The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  The reaction these words provoke is caused more by the words themselves than by the things they denote. Far fewer people will be upset by the word vagina than will be appalled to hear the word cunt. Very few will be disconcerted by a reference to sexual intercourse. It’s also, I think, worth briefly reflecting that swearing, besides often expressing strong feelings and relating to taboos, is not on the whole to be taken literally. Consider, for instance, the statement ‘I got fucked by my boss in my annual review’. Or ‘Fuck me!’, which is an expression of surprise more often than an invitation. Yet the associations of sex with physical force, pain and exploitation – concentrated in the quick invasive aggression of fuck – are present here.

  Shit is, undoubtedly, a different matter. The word does not seem to have bothered readers in the fifteenth century, when Caxton used it in a translation of Aesop’s Fables. By the eighteenth century, attitudes had clearly changed. It seems safe to assume that English-speakers by then were a little less intimately acquainted with their dung than Caxton’s contemporaries had been. Some dictionaries of the period were squeamish, and others less so. In Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730) there is no entry for shit, but shitten (‘beshit, fouled with Ordure’) is there and so is to shite, which is ‘to discharge the Belly; to ease Nature’. (Bailey also registers cunt, but evasively defines it only as ‘pudendum muliebre’.) Johnson includes none of these words. Moving forward, in the first edition of the OED shit does appear, labelled ‘not now in decent use’.

  It has been suggested, by Steven Pinker among others, that slang words for effluvia are unacceptable in precise relation to the unacceptability of emitting – or eliminating – those effluvia in public. Accordingly, shit is worse than piss, which is worse than fart, which is worse than snot. The various slang words for semen are probably somewhere between shit and piss. It is no coincidence that the substances that most disgust us are the most dangerous. Faeces is a powerful vector of disease, whereas snot carries less hazardous infections. There are ways of referring to faeces that infantilize or medicalize it – doo-doo, for instance, and stools – and these neutralize our disgust. But shit does no such thing and is offensive because it arouses our disgust and connects us, subconsciously, to disease. It seems plausible that, the further we are (or believe ourselves to be) from shit in our daily lives, the more the word appals us, because it insinuates something feculent back into a world we think we have made clean and safe.

  Undoubtedly, too, even if on an intellectual level we accept that the connection between sounds and meanings is arbitrary, we feel otherwise. Steven Pinker explains that ‘most humans … treat the name for an entity as part of its essence, so that the mere act of uttering a name is seen as a way to impinge on its referent’. Confronted with a taboo word such as shit, the part of one’s brain known as the amygdala experiences a surge in metabolic activity: ‘The upshot is that a speaker or writer can use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite against their wishes.’5

  George Orwell writes in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933):

  The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic – indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret – usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word.

  Less than twenty years after the first London production of Pygmalion, Orwell notes, ‘No born Londoner … now says “bloody”, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is —. No doubt in time —, like “bloody”, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.’ No prizes for guessing what — stands for. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Julia strikes Winston as natural and healthy because she cannot mention the Party ‘without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways’; Orwell avoids saying which words she uses in order to shock by implication, and perhaps also to avoid committing himself to a view of what might prove shocking in the future.

  Fuck is the dirty prince of English vocabulary – aggressive, flamboyant, versatile, awkward. As Jesse Sheidlower’s book The F-Word enjoyably illustrates, it not only has a vast number of applications, but also is prolific: here’s Robert Louis Stevenson writing in a letter about a fuckstress; here’s a character in a Philip Roth novel using the verb guaranfuckingtee; and here’s Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English explaining that a Dutch fuck is the act of lighting one cigarette from another.

  Until quite recently, dictionaries have treated fuck with caution. In Britain, the word appeared as early as 1598 in John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary, in the definition of the Italian verb fottere – ‘to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy’ – and in cognate forms under fottarie (‘fuckings’), fottitrice (‘a woman fucker’), fottitore (‘a fucker’), fottitura (‘a fucking’) and fottuto (‘fuckt’). The verb to fuck was listed in Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum as ‘a term used of a goat; also subagitare feminam’, and found its way into John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775). But then fuck disappeared from lexicographic view. After the second edition of Ash in 1795, where it is labelled ‘a low vulgar word’ and defined as ‘to perform the act of generation, to have to do with a woman’, fuck’s next appearance in a general English dictionary was in 1965, when a definition was presented in the Penguin English Dictionary. No general American dictionary contained fuck until it appeared in The American Heritage Dictionary in 1969. For all its alleged permissiveness, Webster’s Third did not include the word. Less surprisingly, neither did the original OED. When the entries for the letter F were being put together in the 1890s, it had been omitted; by the 1920s, when the editors had made it as far as W, the word windfucker – the name of a type of kestrel – was considered fit for inclusion. Fuck got its own entry when the OED’s first supplementary volume was published in 1972.

