by Rufus Lodge
The Animal (F’)Kingdom
Many of God’s creatures have found their way into the lexicon of English swearing, from the humble lark to the mighty … well, duck.
BEARS: There is a Canadian TV series that you may have missed, entitled Trailer Park Boys: it’s the kind of thing that Chris Lilley of Summer Heights High fame might have dreamed up if he came from Nova Scotia and couldn’t afford a tripod for his camera. And in this series a new phrase was added to the language: ‘fucked by bears’. Besides its literal meaning, and the related sense of being attacked by our ursine cousins, it also carries wider connotations, as the worst possible experience that anyone can imagine. Especially if they’ve spent their entire lives in Nova Scotia.
CAT: Let’s leave the poor ‘pussy’, in all its permutations, out of this, OK? Suffice to say here that if you ‘fuck up someone’s pussy’, you are not necessarily having sexual intercourse (though you might be). A polite translation of this phrase might be ‘winding up a rival’, and interfering with their cat might hit the spot perfectly. If someone does that to you, you might scream ‘Fuck a cat!’ in frustration.
CHIMP: For some reason, cartoonists around the world often portrayed President George ‘Dubya’ Bush as a chimp. So you can probably guess the prime target of the casual insult, ‘fuck-chimp’, which doesn’t mean that he’s good in bed. It simply denotes somebody who is hopelessly out of his depth.
COW: A dictionary of casual sexism would be bigger than the Bible and more depressing than the latest list of bankers’ bonuses. With the innocent cow already figuring in countless insults aimed at women, it’s not surprising that, by extension, it has also been dragged into describing parts of the female anatomy. The result – a triumph of the same refined twenty-first-century imagination that brought you the Kardashian family – is the word ‘fuck udders’, as a way of describing a pair of breasts. The intelligence of the person who coined this addition to our lustrous language is demonstrated by the fundamental non sequitur at its heart. I can understand (though not condone) a young man who has no female friends describing breasts (as they sometimes do) as ‘fuck handles’. And I can see (but not etc etc) the link between breasts and udders: keeping the species alive, and all that. But ‘fuck udders’ suggests that someone needs some very basic sex education lessons.
DOG: ‘Fucking the dog’ is military slang for anything that seems like a complete waste of time (everything except fighting and drinking, in other words). A soldier could feel that he is ‘fucking the dog’ when the sergeant-major tells him to ‘paint that fence white, and then paint it black’. By association, the gallant infantryman may choose to ‘fuck the dog’ by engaging in something that is utterly pointless but looks useful (such as painting the fence), to avoid being commandeered for something less pleasant (e.g. cleaning out the latrines). It is probably best not to imagine what kind of bitter experience led to the original coining of this phrase, which apparently originated during the First World War in a more genteel variant, ‘walking the dog’. Or you might prefer to ‘fornicate the poodle’ (other breeds are also available). Some sources transfer the blame from the dog to the duck, incidentally, and offer a more polite alternative: ‘stroke the duck’.
The abbreviation FTD, which probably ought to stand for ‘fuckingly transmitted disease’, is sometimes used by members of the military to summarise the pointlessness of their duties (see above). But there’s also an extended version of the phrase, which commands the lowly private to ‘fuck the dog and sell the pups’. What began as an expression of the meaninglessness of army existence has slowly crossed into civilian life, to the point where a young man might lust vainly over a celebrity on the internet, and boast to his equally retarded friends that he would be delighted to have the opportunity to impregnate her and then dispose of her babies. Not recommended as a chat-up line, though.
More recently, young Americans have transferred the humble ‘dog-fuck’ from sexual braggadocio to non-related aspects of everyday life, as a synonym for trouble – ‘deep doo-doo’ or ‘deep shit’, in other words. And, of course, two sexual practices that can often be one and the same – entry from the rear and anal intercourse – have often been decorated with the ‘dog-fuck’ description, otherwise known as ‘doggy-fuck’ or ‘doggie-fuck’ – or, more traditionally, ‘doing it doggy style’.
