Filthy English, page 6
There are animal metaphors: choke the chicken, spank the monkey. There are vegetable ones: jerk the gherkin, flick the bean – though as the only certain source for that seems to be the adventures of the fictional Australian Barry McKenzie, it’s possible that it is Barry Humphries’ invention. There are sporting ones: pocket billiards. There are culinary ones: beat the meat, ham shandy, pull one’s pud. Ham shandy? A mishearing, I think, of a now-obsolete piece of rhyming slang, hamshanker. Pud? Lexicographers once claimed it was a memory of Latin, pud being short for pudendum, ‘that of which one ought to be ashamed’, in the words of the OED. More recently, it’s been linked to ‘pudding’ which, since the seventeenth century, has meant sexual intercourse – hence ‘in the pudding club’ for pregnant. (Till I checked that out, I’d always thought it was a physical analogy: pregnant women looked like they’d eaten a lot of pudding.)
There are almost poetic similes: mother fist and her five daughters, a phrase borrowed by singer Marc Almond for a 1987 album title. There are even doctrinal references. Grose’s 1796 slang dictionary gives ‘box the jesuit’, an anti-Catholic jibe. Masturbation, explains Grose, was ‘A crime that is said much practised by the reverend fathers of that society.’ Bashing the bishop has been around since the late nineteenth century and is probably more a chess-piece anatomical analogy than an ecclesiastical one.
Another old favourite was frig, a grandchild of the Latin fricare, for rub. It’s old enough to have made it into Florio’s 1598 English–Italian dictionary and was still around in the 1820s when the future novelist William Thackeray arrived at Charterhouse School. He later recalled that one of the first ‘orders’ he received there was an almost parodically public school one: ‘Come and frig with me.’ Oddly, it has also sometimes both meant fuck and been used as a euphemism for fuck. It’s possible, too, that it was there, punningly, in frigate as a late seventeenth-century word for woman.
In recent years, though, by far the favourite English word for this commonplace activity has been wank. It still retains an old-fashioned strength, too. In Australian English, wanker’s power has dwindled to nothing. There it is described as merely ‘colloquial’ – whereas the OED still has it as ‘not in polite use’. In a 2000 ranking of swearwords by the British public, wanker came fourth.† When U2 appeared on The Simpsons the word wank was used twice – and both were bleeped out when the episode was shown in England. In rhyming slang, it has been turned into both a Barclays (Bank) and a Jodrell (Bank, an observatory in Cheshire). In the wider language, it has given us the most wonderful neologism, wangst – self-indulgent anxiety. When did we start wanking? In the seventeenth century probably, when whack turned into wank. Nothing to do with wackos or wacky racers, by the way. Wackos and wackiness are 1960s things.
As with so many areas and aspects of female sexuality – of which more in a later chapter – there are far fewer words for female than male masturbation in English. There really, really aren’t many woman words for masturbation. There’s ‘play with’ and ‘fiddle about’ – both used for both sexes, and for sexual molestation, too. There’s diddle, probably from an old word meaning to jerk from side to side. There are some who think the word ‘masturbation’ itself is essentially masculine. Partridge, for one. He thought there was a Latin original in which the ‘mas’ bit comes from a word for semen. (As I noted above, the OED doesn’t see it this way.)
Other languages have a variety of words for it – if not, as far as I can ascertain anyway, as many as English. Male ones, anyway. Female ones seem slightly more frequent. Some languages gender it, reflecting the differing physical demands and possibilities. Italian women have a ditalino (fingering), Italian men a sega (sawing). Other languages choose their own distinct metaphor or analogy. In Czech, it can be honit ptáka – chase the bird. In Mexico, it’s also an avian thing – vergallito, from gallo (chicken). In Turkish, it’s extremely specific – Otuzbir cekmek (pull thirty-one times). In German, it’s also mathematical – fünf gegen einen (five against one). In Japanese, it’s both gendered and arithmetically precise. For men, it’s senzuri (a hundred rubs), for women, shiko shiko manzuri (ten thousand rubs) – or suichi o ireru (flick the switch). In Spanish, a pajero or pajillero is a wanker, either literally or figuratively. Or both – as it is in many languages. Masturbation has a wide-reaching link to stupidity, idiocy and general head-softness. It’s not an association set in concrete, though. ‘I’d rather be called a tosser than a Muppet,’ my friend Dorothy recently told me.
