Filthy English, page 7
These days, fuck is, well, everyfuckingwhere.† On a Sunday morning, I bought some Israeli pittas in a Sephardic kosher bakery in a north London suburb. One of the senior staff was sorting stuff out behind the counter. He was wearing a black T-shirt with these words on it: ‘Who the fuck is D&G’. I found myself wondering. Why was his T-shirt so angry at Dolce & Gabbana? Why was there no question mark in the slogan? I didn’t find answers to either wondering. I did find out where he bought his T-shirt, though. It was from FUKstore, which stands for Funky Urban Klothes. A clothes retailer in South Beach, Miami, a couple of blocks from the ocean, it also offers women’s black rib tank tops announcing ‘Will fuck for coke’ and pink underwear informing readers ‘Will fuck for shoes’. I found no answer, though, to my main wondering: when did it become okay to sell bread in a T-shirt with the word fuck on it, on a Sunday morning, in Hendon, to observant Jews?
When and how did this happen? Some think it was an inevitable, inexorable consequence of the social changes which began in the 1960s and, as yet, show few signs of reversing. As Australian academic Ruth Wajnryb put it, ‘If it’s okay to do it, it’s okay to say it.’ Yet, in 1976, ten years on from the new freedoms of the 1960s, it could still enrage a nation of English tea-time TV watchers. What accounts for the far more recent revolution in its usage – and acceptance level? Linguistics professor David Crystal turns an eye towards the Irish priesthood – its fictional version, at least. He told an interviewer: ‘One of the factors that has made the f-word so acceptable is the television series Father Ted where they use the word “feck”. It is so close to the original that there is virtually no difference. That suddenly tipped the balance of power with that word. It would only take a famous person in the public eye to use the c-word in a way that was perhaps jocular and acceptable.’
John Ayto, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Slang, said, in 2002: ‘I think it would be too much to say that fuck doesn’t offend anybody. It hasn’t finished the journey yet to becoming a milk-and-water word. But its impact is diminishing at a rapid rate. Young people tend not to think of it as offensive at all.’ I’m not convinced that was entirely true when he said it and I’m even less sure now. I think there are two fuck words and have been for a very long time. One is metaphorical – ‘Where’s my fucking egg and chips?’ (or lamb shank and polenta). The other is actual, physical – ‘Wanna fuck?’ The first draws its power from the second – but it’s only ever borrowed power. The first is the real deal, the real fucking deal. It still fucks people upside the head. The FCC was kind of right when it judged Bono’s non-sexual use of ‘fucking’ a lesser offence than it would have been if it had been sexual. It is more offensive when it refers to the actual sex act rather than merely being used as an obscene intensifier. ‘I fucked him’ is far more acceptable if it refers to negotiating techniques, say, than when it’s a recollection of an evening’s entertainment.
There is also, of course – as there always is – ignorance. John Ayto’s wife, Jean Aitchison, is the Oxford Professsor of Language and Communication. ‘Most kids say fuck a lot,’ she says, ‘but haven’t a clue what it means. They just know it gets adults upset and so keep saying it.’
One Sunday evening, I was eating dinner with my family. My younger son, deep into middle adolescence and knowing that my liberal tolerance is effectively unlimited, showed me a cap he’d bought that afternoon. It said on the front, in a pop art typeface, ‘Fuck’. Unlike my parents, I didn’t move house but I did tell him I suspected that, even in our local language safety zone of Camden Town and Primrose Hill, he might get into a little trouble. To my surprise, despite disagreeing with me, he swapped the cap with his elder brother – who is on the far side of adolescence, just, and running his own small business. He wore the ‘fuck’ cap to a dinner with friends. It was, I’m told, much admired.
† My bad language might have been precocious but I’m not alone. Experimental psychologist Alison Gopnik, author of How Babies Think, studied babies’ first ‘words’ on both sides of the Atlantic. One of American babies’ firsts is ‘uh oh’. It’s used to describe failure – an important thing for learning. English babies generally say ‘oh dear’. One baby in Oxford did, however, ‘memorably’ say ‘oh bugger’.
