Filthy English, page 5
The show went out live and wasn’t taped. So there is no record of what happened. Denis is our witness. ‘It’s important to say it wasn’t a gratuitous fuck. Ken was engaged in what was an ultimately successful campaign to abolish the Lord Chamberlain.’ Which is why Tynan was on the show. He was there to discuss something that had happened the previous week. Edward Bond’s play, Saved, opened at the Royal Court Theatre. But only after it had been banned, by the Lord Chamberlain – who had been in the business of theatrical censorship since 1737. For two centuries, the Lord Chamberlain vetted everything that appeared on the London stage. All kinds of works were censored over that time. Oscar Wilde’s Salome was banned. Lines were cut from Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata – though the Father of Comedy wasn’t around, of course, to argue the case for his fucking peace play (or rather, non-fucking peace play). The Lord Chamberlain of 1965 was Baron Cobbold, a former governor of the Bank of England. His objection to Bond’s play was to a scene in which a baby was stoned to death. The Royal Court had evaded Baron Cobbold’s blue pencil by temporarily turning the theatre into a members-only club – and therefore, they thought, putting the play beyond the Lord Chamberlain’s writ. Instead, Cobbold’s office prosecuted the play’s producers, successfully. It was a pyrrhic victory, though. Within three years, the Lord Chamberlain’s office had been abolished – brought down by Ken Tynan.
On his big night, Ken was his usual witty self, asking rhetorically: ‘Is the word “duck” 75 per cent obscene?’ His actual use of the offending word was couched in oblique language. He said: ‘I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word “fuck” would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.’ Or perhaps he doubted if there were ‘very many rational people in the world’ who felt that way. Accounts vary, though only in emphasis. As the show wasn’t recorded, we can make our own choice.
So what happened next, Denis? Something big and noisy, I’d always assumed, but no. Something very old-fashioned and British happened. The moment was treated as if it hadn’t happened, as if it were a badly behaved child. If the adults kept quiet and didn’t make a fuss, maybe it would just run away and stop bothering everyone. ‘It didn’t create an enormous furore in the moment because Robert Robinson was so smooth. He had a wonderful ability to ask a question which seemed relevant but which was actually done to divert the stream.
‘When we came off, Ken looked very strange. It was clear this was not something he had done lightly. He had that white, pinched look to his nostrils.’ Denis and Ken left together. Denis saw a BBC commissionaire hand Ken two messages. There had been two telephone calls for him. Both were offers of support from prominent showbusiness liberals – Jonathan Miller and George Melly. ‘Now I know I’m in trouble,’ said Ken.
He was. Kind of. The BBC apologized, formally. The House of Commons came up with four motions of censure, signed by 133 MPs – lots of sound, lots of fury but ultimately very little signifying. Naturally, Mary Whitehouse weighed in. A tidy little woman from Shropshire, a school teacher with big glasses and a helmet of permed hair, she’d taught sex education to her students and been shocked by their morals. Blaming television – and the BBC, in particular – for ‘the moral collapse in this country’, she formed the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. She and it led a decades-long Christian-ish crusade against sex and swearing on TV. In the finely turned words of Bernard Levin, they ‘hammered away at the world, the flesh and the devil, particularly the flesh’. When Tynan swore Mrs Whitehouse told the press he should have ‘his bottom spanked’ – not the worst of punishments for a man whose hobby was flagellation.
It’s true that Tynan didn’t really work much on TV after that first fuck but he wasn’t horsewhipped or spat at in the street. He didn’t lose his job at the National Theatre. He wasn’t stopped from producing the erotic stage show, Oh! Calcutta!† He just had to wait till the Lord Chamberlain’s office was abolished, freeing writers to write what they wanted and actors to act in the nude – previously, if naked, they had to remain static (as if that put a stop to all sexual titillation and desire). He wrote elegant profiles for the New Yorker. He continued to dress up as a woman and ask to be hit. The fact is that history’s tide was his not Mary Whitehouse’s. ‘It must sound very strange now,’ said Denis. ‘But what he did was very liberating to anyone who was on TV at that time.’ Denis and his writing partner Frank Muir were frequent guests on a lot of panel shows. ‘Singularly inane ones, so soppy that your concentration would start to wander. A very strong temptation would come over you to say that word. It was like the experience of being on a high building when you want to jump. What Ken did was very … liberating. What is hard to appreciate today is the enormity of the utterance. You really did feel there would be some divine punishment meted out.’