In English, wanker’s real import is, like many of the best swearwords, not in its original, physical meaning but in the allusive meanings it’s gathered to itself over the years. To use the word ‘wanker’ is not just to insult someone but to elaborate an entire world view. Wanker is one of three central words of English swearing. Fuck, cunt, wanker – the holy trinity of British profanity, the three magic words. When visiting Americans fall in love with London and its culture, one of the things they fall for is the word ‘wanker’ – or rather the thoughts, emotions and calculations that stand behind it. The Weltanschauung of wanker, if you like.
There are other words with similar intentions. Dickhead, fuckwit and twat, yes†. Arsehole, cunt and cocksucker, no. Wanker is an indication of foolishness. Of demonstrable, inexcusable foolishness. Of an inability to reach the most basic level of human competence. I could, if I liked, make an argument that the British use of the word is the last remaining vestige of the intellectual and moral certainties of empire.
No other word has its glorious certainty. Not even Yiddish – always a good source of subtle differences of genitally based insult – has an equivalent. Only wanker conveys the precise combination of disdain, disbelief, anger and righteous judgement. Most swear-based insults are accusations. Calling someone a wanker in the right way at the right moment is a statement of indisputable fact – so certain, so witheringly, devastatingly accurate that the supremest of supreme courts would throw out any appeal against your use of it.
Why? Obviously in part, it’s because of its sounds. Wan-kah! The open, unaccented final vowel is one of the English language’s greatest gifts to speech. It makes everything sound incomplete. It’s like finishing on the up beat. It’s the nearest English gets to syncopation. A football crowd chanting, in unison, at the referee ‘Who’s the wanker in the black?’ Vulgar, clichéd and one of England’s glories.
I think there’s something more, though. Something that was clarified to me by a pair of self-acknowledged wankers, chat show host Richard Madeley and the man behind Joy Division, New Order and Factory Records, the late Tony Wilson – or, as he took to calling himself for a while, Anthony H. Wilson. A man who was always on the side of life, he was sometimes known as Mr Manchester – if only in his own mirror.
When I was young and cynical, sat at my desk two floors above the lift shaft at Covent Garden tube station, avoiding the awkward questions posed by the half-filled piece of A4 in my typewriter, Wilson would occasionally pay me a visit. Which always added to the gaiety of my day. A classic definition of the Yiddish ‘nebbish’ is someone who, when they walk into a room, make it feel like someone just left. Wilson was the exact reverse. He filled empty space. He’d bounce in. He always bounced, even when he wasn’t moving. So did his hair. His scarf, too – in my memory, late 1970s London was always scarf-cold. He’d be there to pitch something at me. We must have met at a very early Joy Division show when they were called Warsaw. I couldn’t see the point of them. He would have tried to persuade me otherwise. He always had something or someone to pitch.
The Wilson pitch I best remember was the one for The Return of the Durutti Column, an album with a sleeve made out of sandpaper. The band took its name from a bunch of Spanish Civil War anarchist guerrillas – misspelling the name of its leader, Buenaventura Durruti. A record which commemorated an anarchist who died of his bullet wounds in the Madrid Ritz and which was wrapped in a sleeve which would ruin any other record it was put next to. Wilson handed me a copy. Delight! As ever, Tony Wilson had made my afternoon. Not everyone agreed, though. ‘Wank-ah!’ judged the subs’ desk when he’d bounced out.
It was a common, almost universal judgement on him. ‘Tony Wilson is a wanker’ was graffitied all over Manchester. For thirty years or so, as he walked the streets of his beloved city, his passage was marked with shouts of ‘Wilson, you wanker!’ If, at first, he took it hard, he soon came not just to accept it stoically but to acknowledge its truth and import. Which he explained to Richard Madeley when the two worked together on the local TV news magazine show Granada Reports. In a 2008 interview with the Guardian, Madeley says he asked Wilson if he minded being called a wanker. ‘What should I mind for?’ said Wilson. ‘It’s fuckin’ funny. I am a fuckin’ wanker and you’re a fuckin’ wanker. We’re on the fuckin’ telly. If you’re on the telly, you’re a wanker.’ And Madeley? He got it, too, straightaway. ‘Totally. Totally got it.’