  When the American scholar Allen Walker Read published an article about the word in 1934, his chosen title was ‘An Obscenity Symbol’, and he managed by various circumlocutions not once to use the offending term. In 1948 Norman Mailer, preparing his novel The Naked and the Dead for publication, amended every instance of fuck to fug, on the insistence of his publisher. The wisecracking Dorothy Parker, meeting her fellow author, allegedly joked, ‘So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.’ (In some accounts it was not Parker, but the sexually adventurous screen star Tallulah Bankhead. Mailer denied that it happened at all.) Elsewhere the word was printed with asterisks in place of its second, third and sometimes also fourth letters; the practice had begun in the early eighteenth century. It was not used in the New York Times until 1998, and then only in the context of the Starr Report into alleged misconduct by President Clinton. Many newspapers continue not to print the word. In other media the equivalent of this reticence is the bleep. The practice of bleeping out profanities on television began in the 1960s, and fuck was not heard in mainstream American cinema until around 1970.6 Yet in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) fuck is in one form or another said about four hundred times, a figure surpassed by Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (1997) with 428.7

  If you suspect that fuck is more common than it used to be, you may well be right. The decline of religion in much of the English-speaking world may help to explain why fuck appears where a religious expletive would once have been effective. Unrestrained language seems to attend unrestrained behaviour. Steven Pinker notes that ‘Sexual language has become far more common since the early 1960s, but so have illegitimacy, sexually transmitted
infections, rape, and the fallout of sexual competition, like anorexia in girls and swagger culture in boys. Though no one can pin down cause and effect, the changes are of a piece with the weakening of the fear and awe that used to surround thoughts about sex and that charged sexual language with taboo.’8 Though Pinker is no conservative in matters of language, this argument, phrased more angrily, is perfectly suited to becoming a weapon in the arsenal of reactionary commentators.

  There are circumstances in which saying fuck creates a momentary solidarity even between people who would normally be offended by the word. If I call you a ‘fucking idiot’ you will be unimpressed, but if I drop a hammer on my foot, I may well exclaim ‘Fuck’ or ‘Shit’, and very few will disapprove. Besides being cathartic, my exclamation has the effect of reassuring anyone who has just seen what has happened; it is a sign of my normality, much less disconcerting than silence, and I am acknowledging my incompetence. If I drop the hammer on the ground rather than on my foot, I am more likely to exclaim ‘Whoops’. My performance in this case is milder, and there is no need for catharsis, but the purpose of the exclamation is the same: I am still drawing attention to the fact that this mishap was unintended – and subconsciously, or semi-consciously, I am keen not to be thought of as someone who goes around dropping hammers.

  Fuck, it should be emphasized, was not the only word to be deliberately omitted from the first edition of the OED. The absence of cunt is not surprising, though the issue of whether or not to include it was vigorously discussed. But the comparatively innocent condom did not make it either. James Dixon, a surgeon who was a valued contributor to the OED, was startled by the word when he came upon it in print – or rather, startled by the existence of the item itself. He told James Murray that it was ‘a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well-deserved clap’. It was ‘too utterly obscene’ to be included in the OED. It seems that Murray concurred.9 Clap was labelled ‘obsolete in polite use’, despite recent evidence to the contrary.

  In the opposite camp there were, and of course still are, those who think there is no such thing as an obscene word. Their strategy, usually, is to administer shock treatment. One of the prime movers in this was George Carlin, whose comedy often contained social commentary and observations about language. In Carlin’s sketch ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ – which appeared on an album he released in 1972 and led to his arrest when he performed it in Milwaukee – the words in question are fuck, cunt, shit, piss, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. These words were not in fact banned; there was simply an informal understanding that they should not be used. Carlin dubbed them the ‘heavy seven’, joking that their use will ‘curve your spine’. His real point was that there were ‘no bad words’, only ‘bad thoughts’ and ‘bad intentions’.10 Carlin’s aim was to question people’s capacity for taking offence. What made certain words more shocking than others? He later expanded the list, adding fart, turd and twat. Was fart acceptable, or was it bad? Wasn’t it, after all, just shit without the mess? In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that the sketch was ‘indecent but not obscene’. Yet, as Jack Lynch notes, ‘Carlin’s list became the de facto standard of what really couldn’t be said on the public airwaves. It’s a strange paradox that a foul-mouthed champion of free speech should have been instrumental in writing the law prohibiting those same words.’11

  In Britain, the law relating to obscenity has been in place since 1857, modified in England and Wales by two further Obscene Publications Acts in 1959 and 1964. The 1959 Act states that ‘an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect … is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.’ (For these purposes an ‘article’ is anything ‘containing or embodying matter to be read or looked at or both, any sound record, and any film or other record of a picture or pictures’.) However, the publisher of an ‘article’ cannot be convicted if publication ‘is justified for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern’. The contradiction here is hardly inconspicuous: can things that ‘tend to deprave and corrupt’ really be ‘justified for the public good’? And how are we to assess or indeed define the experience of being depraved and corrupted?