Inevitably, there is also a ‘fuckdog’ on the prowl: yet another of the marvellously inventive ways invented by young men to describe a young woman of their acquaintance who might actually enjoy having sex. But it can also be applied the other way around, you’ll be amazed to hear. If you’d been in Portland, Oregon in 2001, incidentally, you could have witnessed a theatrical production of something called Poona the Fuckdog. I’m waiting till it hits Broadway. Those with a musical bent can check out the 1995 album by metal band Autopsy. It’s called Shitfun, contains tracks called ‘Bowel Ripper’ and ‘I Sodomize Your Corpse’, but is worthy of mention here for the 42-second song, ‘Fuckdog’.
If someone tells you that they’ve just fucked a dog in the river, don’t look for their water wings: they simply mean they’ve hidden something (probably deeply illegal) where it will not be found.
DONKEY: Not noted for their intelligence, donkeys are the ideal way to signal your complete ignorance, suggesting that you’ve blundered your way through something without a clue – as in the phrase, ‘I had to fuck a donkey in that meeting’. No asses were harmed in the course of this discussion.
DUCK: Quite how the harmless duck found itself the target of the exasperated exclamation ‘Fuck a duck’ is a mystery to historians of Britain’s verbal curiosities – though the internal rhyming scheme certainly didn’t hurt. Its first appearance in print was apparently in the expletive-soaked pages of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. More recently it’s inspired entire phrases, such as ‘Fuck a duck and see what hatches’ and ‘Fuck a duck and give it a buck’. Linguistic experts claim that the original inspiration was the word ‘duckfucker’, the person on board a transatlantic ship who was charged with keeping the domestic animals alive, rather than pleasuring them in exotic ways. This word in turn entered American stoner slang as a term for an annoying idiot.
As the award-winning Italian film Padre Padrone demonstrated all too graphically, young men in remote country districts have been known to explore their budding sexual urges with the help of a handily placed chicken. But ducks probably flap about too much to make that a satisfying liaison.
Two examples of Cockney rhyming slang might also be worth a quack at this point: Donald Duck, and goose & duck. You can probably work out what they rhyme with. The simple joy of creating a rhythm explains the American phrase ‘fucked duck’, which is basically anyone – any species, in fact – which is doomed for destruction. Sounds like an ideal slogan for the Green Party.
You might say ‘I’ll fuck a dead duck!’ on occasions when ‘Blow me down with a feather’ simply doesn’t capture the full extent of your surprise. Being told to ‘Go fuck a duck’ (or a dog, for that matter) is an impolite way of being sent to hell, presumably coined by someone who has actually experimented with trans-species congress. If you are a ‘fuck duck’, you either have sex regularly with your friends or with people who aren’t your friends. And finally, if someone says that you ‘fuck a duck’, they are suggesting that perhaps you might be spreading your favours too widely. Unless, of course, you really are hanging out too much at your local duck pond.
GOAT: Goats are altogether too frisky to be fucked in the ‘sheep’ sense (see below). Indeed, the result would almost certainly be chaotic (not to mention downright dangerous for both man and goat). So a ‘goat fuck’, thanks to our GI buddies, stationed in Britain during the Second World War, is a situation that has got rather out of hand, and is unlikely to reach a positive conclusion. When they’re not dragging goats into the fray, American soldiers have been known to call this a ‘Chinese fire drill’, bringing the planet’s most populous nation into the target area. The Chinese
phrase for the same cock-up is probably ‘American election’.
For entertaining use of the abusive phrase ‘Go fuck a goat!’, listen out for Mooj’s appearance in the 2005 movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin.
HORSE: My introduction to the internet, in the days when it took about twenty minutes for the dial-up connection to take hold, and another hour or two for each page to download, involved my selecting something entirely harmless in what passed for a search engine in 1997, pushing ‘Enter’ – and being rewarded with what we would now call a ‘gif’ of a woman and a horse getting to know each other in a surprisingly intimate way. After which I was not at all surprised to hear that horses were being dragged into the arena of sexual innuendo, with young men boasting that they had ‘fucked a horse’, not in the Biblical sense, but as an expression of whole-hearted enjoyment of their climax. The saucier the filly, the better.
