Filthy English, page 8
It was most often spelled quaint. In his World of Wordes, Shakespeare’s contemporary and pal Florio wrote of ‘A woman’s quaint or priuities’ – the latter from privity, things to be kept secret, used in a sexual sense in Chaucer, too. This usage of quaint predates any other meaning for the word but it’s unclear how the two meanings link. The OED suggests – delicately – a connection to another now-gone quaint meaning, ‘A curious or clever ornament or device, a cunning trick’.
By Shakespeare’s time, it had definitely acquired its modern, publicly unacceptable status. He could only use it indirectly. Twelfth Night: ‘There be her very Cs, her Us, and her Ts: and thus makes she her great Ps.’ Which becomes clear only when spoken aloud, when the word ‘and’ is pronounced the way it generally is in speech, as ’n. So the actor spells out first the word, then its function (pees) – with perhaps understandable Renaissance male anatomical inaccuracy. Shakespeare, it must be said, does delight in vaginal puns. As well as Hamlet’s ‘country matters’, there is the nothing in Much Ado About Nothing, for example – a double pun. One, ‘no thing’ – i.e. no penis. Two, the arithmetic ‘nothing’ – i.e. the vulval shape of zero. In her 2006 book, Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns, Pauline Kiernan collected a good number of them. So many, in fact, that I began to wonder if the playwright had any other interests. She homes in on the word ‘wit’, for example. I’d always thought – and been taught – that it referred to general intelligence and capacity of thought rather than its more modern, comedic meaning. Kiernan offers a third option. For her, Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘almost always carries with it the punning meaning of cunt, vagina or genitals’. (She also suggests his name itself conceals a masturbatory allusion. ‘His name meant Wanker – to shake one’s spear.’)
‘Scotland’s favourite son’, Robert Burns used the word, too, though only in private bawdy verse. ‘For ilka birss upon her cunt, Was worth a ryal ransom.’ (Ilka: every. Birss: hair. Ryal: royal.) Hidden away in his life, these lines appear in Merry Muses, a collection of popular songs and his own lickerish poetry. The great Scots poet did, as they say, like a bit of Houghmagandie. Compiled only after his death, in 1796, Merry Muses remained banned in Britain till 1965, a year earlier in the US.
The seventeenth-century poet (and MP for Hull) Andrew Marvell punned on it in his renowned seduction poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress’:
( … ) worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust;
And into ashes all my lust.
Which quaint pun is a recent realisation, for me anyway. I blame my English teachers. Despite the many, many hours they spent analysing the many, many clevernesses of this poem, not once did they draw attention to Marvell’s odd use of quaint. Nor did they draw my attention to his near contemporary John Donne’s taste for sucking on ‘country pleasures’ in ‘The Good Morrow’.
Like fuck, cunt has had an in-and-out relationship with dictionaries. Mostly out. It was included, as c--t, in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796), the very first wide-ranging collection of slang – i.e. all the words Doctor Johnson left out of his dictionary. This collection – which includes the first ‘pig’ for policeman – was put together by Francis Grose, son of an immigrant Swiss jeweller. Perhaps he had a foreigner’s ear for the little delights of words that locals are too familiar with to hear. Grose uncovered his words – and put them in his ‘knowledge-box’ – on his trawls across midnight London with his wonderfully named assistant/informant Tom Cocking. They’d set off together most nights, around about midnight, after a drink or ten at the King’s Arms, Holborn, in search of what his near contemporary, the novelist Tobis Smollett, called ‘the tropes and figures of Billingsgate’. A small, fat, clubbable man, Grose was a friend of the poet Burns and the great boxing writer Pierce Egan. In the preface to his dictionary, he wrote, democratically, that ‘the freedom of thought and speech, arising from, and privileged by our constitution, gives a force and poignancy to the expressions of our common people, not to be found under arbitrary governments, where the ebullitions of vulgar wit are checked by the fear of the bastinado, or of a lodging during pleasure in some gaol or castle.’ His obituary in the Dublin Chronicle said of him, ‘he edified while he exhilarated’. His knowledge-box and dictionary included the sexonyms, shag, hump, screw and roger.