When people shouted ‘wanker’ at Wilson, they thought they were accusing him of being a pseud or pretentious or something like that. He knew better. Madeley does, too. They know it’s the human condition. They know that the real power, the real secret of ‘wanker’ is that it’s an insult that carries a truth about the insulter as well as the insulted. We are all wankers. So it’s okay to call someone a wanker. To be called one, too. Kind of.
If wank, wanker and wanking are about weakness, then fuck, fucker and fucking are – in whatever way – about power. Fuck is a word that was for so long hidden away in the underbellies of the English language that it can be hard to tell which was the greater taboo: the act itself or the word that described it. Still and all, though, even now, fuck still retains a good deal of power – to offend, disturb, unsettle. What, though, is the source of that power? At the risk of stating the absofuckinglutely obvious, it obviously has something to do with sex and its multifarious taboos.
But what exactly? Sex and taboo being very much of interest to psychoanalysts, what do they have to say? The most famous psychoanalytic contribution to the matter was by Leo Stone in On the Principal Obscene Word of the English Language: An Inquiry, with Hypothesis, Regarding Its Origin and Persistence. Great subtitle, no? Published in 1954, it’s still quoted. It’s a particular, if not peculiar, theory he proposes, though. He focuses on the rhyme of fuck and suck, seeing a link in meaning expressed surreptitiously through the link in sound. The precise significance of this link remains a little cloudy to me, at least. Fuck also rhymes with muck and tuck and pluck and snuck and Donald Duck – hence the rhyming slang, ‘a Donald’. But Stone is set on suck. He seems to be suggesting that the sound of the word ‘fuck’ reminds us of the word ‘suck’ which in turn reminds us of the act of suckling at the breast. So, for him, the reason for the persistence of fuck’s power and obscenity lies in its embedded incestual implications and confusions. If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.
There’s more. Early 1950s New York seems to have seen a marked rise in the use of ‘fuck’. Stone reckoned this corresponded to a ‘general diminution of the taboo on oral-genital practices’. Which, in turn, he relates to a rise in public consumption of alcohol and homosexuality. He also claims a historical link between fuck’s arrival in the English language and two other cultural movements: the near-simultaneous ‘rapid spread of smoking’ and the critics’ new-found dislike of the use of rhyme in English verse. That is, he correlates three previously unconnected things which happened in England around the time of the Renaissance: tobacco arrived from the new world, fuck arrived from
Europe somewhere, literary essayists began to disdain rhyme. He calls it a ‘direct psychodynamic relation between unconscious oral impulses and genital impulses’. Well, maybe. Or maybe not.
Another, more modern analyst, the Argentinian Ariel Arango, wrote an entire book about bad language, Dirty Words. For him, ‘the “dirty” word, to fuck, always means, at root, to fuck one’s mother; to go back to her womb. Such is the universal Oedipus longing. Everyday use of the word would awaken the “sleeping dogs” among fathers and sons. Therefore, a ban on the word fuck is essential to bury the universal incestuous desire.’ So: fuck’s power is essentially and entirely Oedipal and its taboo status is an attempt to suppress and deny that truth: let sleeping dogs lie. The fact that fuck’s shock-and-awe potential has undeniably diminished in recent years would, with Arango’s logic, indicate a more open acceptance of ‘incestuous desire’. I see no evidence for that.
Still, sex has to be the source of fuck’s word-power. Whenever and however we use the word, in whatever context, it is inevitably linked back – however obliquely, however unconsciously – to deep, hidden parts of ourselves and our feelings about sex. Which, given anglophone attitudes towards sexuality, is surely a major reason for fuck’s popularity. Scandinavian cultures certainly don’t set such store by sexual swearing. Mediterranean and Muslim cultures find much greater power in the illegitimacy insult. Though Swahili-speakers also favour sexual swears, they focus closely and almost exclusively on one aspect of it – the mother’s sexuality. Not that the mother might have had sex with more than one man, just the fact that she had sex and might have taken pleasure from the activity. A favourite Swahili swear translates as ‘Your mother is fucked and enjoys it’.