LARK: ‘Fuck this for a lark,’ people used to say when they were faced with something too tedious to deserve their attention. That was, of course, a lark in the sense of a frolic, a game, a jolly good time, rather than the garden bird otherwise known as the skylark. None of which prevented Sir Laurence Olivier, no less, from adopting a very literal, bird-centred French translation of the phrase during his stewardship of the National Theatre: ‘Baisez cela pour une alouette’.
LIZARD: Specifically, the ‘fuck-you lizard’, as American servicemen during the Vietnam War named the tokay gecko – simply and sensibly because the amphibian’s natural call sounded (to stoned American ears) like ‘fuck you’.
MINK: Some teenage girls refer to their private parts as their ‘minky’. This may or may not be relevant to the phrase ‘fuck like a mink’, which has traditionally been used to refer to women but not men (see Rattlesnake below). Minks are small, furry creatures that are notoriously promiscuous and unwilling to form lasting sexual relationships. They mate violently, with the male often seizing the nape of the female’s neck with his teeth, while holding her down with his paws. Any similarity to the scene outside an English seaside tavern on a Friday night is purely coincidental.
MONKEY: Bored with saying ‘fuck a duck’? ‘Fuck a monkey’ will work equally well as a demonstration of your verbal dexterity. No doubt other animals could be brought into the cage as well, but be careful of the ones with claws.
MOOSE: ‘Fuck a moose’ is probably only an appropriate exclamation for Canadians. But that hasn’t prevented death metal band Flesh Parade incorporating the phrase into a track (‘Eat Shit and Fuck a Moose’) that sounds as if it was recorded just after the singer was set on fire.
PIG: Pigs have curly tails (and penises, but let’s not go there). And that, by a complex process of association and translation down the centuries, is why we have the word ‘screw’ (a means of fixing two objects together, that is). The derivation goes like this: from the Latin word for ‘sow’ (scrofa) to the medieval French (escroue) and then into English, once the man-of-war ferry service from Calais to Dover had opened in 1539 (I’m sure I read that on Wikipedia).
Anyway: ‘fuck-pig’ (Cockney in origin) is an insult, suggesting that someone is so filthy that they might actually do what the phrase suggests; and so is ‘pigfucker’ – the latter representing a more contemptuous variant on the better-known ‘sheep-shagger’. For a literary rendering, try Brendan Behan’s invention in his 1958 play Borstal Boy: ‘fugh-pig’, the first syllable definitely not rhyming with ‘hugh’.
RABBIT: The one thing everyone knows about rabbits is that they have babies. Lots of babies. So presumably they must have sex somewhere along the line. Someone who ‘fucks like a rabbit’ – or like a bunny – could therefore be said to have a voracious appetite for sex (rather than a lot of babies). A ‘fuck bunny’, meanwhile, is someone who likes being serviced by someone who ‘fucks like a bunny’, especially if she (usually) looks as if she’s as sweet as pie.
RAT: Nobody likes to boast that they fuck like a rat (or a mouse, for that matter). So ‘ratfuck’ is, you’ll be amazed to learn, not a compliment. In American criminal circles, a ‘fink’ was an informer or stool pigeon; a particularly egregious example of the species was given the intensified label of ‘ratfink’. When American cartoonist Ed Roth invented a hot-rod character named ‘Rat Fink’ in the early 1960s, the insult lost much of its power. Instead, members of the underworld retained the ‘rat’, dropped the ‘fink’, and substituted a different four-letter word ending in a ‘k’. The resulting word was every bit as damning of an associate’s character as ‘ratfink’ had once been. By extension, ‘ratfuck’ also came to mean someone who was utilising political ‘dirty tricks’ – fucking someone up like a dirty rat, in other words.
It enjoyed particular popularity during Richard ‘Tricky Dicky’ Nixon’s 1972 presidential re-election campaign (which incidentally used the stunningly appropriate acronym, CREEP). But it was not one of the multitude of four-letter words captured on tape in President Nixon’s office, and subsequently disclosed to the committee investigating the Watergate scandal. Nixon always preferred a simple ‘fuck’ with no frills.
RATTLESNAKE: While women are compared to minks, men are sometimes said in America (and Australia, where there are no rattlesnakes outside zoos) to ‘fuck like a rattlesnake’. Barry Humphries incorporated the phrase into one of his Barry McKenzie cartoon strips in the late Sixties.
