A talk about the 'C'-word
Jan. 12th, 2004 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenAs requested by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sheepthief following his poll on the most offensive swearword.
This is a talk I gave at Damn Fine Convention in Shepperton a couple of years back.
It is NOT worksafe, for reasons of vocabulary, although there are no illustrations.
It's also totally plagiarised from an academic paper I found.
Credits as soon as I can find them. EDIT: It's by Matthew Hunt. When I gave this talk, his homepage was down and I had to trace a copy in the Wayback Machine, but it's back up again now as C*nt: A Cultural History. His dissertation is 19,000 words with complete references; I trimmed it to a more accessible 7,000 words. Most of his site is dead links and even the link on the opening page to the paper itself is dead, but it is generally regarded as the most authoritative study on the subject around and is widely cited. I believe it won him a Master's Degree, and justly so, although reverendjim did point out some errata and omissions.
Enjoy.
Comments very welcome.
CUNT
The word “cunt”, which according to the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary simply means "the female genitals", is arguably the single most offensive word in the English language. In the article “A C-Change For N.Y.” in The New York Observer, Andrew Goldman (1999) calls it "the mother of all nasty words" and Ted Duckworth’s “Dictionary Of Slang” sees it as "Undoubtedly the most offensive and taboo of all vulgarisms".
Where did “cunt” come from?
The origin of the word ‘cunt’ is uncertain. Freund’s Latin Dictionary suggests that its earliest origin is the Latin term ‘cuneus’, meaning ‘wedge’. ‘Wedge’ and ‘cunt’ seem, initially, to be unlikely associates - as Jane Mills put it in the Without Walls documentary “Expletives Deleted”, "I know what a cunt looks like, and the word ‘wedge’ doesn’t sort of spring to mind!", though the connection may be the triangular (V-shaped) formation which wedges and cunts both share. The Latin ‘cunnus’ (‘vagina’), adapted from ‘cuneus’, is seen as the source of the Middle English ‘cunte’, ‘count’, and ‘counte’ (Stratman, 1891), and thus of the modern ‘cunt’.
It’s also the source of ‘coin’, suggesting that ‘cunt’ may be an ancient pun on ‘treasure’: the French ‘bijou’ (‘jewel’) is also slang for ‘vagina’, and ‘cunt’ may once have had a similar double-meaning. Also of Latin origin are ‘cunnilingus’ (from ‘cunnus’ and ‘lingere’, ‘to lick’) and ‘cunnus diaboli’ (medieval pagan shrines, ‘devilish cunts’).
‘Cunabula’ (‘earliest abode’) also shares the ‘cun’ stem, as do:
· ‘Cunina’
· ‘cunctipotent’
· ‘cundy’
· ‘cush’ (Arabic, from which ‘kush’ is derived)
· ‘cunicle’ (‘underground passage’)
· ‘cuniculate’ (‘open at one end’)
· ‘cunne’ and ‘cunae’ (‘cradle’)
… many of which have womb-like or vaginal connotations.
Related terms are:
· the Old English ‘cot’ (‘cottage’)
· ‘conjuring book’
· ‘conundrum’
· ‘coynte’
· ‘cooch’
· ‘coot’
· ‘cooze’
· ‘cou’
· ‘cuzzy’
· ‘cu’
· ‘cwe’ (‘femininity’)
· the French ‘con’ and ‘coun’
· the Italian ‘conno’
· the Spanish ‘coño’
· plus ‘Cuntkin’, ‘cuntlet’, the Old English ‘cwithe’ (‘womb’)
· and the Welsh ‘cwm’ meaning ‘valley’, thus a descriptive euphemism for ‘cunt’. Cwm was Anglicised as ‘cumb’, ‘coomb’, ‘coombe’, and ‘combe’, which thus share the same origin as, it has been suggested, does ‘cow’.
Derived from ‘cwm’ are the ‘qu-’ terms:
· ‘quin’
· ‘quem’
· ‘quimsby’
· and ‘quim’.
Extensions of ‘quim’ include:
· ‘quim bush’, ‘quim whiskers’ and ‘quim wig’ (pubic hair)
· ‘quimfill’ (a penis fully inserted into the vagina)
· ‘quimling’ (genital stimulation)
· ‘quim nuts’ (labia)
· ‘quim-sticker’ (womaniser)
· and ‘quimstake’ or ‘quimwedge’ (penis)
Similar to ‘cwm’, and with the same origin (i.e. ‘cunnus’), is another Welsh word, ‘cwe’ (meaning ‘woman’, and also spelt ‘cwen’ and ‘cwene’). ‘Cwe’ is the source of the modern ‘queen’, and the arcane ‘quean’ (‘impudent woman’). Though restricted to female monarchs today, ‘queen’ could originally be applied to any woman, and is yet more evidence that ‘cu’, ‘cw’, ‘qu’, and ‘ku’ prefixes carry associations of femininity. ‘Queen’ is used in this general sense by Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet”, when Mercutio says "O! then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you" (circa 1594:1.4.55). Here, "Queen Mab" is the fairies’ widwife, the title coming from the Welsh ‘cwen maban’ (literally ‘woman baby’).
The Greek ‘konnus’ (‘hair’, related to ‘kusos’ and ‘kusthos’) (Green, 1993:33) has two principal influences: its prefix is from the Sanskrit term ‘cushi’ (‘ditch’) and its suffix is from ‘cunnus’. This allusion to the vagina as a ditch is replicated by the name of the River Kennet at Silbury, which Michael Dames (1976:110) traces back to Cunnit (‘cunt’): "the name of that orifice is carried downstream in the name of the river. Cunnit is Cunnt with an extra i". He also cites the Roman settlement Cunetio, situated beside the river in the Kennet (or Cunnit) valley. This brings to mind another of Shakespeare’s lines, Pompey's evocative sexual metaphor, "Groping for trouts in a peculiar river".
If ‘cunnus’ is the source of the ‘cun’ prefix, ‘konnus’ may be the source of the ‘kun’, ‘kin’, and ‘ken’ stems. For example, the Basque term ‘kuna’ (also ‘cuna’), the Old Norse and Friesian ‘kunta’ (also ‘kunte’), ‘kunton’, the Middle Lower German ‘kutte’, the Middle Higher German ‘kotze’ (‘prostitute’), the Hittite ‘kun’, the Egyptian ‘qefen-t’ (‘vagina’), and the Saharan Kuntah tribe. In “The Woman’s Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets” Barbara Walker cites the Indian ‘kundas’, "[descendants] of the Goddess Kunda [or ‘Cunti’]", and Terence Meaden suggests that legal suppression of ‘cunt’ is related to a desire to suppress the worship of such pagan idols, and represents "a series of vicious witch hunts encouraged by an evil establishment wishing to suppress what amounted to apparent signs of Goddess beliefs". (His book The Stonehenge Solution was not stocked by W.H. Smith’s due to its inclusion of a single paragraph discussing the word ‘cunt’.