† Professor Ferenc Szasz teaches American and Scottish culture at the University of New Mexico. In a 2008 study of the historical context of Burns’ poetry, he claimed a connection between flyting and rapping – passed on to black Americans by Scottish slave-owners and overseers. ‘Both cultures accord high marks to satire. The skilled use of satire takes this verbal jousting to its ultimate level – one step short of a fist fight.’
† I guess they gave educated Elizabethans and Jacobeans the same thrill we seek and find in crime thrillers and trickster stories. A popular one was A Caveat of Warening, For Commen Cursetors vulgarely called Vagabondes, set forth by Thomas Harman Esquiere, for the utilitie and proffyt of his natural Cuntrey, Augmented and inlarged by the fyrst author here of. It included many words still with us: booze and prat, for example. It also has niggle and its contemporaneous then current meaning, ‘to have to do with a woman carnally’.
† A few months before the Chatterley trial, Young’s father had died and he had inherited his father’s title, becoming the 2nd Baron Kennet. This noble name refers to the river Kennet, in Wiltshire, which has been worshipped as the source of life and which, as recently as 1740, was known as the Cunnit. Some also link the county of Kent to ‘cunt’. Four years after his first newspaper ‘fuck’, Young published his best-known book, Eros Denied, described as an exploration of ‘Western society’s hysterical fear of human sexuality’, via censorship, in particular. In it, he quotes an Australian talking – an apocryphal one, I guess. ‘I was walking along on this fucking fine morning, fucking sun shining away, little country fucking lane, and I meets up with this fucking girl. Fucking lovely she was, so we gets into fucking conversation and I takes her over a fucking gate into a fucking field and we had sexual intercourse.’ When he died, aged 85, in May 2009, the Guardian noted his first fuck in the first paragraph of its obituary. The Times did not mention it all.
† The Beatles cut eight tracks that Abbey Road afternoon, including their version of the Isley Brothers’ ‘Twist And Shout’, perhaps the very moment when fucking – if only the act itself, rather than the word itself – arrived in English pop music. C’mon, baby, shake it up, baby, work it on out.
† The title is a cross-lingual pun. In French, it’s ‘Oh, quel cul tu as!’ – ‘Wow, what an arse you’ve got!’
† Gass himself has a wonderful way with such language. ‘I simply rejected my background entirely,’ he told an interviewer. ‘I decided … to pick another cunt to come from.’ A character in his novel Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife says: ‘how close, in the end, is a cunt to a concept – we enter both with joy’. Gass also said: ‘Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.’
‡ Sagarin was a real odd one. A Russian Jewish hump-back from Schenectady, New York, who made his money in the perfume game, he lived his life under two names. Edward Sagarin was heterosexual, married with a child, and homophobic. Donald Webster Cory wrote The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (1951). The fact that they were the same man only emerged at a 1974 convention of the American Sociological Society.
† The full top ten, in descending order: cunt, motherfucker, fuck, wanker, nigger, bastard, prick, bollocks, asshole, paki.
† What a wonderful word fuckwit is, a completely ungrammatical and conceptually inconceivable collision of two notions, one from either end of human experience, one completely abstract, one essentially physical. I guess it’s a contraction of ‘fucked wit’. Though first noted only in 1969, the fact that it uses ‘wit’ in its archaic Shakespearean sense sharpens its beauty.
† Experts call this infixing. It’s a common grammatical feature of some languages, a central one in some – Eskimo and Tagalog (the language of the Philippines), for example. To be really pedantic, in English, it’s actually what’s called tmesis (and has been since at least 1586 according to the OED) because it’s not bits of words that are added (adfixes) but whole words. Almost exclusively just two words, in fact: ‘bloody’ and ‘fucking’. As in ‘absobloodylutely’ and ‘infuckingcredible’. Its structural rarity is obviously its charm but I wonder if there is also a more physical analogy – that, somehow, the forced introduction of one word into another word is not just a thought but almost an act. Maybe there is a symbolic relationship to the meaning of the word being introduced. The taboo word is a violent interruption to a regular word. That is: absolutely is being fucking fucked by fuck.