Christopher F. Faiman is an American law professor. In 2006, he wrote a lengthy paper on fuck and its prohibition. Pondering our outlawing of the word, he wrote: ‘If the psycholinguists are right, we’ve done so for good reason. Fuck embodies our entire culture’s subconscious feelings about sex – about incest, being unclean, rape, sodomy, disease, Oedipal longings, and the like.’
Is, though, its power exclusively sexual or is it also linked, as often suggested, to its deep roots in the history of the English language? We often talk, lightly, of bad or dirty words as Anglo-Saxon words, particularly when we’re justifying their use. Judges do it. In 1933, when rejecting an attempt to ban Ulysses in the US, Judge John Woolsey spoke about ‘old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women’. A few decades later, in 1959, Federal Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan similarly declined to ban Lady Chatterley and its ‘four-letter Anglo-Saxon words’.
Regular people do this, too, not just judges. Invoking our collective, distant linguistic history is an authenticity thing – not unrelated to the way that Keira Knightley seems to have used swearing to recast her image. When we refer to bad language as Anglo-Saxon (or Saxon or Old English), we’re announcing that when we use these bad words, we’re not just merely swearing but, rather, being profoundly true to our ancient, island history. It’s a nostalgia thing, looking back to when we were warriors, well-meaded, fully woaded and ready to fight off funny-talking foreigners. At heart, we’re attempting to time-travel back to our world as it was before our language was invaded and bastardized by that Norman bastard, Guillaume le Batard – with words like bastard, the French word that replaced the English get, the pre-1066 ancestor of the modern git.
Gene Lees is a songwriter and the author of ‘William and Harold and How To Write Lyrics’, an amusing but serious essay on the difference between writing songs in English and French. He points out how easy it is to rhyme l’amour – there are at least fifty-one rhymes for it, including day (jour) and crossroads (carrefour). Love, by contrast, has only four rhymes – above, dove, glove and shove. Or, if you’re American, one more – of. In his essay, Lees also points out: ‘It has been said that we whose primary language is English speak Anglo-Saxon until the age of three and then begin learning French.’ Which is true. But only kind of, as less than one per cent of the words in the OED can be traced back to Old English. On the other hand, those few that do come from Old English represent sixty-two per cent of our most-used words.
So, of the seven words that George Carlin said you couldn’t say on television, how many are Anglo-Saxon or, as it’s now usually called, Old English? Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits: exactly how many of them are Old English? How many of that ‘heavy seven’ would have been familiar to Harold and his warriors as they crossed swords with William and his Normans? Just one: shit. The other six core words in the English swearing lexicon might be old but they are not Old English. Piss was a word William brought with him. Cunt and fuck both came later. Cocksucker, motherfucker and tits didn’t arrive till the late nineteenth century. English-language swearing is a many-faced thing but an Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) thing it’s not.
In fact, the only common English swears that predate 1066 and the Normanization of the language are shit, turd, arse and, perhaps, fart. Faecal, all of them. If it’s tempting to see significance in that, it’s hard to see what it might be. That the British are more anally concerned than others? Ten minutes – no, make that five minutes – of German humour does for that thought. That the British are the only ones stuck at the Freudians’ anal stage? The briefest chat with a French pharmacist would give the lie to that. (Where you or I might take a pill or potion, the French inevitably reach for a suppository. Many a non-French-speaking sick English person has been reduced to tears of embarrassment when they’ve finally persuaded the pharmacist to demonstrate how to administer the medication they’ve just been prescribed.)
So what of fuck now? It’s certainly not the power in the land it once was. As the twenty-first century moves along, it is becoming a standard word in most people’s speech, up and down the social scale – both less common and more commonplace. The French have long called the British ‘les fuck-offs’, on account of the word’s ubiquity in their speech. That is surely now truer than ever. Tanja, a German female work colleague, said to me: ‘When I came to London, I couldn’t believe it how much people swear. Even people with good jobs. It’s amazing.’