The earliest citation of ‘cunt’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) dates from c. 1230. At this time in the Stews area of Southwark there was a street called Gropecuntelane. Similarly, there was a Cunte Street in Bristol too" which was renamed Host Street and, in London, "Pissing Alley and Shitteborwelane". Gropecuntelane may have been later shortened to Grope Lane, and a similar example can be found in York, where a Grope Lane was "renamed [to Grape Lane] by staid Victorians who found the original Grope - historically related to prostitution - too blatant". Graeme Donald’s “Dictionary Of Modern Phrase” cites the use of ‘cunt’ in medieval surnames, two of which predate the OED’s earliest ‘cunt’ citation: "those surnames not built on the person’s trade reflected personal traits or peculiarities. Early records mention such female names as Gunoka Cuntles (1219), Bele Wydecunthe (1328) and presumably promiscuous male sporting names such as Godwin Clawecunte (1066), John Fillecunt (1246) and Robert Clevecunt (1302)".
In backslang, ‘cunt’ is ‘teenuc’. In Cockney rhyming slang, it’s variously known as
· ‘Charlie Hunt’ (abbreviated to ‘Charlie’)
· ‘eyes front’
· ‘Grannie Grunt’
· ‘groan and grunt’
· ‘gasp and grunt’
· ‘growl and grunt’
· ‘grumble and grunt’ (abbreviated to ‘grumble’)
· ‘Joe Hunt’ (abbreviated to ‘Joey’)
· ‘National Front’
· ‘sharp and blunt’
· and ‘Sir Anthony Blunt’
In 1998, the Radio Four quiz I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue was introduced as, "the show that is to panel games what James Hunt is to rhyming slang!". In Head On Comedy a joke was made about the name "William Hunt". Other famously connected joking names are Mike Hunt, as used in the 1981 film Porky’s when a female character asks, "Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?!". Indeed, in Australian slang, ‘Michael’ (from ‘Michael Hunt’) is a euphemism for ‘cunt’. The most common rhyming slang usage of ‘cunt’ is the mildly derogatory ‘berk’, which derives from ‘Berkshire Hunt’ or ‘Berkeley Hunt’ (also known as ‘Burlington Hunt’ or ‘Birchington Hunt’) and has been widely used ever since its presence in the situation comedy Steptoe And Son in 1980. ‘Berkeley Hunt’ also gave rise to the terms ‘Sir Berkeley’ and ‘Lady Berkeley’, which are also ‘cunt’ euphemisms.
‘Cunt’ is present in the name Scunthorpe, which poses problems when the name is blocked by internet filtering software. Phonetically, it’s found in
· ‘country’
· ‘lubricant’
· ‘replicant’
· ‘applicant’
· and ‘significant’.
‘Thingstable’ is a recognised euphemism for ‘constable’, employed because of the similarity between ‘const-’ and ‘cunt’. Viz Comic’s Roger’s Profanisaurus cites ‘Constable’ itself as a euphemism, in this case for ‘cunt stubble’.
The word ‘Cunt’ is known euphemistically as ‘the monosyllable’, and according to “Expletives Deleted” from the late 1890s onwards as ‘the divine monosyllable’, though, interestingly, the term’s earliest forms are all disyllabic (‘cunte’, ‘cunnus’, ‘kunta’, etc.)
‘Cunny’ is an affectionate synonym for ‘cunt’, and appears in eighteenth and nineteenth century terms such as:
· ‘cunny-thumbed’ (groped)
· ‘cunny-burrow’ (vagina)
· ‘cunny-burrow ferret’
· ‘cunny- burrow mouse’
· ‘cunny-catching’
· ‘cunny-hunter’
· ‘cunny-catcher’ (penis)
· ‘cunny-thumper’
· ‘cunny-thumbed’
· ‘cunny-fingered’
· ‘cunny-warren’ (vagina or brothel)
· ‘cunnikin’
· ‘cundy’ (charmingly defined as a ‘post-coital vaginal secretion’)
· ‘cunnyskin’ (‘pubic hair’)
· and ‘cunny-haunted’ (‘sexually excited’).
The affectionate ‘cunny’ (C-U-N-N-Y) sounds the same as an old word for rabbit, ‘coney’ or (C-O-N-E-Y or C-O-N-Y), and because of this they became synonyms, hence the double-entendres ‘-burrow’, ‘-catching’, ‘-hunter’, ‘-catcher’, ‘- warren’, and ‘-skin’, and also the terms ‘cunicle’ and ‘cuniculate’. ‘Con(e)y’ was later marginalised, replaced by ‘rabbit’, which just used to mean a young coney. To retain the influence of ‘cunny’, ‘bunny’ was surreptitiously devised as a substitute.
A literature search reveals a host of related words and phrases, such as:
· ‘cunted’ or ‘cunt-faced’ (‘drunk’, c.f. ‘shit-faced’)
· ‘cunt-line’ (‘aperture between stacked beer barrels’, replaced by ‘cont-line’)
· ‘cunt-splicing’ (‘tying a nautical knot’, replaced by ‘cut-splicing’)
· ‘Cunt Pump’ (a cocktail served with an unused tampon)
· ‘cunting’ (an intensifier, c.f. ‘fucking’, used by Philip Larkin and William Peter Blatty)
· ‘cunt bubble’ (Roger’s Profanisaurus)
· ‘cunt-struck’ (‘sexually excited’, c.f. ‘love-struck’)
· ‘cunt-curtain’ (‘pubic hair’)
· ‘cunt-shop’ (‘brothel’)
· ‘cunt-pensioner’ (‘pimp’)
· ‘cunt-hat’ (‘felt hat’, referring to cunts being ‘felt’, i.e. ‘groped’)
· ‘cunt-teaser’ (‘male flirt’, c.f. ‘prick-teaser’)
· ‘cunt-hooks’ (‘fingers’)
· ‘cunt-itch’
· ‘cunt-stand’
· ‘cunt-screen’
· ‘doss cunt’
· ‘cunt-cap’
· ‘cunthead’
· ‘cunt-collar’
· ‘cunt-eyed’ (‘narrow-eyed’)
· ‘cunt-hair’
· ‘cunt-tickler’
· ‘cunt-wagon’
· ‘Cunty McCuntlips’
· ‘cunt-starver’
· ‘cunt- hound’
· ‘cuntish’ (‘effeminate’)
· ‘cunt-laird’
· ‘mouth like a cow’s cunt’
· ‘cunt-licker’
· ‘cunt-sucker’
· ‘cunt-lapper’
· ‘cuntface’
· ‘cunt away!’ (expression of surprise, c.f. ‘get away!’, used by Patrick Marber)
· ‘red c’ (‘red cunt’, i.e. ginger pubic hair)
· ‘he’s a cunt and a half’, and ‘Cunts In Velvet’ (‘City Imperial Volunteers’ and ‘Criminal Investigation Department’)
‘Cunt’ acronyms include
· "Carlton United Network Television" (Jonathon Ross at the 1999 British Comedy Awards)
· "Concentration, Understanding, Nouce, and Tenacity" (The Fast Show, 1997)
· "Charlie Uncle Norfolk Tango"
· "Completely Unbearable Neo-Trash Shoreditchians" (Sharon O’Connell in Time Out, reviewing Madonna
· and [unintentionally!] ‘Coventry University Netball Team’.
So when – and why - did “cunt” become obscene?
The word has been taboo for over five hundred years, though there’s also evidence that it once suffered no social prohibitions or negative connotations. Although once used in the names of people and places, by Chaucer’s time he disguised it as ‘queynte’.