Ken’s first TV fuck inevitably made the next day’s front pages – but only in an asterisked or euphemistic form, as ‘that word’. It didn’t make its movie debut till two years later, in 1967, in a film of James Joyce’s Ulysses, an art-house movie. Its first appearance in a mainstream film was not until three years later, in both the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H and the adaptation of the Gore Vidal novel Myra Breckinridge. The most memorable fuck in film, though, didn’t arrive till 1994, when Hugh Grant opened Four Weddings and a Funeral – and transformed his career and life – with four perfectly turned and modulated fucks. I suspect that non-native English English speakers delighted in the seeming contrast between upper-class voice and lower-class word. Native speakers know that upper-class English men and women swear like, well, like upper-class English men and women.
It made its parliamentary debut in 1982. Wood Green MP Reg Race was complaining about prostitutes’ flyers which, he claimed, said ‘Phone them and fuck them’. Hansard, which is meant to be a full and accurate record of all debates in the house, asterisked his words to ‘f***’.
Till 2009, it was also said that the first printed ‘fuck’ in the US was a twentieth-century thing. In the new edition of The F-Word, though, Sheidlower has pushed it back more than half a century, to a ‘fascinating decision’ on a case which came before the Supreme Court of Missouri in 1846 – when Mark Twain would have been in the neighbourhood and about Tom Sawyer’s age. A man had been accused of having sex with a mare. He sued his accuser for slander and won. The accuser then appealed, on the grounds that ‘fuck’ wasn’t in the dictionary and accordingly ‘unknown to the English language’ and ‘not understood by those to whom it was spoken’. Thus, being a non-existent thing, it couldn’t be slanderous. The court rejected this quite fabulous but entirely specious argument, writing:
‘Because the modesty of our lexicographers restrains them from publishing obscene words, or from giving the obscene signification to words that may be used without conveying any obscenity, it does not follow that they are not English words, and not understood by those who hear them; or that chaste words may not be applied so as to be understood in an obscene sense by every one who hears them.’
Two decades later, in Indiana, a similar case was similarly rejected. Here, the words referred to having ‘f--ked Rebecca Kelley one hundred times’. Again, the court was having none of it. ‘It is claimed that the words charged do not import whoredom, and are not actionable per se. We think otherwise. The word “f--ked”, although not to be found in any vocabulary of the English language, is as well understood as any other English word.’
Sheidlower has also detailed its first openly printed appearance in the US quite uncontroversially, in 1926’s Wine, Women and War – an Australian WW1 solider is being quoted. Its first acknowledged US appearance in print came in 1933, in the first legally available version of Ulysses. This was the book which, above all others, introduced the word to mainstream print. A sample? ‘I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe.’ (If anyone ever asks you what Joycean language is, try quoting that one at them.)
In his 1948 war novel The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer used the euphemism ‘fug’ (of which more in a later chapter). But three years later, another war novel, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, not only had fifty fucks (cut from a reported 258 in the manuscript), but won a National Book Award. As late as 1968, though, in a preface to Lady Chatterley, Lawrence Durrell used the backward form ‘kcuf’ (‘tnuc’, too).
The first fuck on US TV came in 1970 (a year after the first motherfucker, oddly). Comic Charles Rocker said it live on Saturday Night Live. He was fired. It wasn’t till 1985 that fuck made it into the New Yorker. A Nebraska farmer was quoted as saying ‘Goddam fuckin’ Jews … They destroyed everything I ever worked for!’ It was omitted from the fourth edition of Roget’s Thesaurus in 1977, but finally made it into the fifth edition in 1992. The New York Times, though, didn’t print it in full till 12 September 1998 when it quoted President Clinton’s inamorata Monica Lewinsky as saying that she needed him to ‘acknowledge … that he helped fuck up my life’. At the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, Best Musical Performance went to ‘Uncle Fucka’, a song in the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut – the title itself obviously a sexual (and Jewish) pun. The film made it into the 2001 edition of Guinness World Records for Most Swearing in an Animated Film – one every six seconds, 399 swears in total, 146 fucks.