Chapter Two
Vulvas, Vaginas and Breasts
I began thinking about the peculiarities of the word ‘cunt’ in the summer of 1988. I was in another country at the time. Shakespeare makes the same pun in Hamlet. ‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’ the Oedipal prince asks Ophelia. ‘No, my lord,’ she says. ‘Do you think I meant country matters?’ he teases.†
I was in France, in a town with an English name – Robinson, a small suburban centre six kilometres south of Paris, twinned with Woking, Surrey. At a newsstand, I let my eyes wander over the cover-lines of a rack of French magazines. There was the usual mix of stories about diets, economic crises and minor royals, both French and English. My eye was finally caught by Salut Les Copains, a magazine I’d read as a teenager – and which, decades later, became Nick Logan’s model for The Face, the magazine which pretty much defined and even invented 1980s London cool. When I was a teenager, Salut Les Copains covered pop and clothes in roughly equal measure, colourful and upbeat, with plenty of pictures of very cool-looking French girls. My friend Mick’s elder sister had a subscription and we’d sneak it from her bedroom when she was out.
It had changed since then, though. It had become just another teenage girls’ magazine. Its stories reflected the concerns, thoughts and dreams of young French women – say, between the ages of twelve and sixteen. On this particular issue of Salut Les Copains, there was one big cover line: Tous les mecs sont des cons. I read the line. I read it again. I translated it in my head. I translated it word by word. Tous: all. Les mecs: blokes. Sont: are. Des cons: cunts. All blokes are cunts.
That night, we had dinner with my wife’s ageing aunt, a long-time resident of Robinson and a sophisticated woman, a translator at UNESCO, but an ageing aunt, nonetheless. So I was tentative. ‘Tous les mecs sont des cons?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It does mean what you think it means.’ And we left it at that.
What I should have asked her, of course, is about the two words and their place in two cultures that are, after all, separated by nothing more than twenty miles of sea and eight hundred years or so of episodic wars. How can English cunts and French cons be quite such different things? The English one is still the most unacceptable word in the language – even the Guardian is queasy about using it. The French one, though, is acceptable even when writing for very young women – of an age when they are only just beginning to come to terms with the fact that they have one. Does this mean these two nations have completely disparate emotional and psychological relationships to the word? Or to the thing the word represents?
Well, the first obstacle to understanding was my risible French. Taught it by fine but ageing linguists, I ended up speaking a kind of Bertie Wooster French – posh Parisian accent with a scattering of 1930s slang. (To the boundless amusement of my mother-in-law whose own French is fluent and who thinks my north-east London English accent is extremely common.) In my French, con was literally a vulva or vagina. If I’d known any modern French slang, I’d have known that calling someone un con is nothing like calling them a cunt. It translates as something like fool or idiot. And has done for at least a century. Politicians and archbishops might not use it in public. Nor might an ageing aunt – though even one of those, as I found, was happy to discuss it, if not to use it. Otherwise, though, con is part of the public French language, in a way that cunt is far from being even now.
Cunt is something else. How and why can this be? The caesareaned of us apart, we all came into the world via one. Something like more than fifty per cent of us have one (or very occasionally, more) of them. The rest of us have something of an interest in them, too. How, then, can it be quite such a powerful insult to call someone a cunt? But it is. To tell someone they’re a cunt is to accuse them of genuine maliciousness. It’s been called ‘the mother of all nasty words’, ‘the ultimate obscenity’ and ‘the most offensive word in the world’.
As might be expected of a word that has spent most of its life in hiding, the history of cunt is obscure, tentative and disputed. It’s not at all clear or certain where the word came to us from, but it seems likely it’s from northern Europe somewhere. There’s an Old Norse word, kunta. In west Frisian – a language spoken in the northwest of the Netherlands, which is held to be English’s closest relation – there’s kunte. Dutch itself has the word kont – though it translates as bottom. Kot is the Dutch equivalent of cunt, though it doesn’t have the same obscene status.
Some trace cunt far further back, to Proto-Indo-European. According to Grimm’s Law, cunt has its roots in that putative language’s root word gen or gon, meaning create or become. You can see this hypothetical bit of a word in generate and gonads and genetics and genitals. Or perhaps the link is with the Proto-Indo-European root for woman, which produced the ancient Greek word gune, which, in turn, gave us gynecological. Partridge saw this little proto-root as the sound ‘cu’ – which is there in words such as ‘cow’ and ‘queen’ and which, he says, represents ‘quintessential femininity’. Partridge added, with not untypical idiosyncrasy, that this ‘partly explains why, in India, the cow is a sacred animal’. In his 1961 Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, he claimed that the history of what he had once called the ‘most notorious term of all’ was tripartite – Proto-Indo-European ‘cu’, Latin ‘n’, and Dutch ‘t’. Jonathon Green, a successor to Partridge in his slanguage expertise, sees it as having a two-part ancestry – the initial ‘cu’ from the proto-root and the ‘nt’ of its northern European sisters.