The earliest known English swearwords are of Christian origin – even the terms ‘swear’, ‘profanity’, and ‘cursing’ have religious derivations. In Expletives Deleted, Jonathon Green cites ‘gog’ and ‘cokk’ as the earliest known expletives, both of which mean ‘God’. Similar are terms such as ‘’snails’ (‘God’s nails’), ‘’slids’ (‘God’s eyelids’), ‘’sblood’ (‘God’s blood’), ‘’sbody’ (‘God’s body’), ‘’sfoot’ (‘God’s foot’), and ‘zounds’ (‘God’s wounds’).
This reflects the power exercised by the church in Mediaeval times. As Geoffrey Hughes notes in Swearing, since the Reformation and the decline in the power of the Catholic church, “genital, copulatory, excretory and incestuous swearing has largely replaced religious oaths… the grisly invocation of Christ’s body, blood and nails in the agony of the Crucifixion seems as grotesque and bizarre to us now as modern... swearing would have seemed to medievals".
Still, you had to be cautious: the Privy Council and the Master of the King’s Revels were watching. Thus, Shakespeare’s references to ‘cunt’ are all disguised: in Henry V, Katherine confuses the English terms ‘foot’ and ‘coun’ (‘gown’) with the phonetically similar French ‘foutre’ (‘fuck’) and ‘con’ (‘cunt’), calling them "mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique". In Twelfth Night, Malvolio virtually spells out the word:
"These be her very C’s, her U’s, ’n’ her T’s and
Thus makes she her great P’s".
The ‘N’ is formed from the first "and", and "P’s" is a pun on ‘pees’ (‘urinates’). It’s convoluted, but similar euphemisms are still used today. One is ‘see you next tuesday’, the ‘n’ and ‘t’ of ‘cunt’ being the initials of the final two words. Shakespeare’s most famous ‘cunt’ pun is from Hamlet: the Prince’s reference to "country matters", with its phonetical allusion to ‘cunt’, is qualified by "lie in your lap... my head upon your lap... lie between maid’s legs" in the same scene.
It isn’t the word which is offensive, of course, but what it represents: sex, which is tainted by association with original sin. This is quite irrational, it has no actual Biblical provenance - as Obeler points out, "Jesus said absolutely nothing about either original sin or the Fall; not one of the four Gospels quotes any statement by Jesus Christ on these topics. Nowhere in the words of Jesus can there be found any statement that the physical side of sexual life is evil."
Nonetheless, first ecclesiatical and later secular authorities prohibited “obscenity” as they believed it caused moral corruption. Sex is dirty, therefore so are sex organs, so they musn’t be discussed – not that this stopped art, such as the Restoration poetry of John Wilmot, the Earl Of Rochester, which Hughes describes as "a world seen from crotch level" writing of "the best cunts in Christendome" and "The savory scent of salt swoln Cunt".
The Catholics and Puritans banned ‘cunt’ - and ‘fuck’, ‘cock’, and ‘shit’; later, the Victorians – so conservative and repressive in public, yet the most prolific producers and consumers of pornography in history - edited even milder terms such as ‘piss’, ‘arse’, and ‘bugger’ out of daily language. As Jonathon Green notes, "there is no doubt that the language-police come down and a lot of words which really didn’t cause too much trouble... words that really no-one really worried about very much in the eighteenth century... became taboo". Meaden concurs: "[‘cunt’ was] a perfectly normal, useful word... until a puritanical government legislated against it".
The only place where discussion of sexual matters was permissible was in a scientific context, for which new words were coined – for instance, the term ‘homosexuality’ in 1869. It is no surprise, then, that My Secret Life, the diaries of sexual conquests written by ‘Walter’ ("After the blessed sun, sure the cunt ought to be worshipped as the source of all human happiness... God bless cunt", c. 1880) were published only surreptitiously.
It is in Establishment attitudes to such ‘obscene’ literature that the hypocrisy of censorship is revealed. Some of the most acclaimed works of twentieth century literature have been tried for obscenity simply because they were considered incoherent: Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer ("I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt", 1934); Allen Ginsberg’s Howl ("fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt", 1956); and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch ("They could have heard you squealing over in Cunt Lick County", 1959).
The archetypal demonstration of the flaws in this ideology, however, was the trial of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The novel (Lawrence, 1928) was found not to be obscene, despite its graphic language: "‘Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth![’]... ‘What is cunt?’ she said. ‘An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer... Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!’". It escaped prosecution largely due to a revision of the Obscene Publications Act in 1959 which required a defence of artistic merit to be considered.
Today, feminists seek to return to the pride of the Wyf of Bathe in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tales Of Caunterbury: "she is certainly remarkably free in thought and speech, given the general constraints on women of her status in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the broadness of her language makes her virtually unique as a literary figure in her times", as Hughes. In her Prologe (Chaucer, c. 1400:331-332) she assures her betrothed:
"For, certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve,
Ye shul have queynte right ynogh at eve".
The Millere is equally graphic in his Prologe (ibid.:90): "And pryuely he caughte hire by the queynte". Middle English spelling was not standardised, though ‘queynte’ does seem more arcanely spelt than other Chaucerian terms, especially considering that its 1066 appearance as ‘cunte’ in the name Clawcunte (Donald, 1994:84) is almost identical to the modern spelling. It may be, then, that ‘cunt’ first became taboo between 1066 and 1400, and was thus disguised by Chaucer. This literary camouflage was also used by Andrew Marvell in To His Coy Mistress (1653), with a reference to "quaint honour". Related euphemistic mispronounciations of ‘cunt’ include ‘coynte’, ‘quiff’, and ‘quoniam’.
During the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial, the word ‘cunt’ became part of the national news agenda, but it remained largely an underground manifestation. The next filtration of ‘cunt’ into the mainstream media came some ten years after the Chatterley trial, in 1970, when it was uttered on live television.
David Frost was interviewing a counter-culture group of young anti-war activists when he referred to one, Jerry Rubin, as "a reasonable man", and group-member Stew Albert shouts back, "He’s not a reasonable man, he’s the most unreasonable cunt I’ve ever known in my life!" (ibid.). There was an atmosphere of general pandemonium. Albert (1999) later boasted of having "started a riot" in the studio.
The first use of ‘cunt’ in the cinema came the following year, 1971, in Carnal Knowledge, when Jack Nicholson called Ann-Margret a "ball-bustin’ son-of-a-cunt bitch". The next year, Pink Flamingos included the line "You’re a real cunt, you know that?! A real fucking cunt!", though a scene in which a character says "A lot of people like cunt... but your eyes are like a cunt to me... Them cunt-eyes" was cut before the film’s release.
By the late 90s, it’s used extensively in Nil By Mouth in which Ray Winstone brutally assaults Kathy Burke while shouting "You cunt! You cunt! You fuckin’ cunt!". Winstone also similarly assaulted Crissy Rock Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird by calling her "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!..."
More recently, Liam Gallagher of Oasis, during a live interview on Steve Lamacq’s Evening Session on Radio One, threatened to "beat the fucking living daylight shit out of... any other cunts that give me shit". He was previously somewhat renowned for his coinage of the insult "cuntybollocks". The Radio One Breakfast Show has also managed it by mispronouncing The Cult Of Ant And Dec as "The Cunt Of Ant And Dec". The DJ laughed and commented on his Freudian slip, though no serious apology was made. According to Lamacq, Radio One has a swear word hierarchy, in which "one c[unt is] as bad as five f[uck]s".