His definition of cunt is renowned, generally for the wrong reason. He described it as ‘a nasty name for a nasty thing’. Usually and understandably, this is taken as misogynistic or at least vaginistic. But it’s not. In Grose’s time, nasty was also slang for the vagina. So it’s a rather neat pun and also possibly a dry joke about dictionary readers’ attitudes to sex. I’m thinking of the women who congratulated Dr Johnson on having no dirty words in his Dictionary. ‘So you looked for them, then?’ he said. Grose himself once wrote, of himself: ‘My works are for the laughing tribe.’ In Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968), two heavy volumes, Gershon Legman wrote: ‘Your favourite joke is your psychological signature. The only “joke” you know how to tell is you.’ (It’s said Legman invented the vibrating dildo, in 1937. He said he coined the phrase Make Love Not War, in Athens, Ohio, in 1963. His own self-defining joke? His surname, I guess.)
Nasty still meant vagina or vulva in mid-nineteenth-century black American slang. Which is not at all surprising. A good deal of black American English has its roots in old English dialects – accent, vocabulary and grammatical idiosyncrasies. This is because it was the people from the British Isles’ margins who needed to take the risk of uprooting and crossing the Atlantic to make their fortune. They took their music, too, of course. The most basic of blues is an English dialect ballad played on a Spanish instrument – the guitar – to music left behind from the Moorish invasion of Europe.
Jack Nasty Face was a mid-nineteenth-century English phrase – sometimes it meant a lowly sailor, sometimes a vagina. This Jack was ‘everyman’ Jack, as in Jack-of-all-trades, Jack-in-the-box and every man jack of you. Jack is also there in another nineteenth-century slang phrase for vagina, Jack Straw’s castle. Why? A Jack Straw was a nonentity, a nothing – the same common vulvar metaphor that’s there in Much Ado About Nothing. Jack Straw’s Castle was, till recently, a vast pub on the top of Hampstead Heath. Behind it, to the north, stretch lovely old woods and clearings, dappled with used condoms and toilet paper – it’s now the gay cruising area in which George Michael was found expressing his sexuality in a public place. The pub is meant to be named for the hay cart from which Jack Straw, a leading figure in the 1381 peasants’ revolt, made a speech to Londoners. I wonder, though, if its name was a landlord’s dirty joke. It’s not impossible. There’s a restaurant in London called La Figa – Italian for cunt. (If you think I’m being prurient and that it might simply be named for the fruit, you might be persuaded by the fact that its sister restaurant is called Il Bordello.)
Nasty in the sexual sense is still around, of course. You do hear people talking about ‘doing the nasty’. It’s the phrase used in Britop group Elastica’s 1995 ode to lubricant, ‘Vaseline’. The OED quotes Cosmopolitan magazine, April 2001. ‘It’s every girl’s worst nightmare – peeing while doing the nasty.’ And the American porn industry is fond of the phrase ‘nasty girl’ as an indication of inclination.
There is also that other n-word, naughty – common slang for the vagina till the early twentieth century. People do still talk about ‘doing the naughty’, particularly in Australia and New Zealand where it’s a common phrase. ‘Naughty bits’ for any sexual part or quasi-sexual part of either sex – vaginas, vulvas, penises, testicles, breasts, nipples, the lot – made its first noted public appearance in a 1972 episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was popularised, though, in Kenny Everett’s late 1970s and early 1980s TV comedy shows.
Cunt took a long time, a very long time, to make its way into modern mainstream dictionaries. Like fuck, it wasn’t included in the first great national dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, which was published from 1888 onwards, volume by volume – reaching the letter C in 1893 and F in 1900. ‘Yet the OED gave PRICK’, wrote Partridge. ‘Why this further injustice to women?’ There was, however, in the words of its editor Sir James Murray, ‘wide consultation and much discussion’ about including it. Classicist Robinson Ellis wrote to Murray: ‘The thing itself is not obscene. It must in any case be inserted … it is a thoroughly old word with a very ancient history.’ Even Murray’s prep school headmaster pressed for inclusion, telling his former pupil: ‘The mere fact of its being used in a vulgar way, does not ban it from the English language.’ Its dictionary debut did not, in fact, come till the American Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of 1961. Its first British appearance was in the Penguin English Dictionary of 1965. The OED finally allowed it entry in 1972.