Though fuck is the one that causes offence, it’s not the only English word for, well, it – in the sexual intercourse sense, ‘it’ has knocked around since the late sixteenth century. English has multitudes of slangonyms for it – as, of course, does every other language I know anything at all about. You can get your end away or your leg over. You can have your way with a woman or go the whole way or just plain have it away. You can lay with your wife and you can simply lay a woman who’s not. You can go to bed with a man and you can sleep with him. You can make love to and love with. You can have a bunk-up or a bit of how’s your father. You can bump bits or fool around. You can play hide the sausage. Or trains and tunnels. Or doctors and nurses. Or house, even.
Moving to the alphabet, there’s bonk, which has been around since the 1970s. Bang, ball, boff and bone, too. And that’s only the Bs. There’s jump and pork, roger and shag. The first pair’s origins are obvious, the second pair less so. Roger maybe comes from an old word for a bull. Shag (1788) is perhaps a variant on shake – as also may be the American dance with the same name which, to much trans-Atlantic amusement, has been around at least since the early 1930s. Charver (or charva) might be from the French, chauffer, to heat up – perhaps via Polari, the gay slanguage that flourished in Britain in the decades before homosexuality was legalized in 1967. Or maybe it’s from the Roma word charvo, to fool around. Nookie (1928), as in the wonderful Rolling Stones parody, the Masked Marauders’ ‘I Can’t Get No Nookie’ is either from nook, meaning secluded corner, or nug, an old word for lover.
Root was, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, an item of male anatomy, and, from the late nineteenth century, something men had when that anatomical item became aroused. These days, root is mostly what modern Australians do – and to whom they do it, especially if it’s a woman. It’s ruder than fuck in Australia. When working for the Sydney Morning Herald, journalist Maggie Alderson used it in an article. For which she got shouted at by the editor. ‘I still can’t quite judge quite how rude it is,’ she told me – the eternal lament of anyone negotiating swears outside their own culture. Maggie’s own favourite is that particular favourite of the Irish, ride. ‘I love that word. The woman is riding the man.’ Ride has been around since the 1930s, both for the act itself, for ‘a woman when regarded as a partner in intercourse’ and for ‘an attractive man’.
Sadly, of course, none of these words and phrases offer anything extra. As William Gass pointed out in his elegant little 1977 pamphlet, On Being Blue, they don’t indicate different ways of having sexual intercourse†. There’s no difference between a bonk and a bang and a boff and a bone. There’s not even a sex slangword that suggests something so basic and simple as the speed or angle of the action. Gass is right: the real embarrassment about our sexual slang is its embarrassing thinness. Such an essential part of human life but such etiolated lexicon. Not even that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century favourite, niggle, meant anything different from, well, fuck.
Fuck is the one, though, isn’t it. For generations now, it’s been the English swearword, ‘the word’. In 1962, Edward Sagarin‡ wrote: ‘It sits upon a throne, an absolute monarch, unafraid of any princely offspring still unborn, and by its subjects it is hated, feared, revered and loved, known by all and recognized by none.’ It had been that way for at least half a century and would remain that way for at least another quarter of a century. Not just in Britain, either, but across the English-speaking world.
In my late teens, I spent a long, wet summer in Ireland, in the central boglands, with my cousins of all ages. They were fucking all day and all night – all of them, from my farming cousins to my ageing great aunts to my teenage girl cousin and her innocent friends. It was the central word in their language – and most of rural Ireland’s. Fuck this, fuck that. Would you like a few fucking potatoes with your fucking bacon and cabbage? And lay the fucking table while you’re about it.
Priests were then everywhere in Ireland, like bungalows. You couldn’t have a quiet drink or two without one popping up and wanting to buy you a pint or three. They ran the place as a kind of semi-alcoholic political police force. They used the word ‘fuck’ as much as any of their flock.