The first scripted use of ‘cunt’ on television was in the Thames drama No Mama No (1979):
"What did he say?"
"He said your Dr. Cawston is a cunt".
Producer Verity Lambert says: "I had a lot of correspondence with the IBA about that word. I think it was a real insult, and she needed to say that particular word. And, in the end, to be fair to them, they accepted that as an explanation".
While ITV had the earliest both live and scripted uses of ‘cunt’ on television, it’s Channel Four which has subsequently almost monopolised the broadcasting of ‘cunt’. It has a deserved reputation as a broadcaster that pushes further than others do at the boundaries of acceptability. While BBC Two, and sometimes ITV and Channel Five, will occasionally tolerate ‘cunt’ in the films they broadcast, the notion of ‘cunt’ appearing in programmes made specifically for television is - with very few exceptions - anathema to all but Channel Four.
In 1987, the channel broadcast a recital by Tony Harrison of his poem V (1984), in which he attacks the "cunts" who desecrated his parents’ graves. This prompted the front-page banner headline in The Daily Mail: "FOUR-LETTER TV POEM FURY". When a prison guard shouts "You cunt!" in the drama series Mosley, The Mail On Sunday reported: "[Channel Four] will break the last taboo over bad language on television... with the deliberate use of the only word in the English language considered more offensive than the F-word". Co-writer of Mosley, Laurence Marks, explained that the decision to include ‘cunt’ was not an easy one because "it is intensely powerful... we debated long and hard about using the word. There were many on the production team who thought we should not" (ibid.).
Another Channel Four drama - The Granton Star Cause - is distinguished as the most linguistically obscene programme ever screened. The Granton Star Cause contains thirty-seven uses of ‘cunt’, most of which are spoken by a character identified as God. God, played as a man with supernatural powers drinking in a pub, describes himself as "a lazy, apathetic, slovenly cunt". These character traits are his explanation for the continued existence of greed, famine, and war in the world he created. This juxtaposing of the sacred and the profane - God saying "cunt" - is similar to the "JESUS IS A CUNT" Cradle Of Filth t-shirt slogan (19--), inspired by the Happy Mondays lyric "You see that Jesus is a cunt" (1987). Cradle Of Filth's aim was to construct a sentence which was as offensive as possible and also as short as possible. By appropriating our culture’s most revered icon (Jesus) and equating it with our greatest taboo (‘cunt’), they achieved their goal. Similar, though in no way sensationalistic, are these lines from Exorcising His Life, John Meer’s poem about his reaction to his father’s death (1997):
"Fucking bastards! Fucking bastards!
IF THERE IS A GOD HE’S A CUNT".
It’s also used three times each in Queer As Folk - and Sex And The City, an unprecedented event in American television history. The American media simply do not use ‘cunt’ at all: their newspapers do not print it (unlike British broadsheets The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, and The Independent On Sunday) and their television and radio stations do not broadcast it. Possibly, they got away with it because it was used in a strictly anatomical sense rather than as an insult. In 1994, chat show host Phil Donahue used the word "in relating and condemning an employer’s insult to a female employee", though this instance is the exception which proves the rule.
Channel Four has devoted three documentaries to the subject of swearing, although sometimes “cunt” is bleeped out; however, BBC2’s Arena broadcast unbleeped extracts from the ‘Derek’ and ‘Clive’ sketch This Bloke Came Up To Me:
"some bloke came up to me... and he said, ‘You cunt!’"...
"And you replied, ‘You fucking cunt!’"...
"I said, ‘Who are you fucking calling ‘cunt’, cunt?!’"
One indication of the increasing mainstream acceptance of ‘cunt’ is the euphemistic references to it in recent comedy. The Monty Python sketch Crunchy Frog includes a character called Constable Kuntt ("Constable Kuntt and myself are from the hygiene squad"), and their Travel Agent sketch features a character who calls himself "a silly bunt" after establishing that he always replaces the letter ‘c’ with ‘b’ (as ‘bunt’ with a ‘c’ is ‘cunt’). Twenty years after ‘bunt’ came ‘Lunt’: Jack Dee (in Live At The Duke Of York’s Theatre, 1992) joked about a schoolteacher of his who was teased because his sirname was ‘Lunt’.
"SEE YOU EN TEE" (‘C U N T’, from the euphemistic phrase ‘c u next tuesday’) was written on the sleeve of the ‘Derek’ and ‘Clive’ Come Again album (Cook & Moore, 1977). In It’s Only T.V. But I Like It, this was repeated virtually identically by Jonathon Ross and Julian Clary:
"See you-"
"N T".
In The League Of Gentlemen, the line "Sit up straight, you bone-idle, lazy cun[t]" is cut off before the word ‘cunt’ is uttered in its entirety. Ricky Gervais, on The Eleven O’Clock Show, has turned "you stupid c-" into a long-running catchphrase. In Let Them Eat Cake, by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, there are several references to "the old Comte". (Saunders has said of ‘cunt’, "because it’s still the only taboo word, it’s the funniest word") One episode of the situation comedy Hippies was a parody of the Oz obscenity trial, with an image of an "I AM A CUN[T]" speech-bubble on the front-cover of the fictional Mouth magazine (the ‘T’ being obscured by someone’s finger). In Goodness Gracious Me, "FUKCNT" is shown on a series of Scrabble tiles. Jonathon Ross has obliquely described ‘cunt’ as "consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant" at the 1998 British Comedy Awards.
One of Kenny Everett’s characters was called ‘Cupid Stunt’, a Spoonerism of ‘Stupid Cunt’, as is ‘Cunning Stunts’ - ‘Stunning Cunts’ - a female theatre group. Kenneth Williams and Bob Monkhouse have both joked about ‘cult’ being suggestive, and Johnny Vaughn (on The Big Breakfast, 1999) has joked about ‘Kent’ sounding obscene. On the Radio One Breakfast Show in 1999 Zoë Ball read out an alternative version of Mary Had A Little Lamb that ends with a conspicuous silence as it requires a rhyme for ‘front’. Ball was singled out by the Radio Authority's Listening 2000 annual report, which criticised morning radio programmes in general - and Ball's in particular - for their offensive content (Morrison, 2000).
There was even a reference to ‘cunt’ in the children’s cartoon Willo The Wisp (Spargo, 1981). In the Food For Thought episode a bookworm says, "You are an ignoramus. I say, why not join me for breakfast?". This [may!] be a disguised reference to the famous comment by Noel Coward: "you are a cunt. Come and have dinner with me" (and, of course, Coward was something of a bookworm himself).
The various ‘cunt’ euphemisms in modern British comedy demonstrate an increasing willingness to acknowledge the word’s existence and an attempt to belittle the taboo against it. By laughing at our inability to utter a forbidden word (i.e. by referring to ‘cunt’ euphemistically) we recognise the arcane nature of the taboo and begin to challenge it. Satirist Ian Hislop (2000), in a speech at Coventry Cathedral, joked about "a four-letter word beginning with ‘cu’[. That isn’t] ‘cute’". This example is especially interesting, due to the context in which it was spoken. Hislop’s speech was made to a primarily middle-aged audience at Coventry Cathedral, a religious building, and he was introduced by the Bishop of Coventry. It is a clear indication of the increasing public tolerance of ‘cunt’ that it can be joked about even in such a revered institution.