Even when it was included in dictionaries, it was often draped with the most euphemistic of definitions. I can’t be the only schoolboy who ploughed through the biggest dictionaries in the school library, in search of dirty words, only to come up completely short against the definition ‘pudendum’. Worse, when you looked up that word, there was no definition of that word either. Pudendum was a word that hid not just various other words but itself. It’s Latin. Not the kind of later Latin that professionals or motto writers make up so they sound impressive. But real Latin, written by Romans. It means ‘that of which one ought to be ashamed’. It’s there in the writings of that grumpy north African saint, Augustine, worrying about pudenda virilia – men’s private parts. It was long used, in English, to indicate a kind of scholarly, scientific disdain for the ‘external genitals’ of both sexes – something which, after all, most of us have, even if we’re ashamed of them. Pudendum has been around in English since at least as early as 1398, which makes it almost as old as cunt. Not so much a word, though, as a state of mind.
Cunt’s progress through the media has been slow and stuttering. From c. 1700 till the Chatterley trial, it was considered obscene and it was therefore a legal offence to print it, except with asterisks or dashes. It is generally said that cunt’s British newspaper debut was in The Times in 1987, in a piece by columnist Bernard Levin in which he quoted directly from Tony Harrison’s furious anti-Thatcher poem, ‘V’. The extract began: ‘Aspirations, cunt! Folk on t’fucking dole …’ It didn’t go unnoticed, either. There was a fuss. Levin’s fellow columnists lined up for and against. Everyone had their say. The circus moved on – in particular, to the ‘outrage’ of Harrison performing his poem on Channel 4. The Times has never since allowed the full word to appear in its pages: it is always c***.
In fact, the word had made an earlier appearance in a British national newspaper. In the Guardian, of course, in 1974 – though, oddly, while histories of the paper make a great deal of its having premiered fuck in the aftermath of the Lady Chatterley trial, this first cunt is not mentioned at all. It was the depths of the 1970s recession. The price of oil had quadrupled since the previous October. Inflation was at 15 per cent, food prices had risen 25 per cent. Six weeks earlier, Ted Heath’s Conservative government had introduced and imposed the Three-Day Week Order. The coal miners were on go-slow. To restrict fuel consumption in the wake of an impending coal strike, all work was consolidated into three days, TV shut down early, floodlit football was banned. Heath had also called a general election, which he would lose, for 28 February.
Ten days earlier, on Monday 18 February 1974, cunt made its British press debut in the Guardian. The front page leads were about North Sea oil, a helicopter incursion at the White House and the death of forty-nine football fans in a stampede at a stadium in Cairo. The first leader was about inflation and ‘class war’. Manchester United were drawing their way to relegation. And there was a story headlined ‘Porn quiz for party leaders’. Mary Whitehouse had announced her intention to send a questionnaire to all party leaders asking them for their stance on indecency, obscenity and sex education.
The word itself was, suitably, said by Marianne Faithfull, singer, girlfriend of Mick Jagger, great-great niece of the knight of the Austrian Empire whose sexual interests gave us the word masochism, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She was also one of the first people to say fuck in a film, as Oliver Reed’s mistress in Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget What’s ’Is Name (1967) – a movie which, in the claim of its trailer, ‘cuts deep into the flesh of today’. The actual words spoken were ‘you fucking bastard’, shouted at Reed.
The Guardian interview is a charming period piece, written by Janet Watts. Marianne Faithfull refers to her boyfriend in classic 1970s rockchickspeak as her ‘old man’. Watts writes that she asked Faithfull some ‘heavy questions’ and describes her as someone who’s ‘got it sussed out’. The cunt itself comes when Faithfull is talking about bad reviews. ‘They’re entitled to say it: just as I’m entitled to think they’re a cunt for saying it.’ (It’s hard not to recall her other, if fallacious, claim to vaginal fame – the one involving a confectionary bar and a consensual sexual act.)
Tim Radford, who went on to become the paper’s science editor, was there the night the word was passed. A New Zealander thirteen years off the boat from Auckland, he’d been at the paper just six months and was a mere features sub. Several senior journalists were involved in the discussion about including the word. Finally, it was referred up to the editor, Alastair Hetherington – ‘a very straight-laced man who couldn’t believe people would fiddle expenses or drink on duty’, says Tim. When the decision came back down, a sub wrote on the page proof in large letters ‘The editor approves of Miss Watts’ cunt.’ There was, at least as far as Tim is concerned, no fuss. ‘We just printed it and I just don’t remember any subsequent discussion. In those days, we didn’t seem to be able to do anything that would offend our readers. The paper was at such a low ebb – tiny readership and no adverts – that we literally didn’t know if it would be there in six months. We regarded the paper as a bit of a toy we could play with every day. We just didn’t even come across complaints till the early 1980s.’