I couldn’t help but be brought up short. As a delicate university student from London, I’d previously only heard language like that from the mouths of well-brought- up young women from Camden School for Girls. The Irish fuck, I realized quite quickly, was quite different from the English fuck. It was the same word, only with none of the weight. I used to think this was odd, given the extremeness of the Irish reserve about matters sexual. It was then, clearly, a land of virginity and sexual ignorance – which is why, of course, so many young women ended up taking the boat train from Dunleary to London’s abortion clinics and adoption societies. Now, though, I wonder if this sexual blindness wasn’t somehow linked to fuck’s Irish ubiquity. It’s possible that the popularity of ‘ride’ for sexual intercourse is also somehow linked – the Irish fuck is almost exclusively used in its abstract, non-sexual sense.
What about feck, though, you might think. Well, I don’t remember ever hearing it back then. I’ve always assumed it was a new one. Joyce used fuck not feck. It’s not recorded as Irish in Green’s 1998 compendium of slang and it’s not there at all in Partridge’s earlier slang dictionary. Though the OED dates it to 1987, I was sure it was a Father Tedism, a euphemism created for the swear-laden TV sitcom that quickly became an Englishistic Irishism. I checked with my friend Roger, a northern Irishman who has always travelled on a southern Irish passport. He agreed with me. ‘Yes, I think is a late addition, as I certainly never heard it when I lived in Dublin in the early 1970s. Also they were a good God fearin’ Catholic people back then.’
I also asked Philip, a native-born Dubliner and guitarist with the Pogues – original name Pogue Mahone, Gaelic for ‘kiss my hole’. He disagreed. ‘I suppose Father Ted was the conduit for the popular usage in Britain but, in fact, it’s something of an old friend to this Irishman, a softer version of fuck. My mother used it regularly when I was a kid, reluctant perhaps to encourage the more full-bodied version. As soon as I was old enough to know the difference, I became aware that “feck” does not have the same connection with copulation as “fuck” does. I’m sure that Irish-Catholic guilt syndrome, with all its sexual components, will have played its part in that, too.’
All those guilt-stricken sexual components include, I’m sure, duets for one. Which leads me to Wednesday, 20 February 2008, at around 10.30 a.m., in Studio B of the Abernathy Building (which I somehow suspect is not a real structure, more a creation of the imagination), where the man who called himself Bob Dylan had this to say about the sexologist Dr Alfred Kinsey: ‘According to his research there were six different outlets to sexual orgasm. They were masturbation, petting, nocturnal dreams, heterosexual coitus, homosexual behaviours and bestiality.’ He paused, then added: ‘I’m batting about 40 per cent.’
That makes 2.8 Dylanesque outlets to orgasm. I’m guessing he meant us to round up to 3.0. Which, by my calculation and uninformed speculation – I don’t see him as a man’s man or an animal’s man – indicates one of three possible gaps in Dylan’s sexual CV. Either he’s never played with himself; or he’s never been played with by someone else; or he’s never been played with by his dreams. Baseless guesswork again but I’d put good money on it not being the first. I never figured him as a man who couldn’t or wouldn’t play with himself. Even Bob Dylan needs a hobby.
And masturbation is probably the world’s second oldest one. The word itself is a modern hybrid of ancient words. The OED thinks ‘mas’ is short for manus, Latin for hand, while the ‘turb’ bit is the same as the second syllable in ‘disturb’ – it meant ‘upset’. It’s less than two hundred years old – the first citations are early nineteenth century. It did, though, have an older brother, masturpate – common in the seventeenth century but long dead now.
English has a particularly spectacular variety of verb phrases for this universal hobby. Physically descriptive ones: beat off, jerk off, toss off, jack off, whack off. Jack off is an Americanism. Toss off is English and has been around since the mid eighteenth century. All that time, this phrasal verb has lived something of a double life, also meaning to do something quickly and uncaringly. The OED quotes a 1937 cooking guide – ‘Any man worth anything could toss off a rarebit or an omelet.’