[end here?]
Repetition And Over-Use.
In tandem with these frequent euphemistic references is a trend towards over-use and exaggerated emphasis. Over-use of ‘cunt’ can be traced back to a series of drunken improvisations by comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the ‘Derek’ and ‘Clive’ recordings. Their You Stupid Cunt sketch begins with the words "Hello, cunt! You stupid cunt!" (Cook & Moore, 1977), and what is remarkable about these recordings is that they are completely unrestrained and yet have been censored neither by the record company nor the artists themselves. For example, ‘Clive’ jokes about rape and domestic violence: "I’ve never raped anybody for fun. When I’ve raped somebody it’s because, y’know, I felt my knob throbbing and it was necessary to poke it into something... I kicked her and I kicked her in the cunt for half a fucking hour ’til I was exhausted" (Cook & Moore, 1978a & 1978b). One of Alexie Sayle’s stage characters was called ‘Mr. Sweary’, and his routine consisted of the words "Fucking cunt, you wanker. Fucking cunt, you wanker. Fucking cunt, you wanker..." (in Higgins, 1999). Sayle was heckled during his ‘What’s On In Stoke Newington’ routine (1979), and he replied, "fuck off, you cunt!". This moment was later removed from commercially available recordings of the routine.
Two comedians - Jerry Sadowitz and Matt Lucas - have become indelibly associated with ‘cunt’ on the comedy circuit, due to their frequent usage of the word. Sadowitz is "famous for being the bloke who said "c***" [sic] on stage" (Marshall, 1998:13), and Lucas is known as "the c*** [sic] comedian" (Lucas, 2000). Similarly, one of the people who has corresponded with me about ‘cunt’ uses it as ubiquitously as possible: "Oh cunting hell, I’ve cunting well forgotten to pay my cunting telephone bill and now those mothercunters British cunting Telecom are going to cunting cut me off" [email from Gav, 10/2/2000].
Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1998) "regularly got theatres full of women, and celebrities like Melanie Griffith and Gillian Anderson, to chant "C***!" [sic] over and over again, as a way to exorcise the venom from the word" (Goldman, 1999). With less noble intentions, "a woman [spent] an hour shouting the word "cunt" at the top of her voice" (Wilde, 1997:73) as part of a performance art event called Art Shock Blowup! in the 1980s. Irvine Welsh has also chanted "cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt...", on the Primal Scream single The Big Man And The Scream Team Meet The Barmy Army Uptown (1996). In fact, Irvine Welsh has been one of the most prominent over-exposers of ‘cunt’ (which he describes as "the all-purpose term for someone else, either friendly or unfriendly" in Vulliamy, 1999), notably in his novel Trainspotting ("That cunt, that cunt ’n’ his fuckin’ mates back thair, that’s the cunts thit fuckin’ stabbed ma brar!", 1993:82) and the film of the book ("That lassie got glassed and nae cunt leaves here ’til we find oot what cunt did it!", Boyle, 1996). Publisher Maya Baran describes Welsh’s extensive usage: "For Irvine, saying c*** [sic] was like Americans saying the word ‘like’... We would have to send him to a speech therapist and a hypnotist to make him stop" (in Goldman, 1999).
The title of Stewart Home’s novel - Cunt ("it will take forever to get the bastard stiff enough to ram him up my cunt", 1999a:58) - made it "difficult finding a publisher" [letter from Stewart Home, 1/12/1999], because "the word ‘cunt’ is very problematic" (Home, 1998). Forty-three printers rejected it, until it was finally decided not to print the title on the spine but instead to print "CUNT" stickers that could be stuck onto the book after purchase. Thirty-four companies then refused to print the stickers. The names of the two companies which did finally agree to print the novel and stickers have not been made public, at their request. The novel’s publishers, Do Not Press, were raided by the Obscene Publications Squad (Morris, 1999). The delays in publication afforded Time Out and Die Wochenzeitung the opportunity to pun on the ‘countdown’ to Cunt’s release, with the respective headlines The Final ‘Cunt’down and Final Cuntdown (both 1999).
Cunt’s title is applicable in both the literal and abusive senses of the word, as the novel describes "a cunt in search of cunt" (Stewart Home in Morris, 1999). The pressure group Women Against Violent Language protested against the novel’s publication: "We believe the title... reduces this very personal and private aspect of women’s bodies to an obscene insult" (Fowley & Wiggins, 1999), though Home’s reply was, "Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!" (1999b), with support from the Feminists Against Censorship group (ibid.). Other ‘cunt’ book titles include A Good Cunt Boy Is Hard To Find by Doug Rice et al. (1998), Cunt Of Hope by Ben Prosser (2000), and two books by Gary G. Graham: Cannabis: Glasgow Cunt Sez Shite U No Like and Cannabis: More News From The Home Cunt? (both 1999).
A birthday card on sale in Brighton reads "happy birthday cunt" (1999). Bizarre magazine sold wrapping paper adorned with the words "You Cunt You Cunt" and "CUNT Cuntface CUNTING MOTHERFUCKER" (1999). Almighty Marketing sells "CUNT" t-shirts and badges ("Grrls - Wear your CUNT with pride!", 2000). These are evidence of the colonisation of cultural space by ‘cunt’, and thus of its colonisation of our collective consciousness. Viz magazine’s twentieth anniversary issue (2000) featured "[THE] SWEARIEST COVER EVER!", and marks the first appearance of ‘cunt’ on a mainstream magazine cover. (‘Cunt’ had previously been used in the titles of Cunts And Grunts and Sewer Cunt, though these were underground hard-core pornography magazines rather than mainstream publications.) On the internet, a search for ‘cunt’ as a keyword results in a long list of websites with hard-core sexual content, with names such as cuntpics.com, shitpisscuntfuck.com, thecunt.com, and cuntcollection.com.
The Cradle Of Filth t-shirt slogan ("JESUS IS A CUNT", 199-) is perhaps the most famous use of ‘cunt’ in the music industry. The most famous almost-use is surely that of The Sex Pistols, whose song Pretty Vacant is pronounced "pretty vay-cunt" (1977), with the final syllable being emphasised by the band. There have been occasional references in lyrics by Happy Mondays, Eminem, Frank Zappa, and others, though mainstream musicians very rarely use the word. Indeed, even The 2 Live Crew’s album As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989) - regarded as the epitome of rap’s violent, obscene, and misogynistic lyrical content - uses ‘cunt’ only once. ‘Cunt’ is primarily reserved for use by underground punk and metal bands such as Anal Cunt, Cunt Like A Bear-Trap, Sawthoothedcunt, and Unholified Through Cunt. It is traditional that, whenever disc-jockey John Peel appears at the Reading Festival, the crowd shouts "John Peel is a cunt!" (in Robinson, 2000:32), and music magazine Uncut is known amongst rivals as ‘ucunt’ (an anagram of the title, meaning ‘you cunt’).