  Anxieties about obscenity lie behind a lot of humour, which tends to deal with sex, violence and society’s ritual practices. Jokes help us grapple with our distastes and mistrusts: of our bodies, our desires, our apparent superiors and people who seem to menace our lives’ equilibrium. Typically, jokes expose a gap between what we expect and how things turn out; humour is liberating because it momentarily makes the real world seem surreal and because it briefly gives us a chance to reflect on the fears implicit in our daily existence. ‘The genius of jokes,’ writes the philosopher Simon Critchley, ‘is that they light up the common features of our world.’12 They pique our distaste, making us uncomfortable and at the same time making us question this uncomfortableness.

  Lenny Bruce is an important figure here. Unusually for a comedian, Bruce did not tell jokes. His rhythm was typically that of a conventional stand-up comedian – set-up, delay, punchline – and his subject matter (despair, destruction, the truth) was of a kind that has frequently been mined by comics, but Bruce’s profanity took the form of an abstract jazz performance rather than a studious progression. Bruce wanted his audiences to be shocked by the things that were really wrong – not by four-letter words, but by the inequalities and depravities of society. Why was it unacceptable to depict sex (something most of us practise) in a film, yet acceptable to depict murder? A crucial part of his act lay in demystifying the language conventionally deemed obscene. Bruce used the phrase ‘yada yada yada’ to sum up the endless torrents of blather spouted by the moral majority.

  It probably now seems bizarre that Bruce was in 1961 arrested for using the word cocksucker during a routine at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop. Twenty years later Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her performance in Sophie’s Choice, in which she uttered this very word. We have become inured to hearing it – and to hearing what would generally be considered far worse. Still, the use of so-called bad language is likely to provoke complaint when it happens in a context where it seems especially inappropriate. When the singer Madonna presented the Turner Prize for contemporary art in 2001, she successfully outraged many by exclaiming, on live television and before the nine o’clock ‘watershed’, the words ‘Right on, motherfuckers!’

  Although motherfucker is regarded as outstandingly obscene in its condensed expression of Freud’s Oedipal theory, today the term most likely to cause shock is nigger. When first adopted in the sixteenth century – from French, Spanish or Portuguese, though ultimately its source was Latin – it was used neutrally, without obvious hostility and contempt. That changed in the late eighteenth century, and there is no mistaking the tone of Byron’s ‘The rest of the world – niggers and what not’ (1811) or Henry Fearon’s reference in Sketches of America (1818) to ‘the bad conduct and inferior nature of niggars [sic]’. The word is fatally linked to white supremacy and slavery. Although it has different levels of toxicity according to who is using it, nobody can now free it from its long history of derogatory connotations. The popularization of the hip-hop endearment nigga, which the rapper Tupac Shakur improbably claimed was an acronym for Never Ignorant and Getting Goals Accomplished, and what might be called its neutralized and generalized use as an equivalent of guy or man, have only complicated reactions to the original word. Black people’s use of nigga or indeed nigger as a form of address is not a unique example of an insult being recast as a badge of honour; the Christian movement known as the Quakers adopted that nickname for their movement – more formally called the Religious Society of Friends – in order to neutralize what was at first a term of derision.

  Sensitivity about nigger has led to the avoidance of the
unrelated adjective niggardly. In 1999 David Howard, who worked in the mayor’s office in Washington DC, used the word during a meeting. Rumours circulated that he had used a racist epithet: Howard resigned his post, conceding, ‘I should have thought, this is an arcane word, and everyone may not know it.’13 Because niggardly sounds as though it derives from nigger, it is tainted. Knowledge of the two words’ different etymologies is no protection against those for whom their sounds are simply too close for comfort. There are other words one can use instead of niggardly that will cause no offence. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman suggest that ‘Somebody who uses it is in effect telling his audience: “I’m smarter than anyone who’s dumb enough to get mad.”’14 Well, maybe. But I suspect most people who use niggardly do so without the snooty premeditation this implies.

  The episode involving David Howard was not the first time that niggardly had caused controversy, and there have been similar rows since, as when a student at the University of Wisconsin made a formal complaint about a professor’s discussion of the word’s use by Chaucer. Niggardly is a pejorative word, and was in the fourteenth century, though of course Chaucer knew nothing of nigger. The negative import of niggardly makes its similarity to nigger both plausible and likely to give offence. I suspect that many people hear it as niggerly. I am pretty confident that niggardly will fall out of use. But will that be the end of it? What of niggling or snigger? Or denigratory?