (Pearce), Yoram (Inspector), Zoe (Cormier).
And: Andrew, Deborah, Elizabeth, John, Jorge, Livia, Pat, Richard, Rochelle, Tuesday.
Pricks: Johnny Black (Popular music), Ted Carroll (Mothers and Fathers), Marie-Elise Coatantiec (Mothers and Fathers), Fred Dellar (Popular Music), Richard Dixon (Sexual Intercourse, Vulvas and Vaginas), Simon Franklin (Around the World), Daniel Gavron (Penises and Testicles, Mothers and Fathers, Around the World), Viv Groskop (Around the World), Barney Hoskyns (Popular Music), Michael Knipe (Sexual Intercourse, Euphemism), Jane Krivine (Around the World), Sophie Krivine (Vulvas and Vaginas), Elizabeth Lebas (Penises and Testicles, Around the World), Gina Lubrano (Euphemism), Felipe Massao (Around the World), Kate Miller (Sexual Intercourse), Jon Newey (Popular Music), Nigel Paneth (Penises and Testicles, Around the World, The Couch), Ellen Pollak (Euphemism), Dave Robinson (Popular Music), Jonathan Sklar (The Couch), Neil Spencer (Popular Music), Mary Target (The Couch), Ying-Ping Wang (Mothers and Fathers, Homosexuals, Around the World), Louisa Young (Sexual Intercourse), Oren Ziv (Mothers and Fathers).
Index
Abyssinian, 1 (clitoris)
Afrikaans, 1
(faeces, vagina), 1 (racial slur)
Alderson, Maggie, 1
(favours ‘ride’) 1(genital words)
Aman, Reinhold, 1(publishes bad language, gets prison sentence)
American English, 1
(breasts), 1
(penis), 1
(penis), 1
(penis), 1
(buttocks), 1
(sperm), 1
(toilet euphemism), 1
(homosexuals), 1
(sex between a woman’s breasts), 1(racial slurs)
Anglo-Saxon, see Old English
Anthusa, 1, (fucked by Fortunatas)
Arabic, 1
(mother insult), 1
(homosexual), 1 (racial slur)
Argentinian Spanish, 1
(breasts), 1n
(disability insult), 1
(mother insult), 1 (geographical slur)
Armstrong, Roger, 1 (feck)
Arsenal, 1
(as menstruation metaphor), 1
(vs Aston Villa), 1
ASL (American Sign Language), 1 (‘fuck off’)
Australian English, 1
(masturbation), 1
(breasts), 1
(penis), 1
(bloody), 1
(urination), 1
(‘deadshit’), 1 (racial slurs)
backronyms, 1 (FUCK)
Baker, Lavern, 1(first ‘cunt’)
baseball, 1 (swearing habits of players)
Battlestar Galactica, 1 (‘frak’)
Baudelaire, Charles, 1(has stroke, dies, leaves hints about meaning of swearing)
BBC TV, 1, 2
(record number of complaints), 1
(sends comic to survey swearing), 1 (producer fails to attend course)
Belarusian, 1
(fart), 1
(oral sex), 1 (whore)
Bergler, Edmund, 1 (views on attraction of large breasts and penises)
Blair, Tony, 1
(‘bollocks’), 1 (‘cunt’)
Blenders, The, 1 (‘Don’t Fuck Around With Love’)
Bogan, Lucille, 1
(first ‘fuck’), 1
(cock ‘made of brass’), 1
Bono, 1 (‘fucking brilliant’)
Boswell, Dorothy, 1
(‘tosser’), 1 (mother insult)
Bourdaloue, Père Louis, 1 (invention of Portaloo)
Bradshaw, Elizabeth, 1
Brand, Russell, 1 (complained about)
Breton, 1 (fart)
Brontë, Emily, 1(fuck, shit, cunt)
Browning, Robert, 1 (‘twat’)
Bulgarian, 1
(mother insult), 1(origins of buggery)
Burgess, Anthony, 1 (‘camp’)
Burmese, 1 (homosexuals)
Burns, Robert, 1 (‘cunt’)
Bushell, Garry, 1 (fuck, bollocks, cunt)
‘bugger’, 1 (says author’s father)
Campbell, James, 1 (founds FCUK-ization)
Cantona, Eric, 1n (‘shit’)
Captain Beefheart, 1 (‘old fart’)
Carlin, George, 1
(‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’), 1
(‘heavy seven’), 1(longimpact of ‘heavy seven’)
Carrey, Jim, 1 (shmuck)
Casanova, 1
(penis and vagina joke), 1 (condom)
Catalan, 1
(penises), 1
(testicles), 1
(oral sex), 1 (perineum)
Caxton, William, 1 (replaces arses with buttocks)
Channel 1, 2
(‘cunt’), 1 (ejaculating as trade for alcohol)
Chapman, Jake and Dinos, 1 (cunt)
Charing Cross, 1 (‘Beware of sods!’)
Chaucer, 1
(cunt), 1
(buttocks), 1
(‘gay gerl’), 1 (‘hard language’)
Chester, Charlie, 1n (cunt, child molester)
Chevron, Philip, 1 (feck)
Chicago, Judy, 1
(ceramic vulvas), 1 (ceramic vulvas)
Chicago Tribune, 1 (no bitches, no faggots)
Chinese, 1
(breasts), 1
(anal wind), 1
(mother insult), 1
(homosexuals), 1
(turtle insult), 1
(maternal vagina insult), 1 (racial slurs)
Christians, 1
(destroy TV), 1
(views on swearing), 1
(complain about metallic buggery), 1
(swearing habits), 1
(suppress swearing), 1(buggery)
Clark, John, 1 (cunt)
Clarkson, Jeremy, 1 (‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’)
Clough, Brian, 1n (‘shit’)