Other words, related by meaning or analogy, have been linked to this ancient ‘cu’ sound. The Arabic and Hebrew kus, for cunt, for example. Which, in turn, links to other English words for the vagina, words such as cooze and hoochie coochie – a kind of belly dance introduced to an eager world at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and revivified in 1954 in a song Willie Dixon wrote for Muddy Waters, ‘(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man’. The meaning is not unclear.
The ‘cu’ sound is also there in English words which refer to something being contained. Cubby-hole or cove – as in inlet. Or cod as in cod-piece, the pouch worn by Middle Aged men which both concealed and displayed their genitals. Cod meant bag or sack. Till the nineteenth century, it was a standard English word for the scrotum. So: cods! means bollocks! This little ‘cu’ sound has also been related to words about knowledge and capability. In ‘cognition’, for example, or ‘cunning’, ‘can’ and ‘ken’ – as in ‘D’ye ken John Peel’. And ‘cu’ has also been linked to words about family – ‘kin’ and ‘kind’. It’s the ‘where do we come from?’ sound. The origins of knowing, of family, of existence: all seem to be there in the millennia-old sound which stands behind ‘cunt’. Which makes a fair deal of sense, not just anatomically but epistemologically, too. When St Augustine wrote ‘Inter urinas et faeces nascimur’ – coarsely, between piss and shit are we all born – he meant it conceptually as well as anatomically.
The first cunt in English, according to the OED, appeared as part of an Oxford street name in about 1230, Gropecunte Lane. By 1260, London had its own Gropecunt Lane. A ‘rebarbative street name’, as The Times referred to it in its report of cunt’s first appearance in the OED, in 1972. It was an alley leading south from Cheapside which probably vanished in the rebuilding after the Great Fire of London (1666). Its north end was about 15 metres east of the modern junction with Queen Street – about where Pret a Manger is now.
What’s in a name? I asked John Clark, Senior Curator (Medieval) at the Museum of London. Was it a reference to prostitution or was it a kind of lovers’ lane? ‘Prostitution? Possibly. A dark alley off a busy street would lend itself to all sorts of uses – commercial or not. And it might be significant that the next alley to the west, Soper Lane (now under Queen Street), was where the transvestite male prostitute John Rykener (aka “Eleanor”) was arrested in 1395. His client John Britby was down from York on business and had accosted “Eleanor” in Cheapside on a Sunday evening.’ The court records state that Britby asked Rykener ‘as he would a woman if he could commit a libidinous act with her. Requesting money for [his] labour, Rykener consented, and they went together to the aforesaid [market] stall [in Soper Lane] to complete the act, and were captured there during these detestable wrongdoings by the officials and taken to prison.’
John Clark provided context. ‘Heterosexual prostitutes didn’t inspire this sort of detailed record but it does suggest that men like Britby expected to encounter ladies of negotiable virtue strolling along Cheapside in the evening, and to complete the deal among the empty market-stalls in one of the lanes running off it. But I don’t know who would live in Gropecunt Lane. It certainly had shops in 1349, though.’ As well as the one in Oxford (later bowdlerized to Magpie Lane), there were also similarly named streets in Northampton, Wells and York.
Cunt is there in Chaucer, spelled queynte and not obscene. The Wife of Bath says: ‘Is it for ye would have my queynte alone?’ It was a simple descriptive word for the thing it described. Though there are two hundred different oaths in Chaucer, sexual swearing is ‘non-existent’, according to Ralph Elliott’s 1974 book, Chaucer’s English. It is there again in a c. 1400 medical manual, again used prosaically and anatomically: ‘In women, the neck of the bladder is short and made fast to the cunt’. Yet, in time, its acceptability began to drift. It is claimed that English counts were renamed earls because of their titles’ homophonic closeness to the word.