A representative selection of ‘cunt’ song titles: Entrails Ripped From A Virgin’s Cunt by Cannibal Corpse (1992), Lady Love Your Cunt by S*M*A*S*H (1994), Anal Cunt by G.G. Allin (1994), Cunt-Suckin’ Canibal by G.G. Allin (1994), Bloody Mary’s Bloody Cunt by G.G. Allin (1995), Just Like A Cunt by Whitehouse (1995), Cunt by Diamanda Galßs (1996), I Want Cunt by The Queers (1996), Berkshire Cunt by Conflict (1996), Cunt Face by Bloody Fist (1996), Nazi Cunts by UK Subs (1997), Cunty The Feeling by Rageous Projectin (1997), Stick A Cross Up A Nun’s Cunt by G.G. Allin (1998), Jesus And Mother’s Cunt by G.G. Allin (1998), Conformist Cunt by Snap-Her (1998), Teenage Cunt by Rocking Dildos (1998), Trans Cunt Whip by Tsatthoggua (1998), A Cunt Like You by Whitehouse (1998), Drink The Cuntshake by Trash (1998), Just Another Cunt by Nobodys (1999), Stupid Drunkin Fuckin’ Cunt by Dayglo Abortions (1999), Fuck Off You Cunt What A... by Chaotic Dischord (1999), Cuntrie Girl by Da Shortiez (1999), Cunty by Kevin Aviance (1999), Cuntgirl by Spoonfed (2000), Cunt Face by Nasenbluten (2000), Cunt Maniac by Green Machine, Hard Nuts And Hard Cunts by Hard Skin, Bunch Of Pissed Cunts by Hard Skin, Ispellgodcunt by Cumchrist, Cunt Renaissance by Big, You’re A Fucking Cunt by Anal Cunt, Throws Cunt A Tear by To Live And Die in LA, Razor Cunt by Grotesque Blessings, Cunt Tease by Pussy Galore, Cunt Hunt by Rock, Cunt by ‘Caustic Window’ (Aphex Twin), and Cunt by Robbie Tronco.
‘Cunt’ As The New ‘Fuck’.
As the word ‘fuck’ becomes increasingly acceptable in mainstream popular culture, ‘cunt’ is left as the last swear word with any true power to shock: "Swear words are no longer truly obscene... Only the c-word has any real shock value" (Will Self in Tom Shone’s article Expletives Deleted?, 1994). Andrew Goldman notes, "It’s no secret that the F-word... has lost all footing as a truly offensive word" (1999). A Brief History Of The F-Word (Jeffcock, 2000) discusses the ubiquity of ‘fuck’: "So confident is the f-word today of its place in the nation’s affections that French Connection was able to use it to sell us clothes. The f-word is now glamorous".
The French Connection ‘fuck’ campaign centred around the acronym "fcuk" (‘French Connection United Kingdom’), and it bears a striking similarity to ‘Cnut’, an arcane spelling of the name of Viking invader King Canute. ‘Fcuk’ and ‘Cnut’ are both taboo words with their respective middle letters reversed, the difference being that ‘fcuk’ was a deliberate reference to ‘fuck’ whereas ‘Cnut’ was an accidental reference to ‘cunt’. This accidental reference may, however, explain why ‘Canute’ has replaced ‘Cnut’. Similarly, "It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title Count was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic Earl... precisely because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt" (Hughes, 1991:20), and ‘cuntur’ is now spelt ‘condor’ to avoid contention.
(The similarity of ‘cunt’ and ‘count’ was also highlighted by Billy Connolly (who, in 1979, called himself "the man who put the ‘count’ [i.e. ‘cunt’] in ‘country music’!"), Terry Wogan (who joked about ‘country and western’ sounding obscene on the Radio Two Breakfast Show in 1998), Lily Savage (who - in Kinane, 2000 - jokingly announced that she would release a ‘country and western’ album called "Total Country"), the rock band Nu Cuntry, and by a sign advertising a Millenium party in Singapore in 1999. The sign was intended to read ‘Countdown ’99’, with the ‘o’ of ‘Count’ represented not by a letter but by a circular light. Unfortunately, the light did not shine as brightly as had been thought, thus rendering the sign as "C untdown ’99", as Private Eye reported in 1999. Empire magazine (Marquee Meltdown!, 1998) predated this sign with one of their own: "THE C UNT OF MONTE CRISTO" (‘THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO’ with the ‘U’ omitted). Similarly, Angus Deayton once ended the comedy quiz Have I Got News For You (Wheeler, 1997) with the words, "So, for our winners: the chance to go to Michael Portillo's constituency and see the count. For our losers: the chance to retype that sentence without the spelling mistake!".)
Just as ‘fuck’ is used only once in films with ‘12’/‘PG-13’ classifications - such as Ghost (1990) - so ‘cunt’ is gaining mainstream acceptance through its single appearances in L’Ultimo Tango À Parigi (1972), Withnail And I (1987), Natural Born Killers (1994), American Beauty (1999), and others. Several of Martin Scorsese’s films - Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Casino (1995) - also contain one ‘cunt’ each.
Several comedians are also testing the water with single usages of ‘cunt’. Hence, Rob Newman's reference to compassion fatigue and the Ethiopian famine: "Wipe those flies off your face, you lazy cunt!" (in Bendelack, 1992). Jack Dee, in a reference to the difficulties of hanging wallpaper (in Live At The London Palladium, 1994), once shouted "Hang, you cunt!". Howard Stern has recorded a spoof of Candle In The Wind called Candle In My Cunt (199-). Elisabeth Belile has recorded a monologue called My Country My Cunt (1994). Chris Morris, in Brass Eye, flashed a subliminal message which read "[MICHAEL] GRADE IS A CUNT" and appeared on screen for only one fiftieth of a second (1997), and his later series Jam featured a t-shirt with the slogan "LITTLE CUNT" (2000). In the Innit video (1999), ‘Ali G.’ discusses the tape’s classification: "to get it an ‘18’ I is gonna ’ave to use a word which I ’as never used before... ‘cunt’". The irony of this is that the video was classified ‘15’. Several films which each include a handful of uses of ‘cunt’ - including Beautiful Thing (1996) and My Name Is Joe (1998) - have also been classified ‘15’, indicating that ‘cunt’ is becoming more acceptable to the censors.
As ‘fuck’ has, over time, become increasingly acceptable, so the acceptability of ‘cunt’ is also likely to increase: "‘fuck’ has become fairly acceptable in a relatively short space of time. Not long ago if ‘fuck’ was said on a live T.V programme a big deal would have been made. Now... all that is needed is a quick apology and it’s all forgotten about... within 20 years ‘cunt’ will hold the same place as ‘fuck’ does [sic] today... if you hear something often enough it loses its impact" [email from Emma Desborough, 19/2/2000]. ‘Cunt’ is currently undergoing a period of transition. As I have shown, feminist efforts to reappropriate it have achieved only limited success, and attempts to ingratiate it into popular culture have not yet seen it accorded the same ubiquity as ‘fuck’.