Marianne Faithfull was also the second pop singer to use ‘cunt’ on a record. A year after Sid Vicious had used it in his version of ‘My Way’, she used it in a couplet on her 1979 album, Broken English: ‘Why’d ya do it, she screamed, after all we’ve said/Every time I see your dick I see her cunt in my bed.’
The Guardian was also the first paper to use the word on its front page. In 2002, it quoted Irish-born footballer Roy Keane. To Mick McCarthy, the English-born manager of Keane’s national team, he’d said: ‘You’re not even Irish, you English cunt.’ Later, Keane claimed he never said it. ‘I have to live in England, and to be accused of saying that sort of thing, it’s not nice for my wife and family.’ He did, however, use the word again, colourfully, in his autobiography. ‘Stick it up your bollocks, you English cunt’ was one gloriously, joyously anatomically confused example he gave. Another was ‘Take that, you cunt!’ said, on 21 April 2001, to the Norwegian player Alf-Inge Haland who he had just tackled into premature retirement.
Football referees say that cunt is the word they most hate having shouted at them. Which, if my modest lip-reading skills are anything to go by, is something they must have to hate very, very often. Swearing and sport go together as well and as often as you’d expect of such paired twins of aggression and violence. There is even something oddly charming about the fact that it’s a supposedly gentlemanly sport, cricket, that gave us sledging – insulting opposing players to create in them what Australian captain Steve Waugh called ‘mental disintegration’. A late 1970s Australian creation, the idea being evoked is that it’s like being hit by a sledgehammer. Even when swears are not being used, the sledge is regularly sexual: Australian pacemaker Glenn McGrath to Zimbabwe’s Eddo Brandes: Why are you so fat? Brandes: Because every time I shag your wife she gives me a biscuit. And: Australian wicket-keeper Rod Marsh to Ian Botham: So how are your wife and my kids?
Cunt made its British TV debut on 7 November 1970, on The Frost Programme, a late-night live current affairs chat show which had been running on commercial television for four years. Prince Charles had been on it, Muhammed Ali and Mick Jagger, too. That night, Jerry Rubin was a guest. Rubin was an American yippie – a politicized hippy. He brought with him a tie-dye of English hippie friends and associates. Among them was Felix Dennis, who would be a defendant in the 1971 Oz magazine obscenity trial.† In the course of a discussion, almost as an aside, Dennis described Rubin as ‘the most unreasonable cunt I’ve ever met.’ A little later, Rubin and his crew took over the show. Chaos fell. The show was stopped. The credits were rolled. Felix Dennis is now a publisher, a very rich man and a poet. He also wishes he hadn’t used that word, saying that he’d behaved ‘bloody abominably’.
Its first scripted appearance on British TV was not, as is often claimed, in a 1997 series about the English fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, but in a 1979 drama on ITV, No Mama No. The actual line was: ‘He said your Dr Cawston is a cunt.’ It was said by a woman. Its US TV debut was in The Larry Sanders Show in 1992. It also featured in the first series of Sex and the City. It is said by an artist, Neville Morgan, to Charlotte (the sweet, WASPy, former prom queen who works in an art gallery): ‘I used to paint full nudes, but as I got older I realized that the truth was to be found only in the cunt.’
Its first appearance in a major film was in 1971’s Carnal Knowledge, which tracks Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson from virginal college friends through 25 years of sexual relations to middle-aged confusion and despair. ‘Here’s a real cunt,’ says the Nicholson character of one of his many women. ‘I forget her name. A Nazi. I banged her in Berlin.’ When the John Travolta disco movie Saturday Night Fever first came out, in 1977, its language ensured it received an 18 certificate. So a non-swearing version was created for children. Among the lines that went was a little piece of advice given by the Travolta character to Annette, a girl who fancies him wildly but whose passion he does not reciprocate. ‘It’s a decision a girl’s gotta make early in life, if she’s gonna be a nice girl or a cunt.’