The more you learn about the mating habits of the rattlesnake, the less complimentary the phrase sounds. Male rattlesnakes single out a prospective sexual partner, then trail round after her for days, refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer. They continually touch her in inappropriate places, in a vain attempt to arouse her. If another male gets in the way, they wind their bodies around each other and sprawl on the ground until one of them gives in. After that, coupling takes the form of a series of uncoordinated spasms. Many women readers may feel a tinge of recognition at this point. Someone who ‘fucks like a rattlesnake’ will also ‘go like the clappers’.
RHINO: Another recent invention: ‘fuck a rhino’ as a suggestion to a friend (the ‘go’ at the start of the phrase is both invisible and silent).
SHEEP: Sheep-fuckers, or more commonly sheep-shaggers, are local yokels so simple and desperate that they’ll couple with anything soft, warm and slow on the uptake – all of which makes the none-too-bright sheep an easy target. The English use the phrase to insult the Welsh, the Aussies to ridicule their cousins in New Zealand, and so on and on. Anybody who owns a sheep is likely to hear this phrase at least once in their lives, regardless of how intimate they are with their flock.
SPIDER: Students of the English language who dedicated themselves to research in the more dubious districts of Singapore claim to have heard the exasperated exclamation: ‘Fuck spider!’. However, given the viciousness of some arachnids in those parts, what they may actually have heard is ‘Fuck! Spider!’. If you happen to be in Singapore, asking an attractive young person for a date, and they tell you to ‘Go fuck spider’, you should think about putting an ad in the Lonely Hearts column instead.
You Can Leave Your Shoes On
Fuck-me pumps. Fuck-me shoes. Fuck-me boots. Or, if you prefer, come-fuck-me pumps. Or catch-me-and-fuck-me shoes.
The common denominator? Joan Crawford. She was hardly the first – or, in her time, the only – actress to accentuate her height, her hauteur or indeed her sexual appeal by donning a pair of cross-laced high heels. Such footwear has become a signifier of alluring female beauty around the world, despite the fact that these shoes are (a) usually painful to wear, (b) apparently designed to leave the feet looking as if they’ve been used as a garden implement and (c) constructed in such a way as to make it impossible – or embarrassingly ridiculous – for the wearer to walk. (Women in catch-me-and-fuck-me shoes therefore aren’t actually that difficult to catch, which may be the point.) But what are comfort, safety, and dignity when you can perch perilously atop a pair of six-inch wedges?
I digress. We were talking about Joan Crawford, whose tempestu
ous career involved success, failure, success, failure (you get the idea), notoriety, and an alleged propensity to apply her coat-hanger to sensitive areas of her children’s behinds. A star from the Thirties onwards, she was by the end of her movie career established not just as a Hollywood legend, but as an icon for the increasingly vocal section of the gay community who identified themselves with flamboyant and troubled divas from the worlds of stage and screen. None of these particular admirers would have been likely to feel any great sexual desire for Ms Crawford, but that didn’t prevent them from worshipping her erotic image and (for those who felt that way inclined) echoing her appearance in their own trans-gender clothing expeditions.
By the early Seventies, the phrase ‘fuck-me pumps’ had been coined (by Americans, naturally, as nobody in Britain talked about pumps forty years ago), and was sometimes linked, in conversation and then in print, with Joan Crawford. Once established, the link became unbreakable, as if her ‘fuck-me pumps’ had been on the lips of everyone in the Hollywood community. And so her expansive career in the flicks has been reduced to a casual reference to her shoes, and a folk memory of the movie Mommie Dearest, based on her daughter’s exposé of her mother’s disciplinary habits.
David Bowie, no stranger himself to Crawford-style dress or demeanour, can be given credit for introducing the phrase ‘fuck-me pumps’ into popular culture at large – or at least he could have been, had the phrase been more distinguishable among the garbled, cut-up images of his 1974 recording ‘We Are the Dead’. Thirty years later, ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ was one of the songs on Amy Winehouse’s debut album, Frank, though she only uttered the dreaded word at the very end of the recording, her first rendering of the phrase restricting itself to ‘f me pumps’. (The song was coyly listed as ‘F**k Me Pumps’ on the back of the CD, although the booklet inside bravely printed the title in full.)