However, standards of acceptability are in constant flux. In the 1930s, the Motion Picture Production Code forbade the uses of even the most mild swear words. Then, in 1939, Gone With The Wind included the word ‘damn’. In 1967, I’ll Never Forget What’s ’is Name included the word ‘fuck’. In 1971, Carnal Knowledge included the word ‘cunt’. Today ‘fuck’ is used hundreds of times in Casino (1995) and ‘cunt’ is used repeatedly in Nil By Mouth (1997). Thus what is unacceptable to one generation becomes acceptable to the next, and there is no reason to suppose that this will not also apply to ‘cunt’ in due course. Gilbert Adair accepts this notion, though he is perturbed by it: "Nowadays, with fewer and fewer exceptions, print journalists are free, should the context require it, to bandy about... all four-letter words, not excluding the last to resist common usage, "cunt"... Thus individuals who would never dream of using the word "cunt" in their private verbal exchanges now risk finding themselves confronted with it on the printed newspaper page" (1999:1). Neil Lyndon also problematises the increasing popularity of ‘cunt’: "Today there is just one word - describing female genitalia - which is still considered taboo and is as impermissable on television as the word f*** [sic] was 20 years ago. F*** [sic] [is now] constantly in use... so you can see what will happen next" (2000:51).
Rather than condemning this as a coarsening of the language, however, we should celebrate it as a symbol of our collective liberation from cultural repression. If ‘cunt’ is used openly and freely its power as a misogynistic insult will be diluted, our language will become more accessible, and outdated notions of sin and obscenity will be discarded. In the words of comedian and writer Stephen Fry (The Roots Of English, 2000): "there won't be any swearing [in the future], because... almost every swear-word now is more-or-less acceptable in broadcasting and every other form [therefore] it is impossible to imagine that there will be any taboo words which are unsayable, unless you invent new disgusting parts of the body that we haven't thought of yet!".
sheepthief following his poll on the most offensive swearword.This is a talk I gave at Damn Fine Convention in Shepperton a couple of years back.
It is NOT worksafe, for reasons of vocabulary, although there are no illustrations.
It's also totally plagiarised from an academic paper I found.
reverendjim did point out some errata and omissions.Enjoy.
Comments very welcome.
CUNT
The word “cunt”, which according to the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary simply means "the female genitals", is arguably the single most offensive word in the English language. In the article “A C-Change For N.Y.” in The New York Observer, Andrew Goldman (1999) calls it "the mother of all nasty words" and Ted Duckworth’s “Dictionary Of Slang” sees it as "Undoubtedly the most offensive and taboo of all vulgarisms".
Where did “cunt” come from?
The origin of the word ‘cunt’ is uncertain. Freund’s Latin Dictionary suggests that its earliest origin is the Latin term ‘cuneus’, meaning ‘wedge’. ‘Wedge’ and ‘cunt’ seem, initially, to be unlikely associates - as Jane Mills put it in the Without Walls documentary “Expletives Deleted”, "I know what a cunt looks like, and the word ‘wedge’ doesn’t sort of spring to mind!", though the connection may be the triangular (V-shaped) formation which wedges and cunts both share. The Latin ‘cunnus’ (‘vagina’), adapted from ‘cuneus’, is seen as the source of the Middle English ‘cunte’, ‘count’, and ‘counte’ (Stratman, 1891), and thus of the modern ‘cunt’.
It’s also the source of ‘coin’, suggesting that ‘cunt’ may be an ancient pun on ‘treasure’: the French ‘bijou’ (‘jewel’) is also slang for ‘vagina’, and ‘cunt’ may once have had a similar double-meaning. Also of Latin origin are ‘cunnilingus’ (from ‘cunnus’ and ‘lingere’, ‘to lick’) and ‘cunnus diaboli’ (medieval pagan shrines, ‘devilish cunts’).
‘Cunabula’ (‘earliest abode’) also shares the ‘cun’ stem, as do:
· ‘Cunina’
· ‘cunctipotent’
· ‘cundy’
· ‘cush’ (Arabic, from which ‘kush’ is derived)
· ‘cunicle’ (‘underground passage’)
· ‘cuniculate’ (‘open at one end’)
· ‘cunne’ and ‘cunae’ (‘cradle’)
… many of which have womb-like or vaginal connotations.
Related terms are:
· the Old English ‘cot’ (‘cottage’)
· ‘conjuring book’
· ‘conundrum’
· ‘coynte’
· ‘cooch’
· ‘coot’
· ‘cooze’
· ‘cou’
· ‘cuzzy’
· ‘cu’
· ‘cwe’ (‘femininity’)
· the French ‘con’ and ‘coun’
· the Italian ‘conno’
· the Spanish ‘coño’
· plus ‘Cuntkin’, ‘cuntlet’, the Old English ‘cwithe’ (‘womb’)
· and the Welsh ‘cwm’ meaning ‘valley’, thus a descriptive euphemism for ‘cunt’. Cwm was Anglicised as ‘cumb’, ‘coomb’, ‘coombe’, and ‘combe’, which thus share the same origin as, it has been suggested, does ‘cow’.
Derived from ‘cwm’ are the ‘qu-’ terms:
· ‘quin’
· ‘quem’
· ‘quimsby’
· and ‘quim’.
Extensions of ‘quim’ include:
· ‘quim bush’, ‘quim whiskers’ and ‘quim wig’ (pubic hair)
· ‘quimfill’ (a penis fully inserted into the vagina)
· ‘quimling’ (genital stimulation)
· ‘quim nuts’ (labia)
· ‘quim-sticker’ (womaniser)
· and ‘quimstake’ or ‘quimwedge’ (penis)
Similar to ‘cwm’, and with the same origin (i.e. ‘cunnus’), is another Welsh word, ‘cwe’ (meaning ‘woman’, and also spelt ‘cwen’ and ‘cwene’). ‘Cwe’ is the source of the modern ‘queen’, and the arcane ‘quean’ (‘impudent woman’). Though restricted to female monarchs today, ‘queen’ could originally be applied to any woman, and is yet more evidence that ‘cu’, ‘cw’, ‘qu’, and ‘ku’ prefixes carry associations of femininity. ‘Queen’ is used in this general sense by Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet”, when Mercutio says "O! then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you" (circa 1594:1.4.55). Here, "Queen Mab" is the fairies’ widwife, the title coming from the Welsh ‘cwen maban’ (literally ‘woman baby’).
The Greek ‘konnus’ (‘hair’, related to ‘kusos’ and ‘kusthos’) (Green, 1993:33) has two principal influences: its prefix is from the Sanskrit term ‘cushi’ (‘ditch’) and its suffix is from ‘cunnus’. This allusion to the vagina as a ditch is replicated by the name of the River Kennet at Silbury, which Michael Dames (1976:110) traces back to Cunnit (‘cunt’): "the name of that orifice is carried downstream in the name of the river. Cunnit is Cunnt with an extra i". He also cites the Roman settlement Cunetio, situated beside the river in the Kennet (or Cunnit) valley. This brings to mind another of Shakespeare’s lines, Pompey's evocative sexual metaphor, "Groping for trouts in a peculiar river".
If ‘cunnus’ is the source of the ‘cun’ prefix, ‘konnus’ may be the source of the ‘kun’, ‘kin’, and ‘ken’ stems. For example, the Basque term ‘kuna’ (also ‘cuna’), the Old Norse and Friesian ‘kunta’ (also ‘kunte’), ‘kunton’, the Middle Lower German ‘kutte’, the Middle Higher German ‘kotze’ (‘prostitute’), the Hittite ‘kun’, the Egyptian ‘qefen-t’ (‘vagina’), and the Saharan Kuntah tribe. In “The Woman’s Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets” Barbara Walker cites the Indian ‘kundas’, "[descendants] of the Goddess Kunda [or ‘Cunti’]", and Terence Meaden suggests that legal suppression of ‘cunt’ is related to a desire to suppress the worship of such pagan idols, and represents "a series of vicious witch hunts encouraged by an evil establishment wishing to suppress what amounted to apparent signs of Goddess beliefs". (His book The Stonehenge Solution was not stocked by W.H. Smith’s due to its inclusion of a single paragraph discussing the word ‘cunt’.
The earliest citation of ‘cunt’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) dates from c. 1230. At this time in the Stews area of Southwark there was a street called Gropecuntelane. Similarly, there was a Cunte Street in Bristol too" which was renamed Host Street and, in London, "Pissing Alley and Shitteborwelane". Gropecuntelane may have been later shortened to Grope Lane, and a similar example can be found in York, where a Grope Lane was "renamed [to Grape Lane] by staid Victorians who found the original Grope - historically related to prostitution - too blatant". Graeme Donald’s “Dictionary Of Modern Phrase” cites the use of ‘cunt’ in medieval surnames, two of which predate the OED’s earliest ‘cunt’ citation: "those surnames not built on the person’s trade reflected personal traits or peculiarities. Early records mention such female names as Gunoka Cuntles (1219), Bele Wydecunthe (1328) and presumably promiscuous male sporting names such as Godwin Clawecunte (1066), John Fillecunt (1246) and Robert Clevecunt (1302)".
In backslang, ‘cunt’ is ‘teenuc’. In Cockney rhyming slang, it’s variously known as
· ‘Charlie Hunt’ (abbreviated to ‘Charlie’)
· ‘eyes front’
· ‘Grannie Grunt’
· ‘groan and grunt’
· ‘gasp and grunt’
· ‘growl and grunt’
· ‘grumble and grunt’ (abbreviated to ‘grumble’)
· ‘Joe Hunt’ (abbreviated to ‘Joey’)
· ‘National Front’
· ‘sharp and blunt’
· and ‘Sir Anthony Blunt’
In 1998, the Radio Four quiz I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue was introduced as, "the show that is to panel games what James Hunt is to rhyming slang!". In Head On Comedy a joke was made about the name "William Hunt". Other famously connected joking names are Mike Hunt, as used in the 1981 film Porky’s when a female character asks, "Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?!". Indeed, in Australian slang, ‘Michael’ (from ‘Michael Hunt’) is a euphemism for ‘cunt’. The most common rhyming slang usage of ‘cunt’ is the mildly derogatory ‘berk’, which derives from ‘Berkshire Hunt’ or ‘Berkeley Hunt’ (also known as ‘Burlington Hunt’ or ‘Birchington Hunt’) and has been widely used ever since its presence in the situation comedy Steptoe And Son in 1980. ‘Berkeley Hunt’ also gave rise to the terms ‘Sir Berkeley’ and ‘Lady Berkeley’, which are also ‘cunt’ euphemisms.
‘Cunt’ is present in the name Scunthorpe, which poses problems when the name is blocked by internet filtering software. Phonetically, it’s found in
· ‘country’
· ‘lubricant’
· ‘replicant’
· ‘applicant’
· and ‘significant’.
‘Thingstable’ is a recognised euphemism for ‘constable’, employed because of the similarity between ‘const-’ and ‘cunt’. Viz Comic’s Roger’s Profanisaurus cites ‘Constable’ itself as a euphemism, in this case for ‘cunt stubble’.
The word ‘Cunt’ is known euphemistically as ‘the monosyllable’, and according to “Expletives Deleted” from the late 1890s onwards as ‘the divine monosyllable’, though, interestingly, the term’s earliest forms are all disyllabic (‘cunte’, ‘cunnus’, ‘kunta’, etc.)
‘Cunny’ is an affectionate synonym for ‘cunt’, and appears in eighteenth and nineteenth century terms such as:
· ‘cunny-thumbed’ (groped)
· ‘cunny-burrow’ (vagina)
· ‘cunny-burrow ferret’
· ‘cunny- burrow mouse’
· ‘cunny-catching’
· ‘cunny-hunter’
· ‘cunny-catcher’ (penis)
· ‘cunny-thumper’
· ‘cunny-thumbed’
· ‘cunny-fingered’
· ‘cunny-warren’ (vagina or brothel)
· ‘cunnikin’
· ‘cundy’ (charmingly defined as a ‘post-coital vaginal secretion’)
· ‘cunnyskin’ (‘pubic hair’)
· and ‘cunny-haunted’ (‘sexually excited’).
The affectionate ‘cunny’ (C-U-N-N-Y) sounds the same as an old word for rabbit, ‘coney’ or (C-O-N-E-Y or C-O-N-Y), and because of this they became synonyms, hence the double-entendres ‘-burrow’, ‘-catching’, ‘-hunter’, ‘-catcher’, ‘- warren’, and ‘-skin’, and also the terms ‘cunicle’ and ‘cuniculate’. ‘Con(e)y’ was later marginalised, replaced by ‘rabbit’, which just used to mean a young coney. To retain the influence of ‘cunny’, ‘bunny’ was surreptitiously devised as a substitute.
A literature search reveals a host of related words and phrases, such as:
· ‘cunted’ or ‘cunt-faced’ (‘drunk’, c.f. ‘shit-faced’)
· ‘cunt-line’ (‘aperture between stacked beer barrels’, replaced by ‘cont-line’)
· ‘cunt-splicing’ (‘tying a nautical knot’, replaced by ‘cut-splicing’)
· ‘Cunt Pump’ (a cocktail served with an unused tampon)
· ‘cunting’ (an intensifier, c.f. ‘fucking’, used by Philip Larkin and William Peter Blatty)
· ‘cunt bubble’ (Roger’s Profanisaurus)
· ‘cunt-struck’ (‘sexually excited’, c.f. ‘love-struck’)
· ‘cunt-curtain’ (‘pubic hair’)
· ‘cunt-shop’ (‘brothel’)
· ‘cunt-pensioner’ (‘pimp’)
· ‘cunt-hat’ (‘felt hat’, referring to cunts being ‘felt’, i.e. ‘groped’)
· ‘cunt-teaser’ (‘male flirt’, c.f. ‘prick-teaser’)
· ‘cunt-hooks’ (‘fingers’)
· ‘cunt-itch’
· ‘cunt-stand’
· ‘cunt-screen’
· ‘doss cunt’
· ‘cunt-cap’
· ‘cunthead’
· ‘cunt-collar’
· ‘cunt-eyed’ (‘narrow-eyed’)
· ‘cunt-hair’
· ‘cunt-tickler’
· ‘cunt-wagon’
· ‘Cunty McCuntlips’
· ‘cunt-starver’
· ‘cunt- hound’
· ‘cuntish’ (‘effeminate’)
· ‘cunt-laird’
· ‘mouth like a cow’s cunt’
· ‘cunt-licker’
· ‘cunt-sucker’
· ‘cunt-lapper’
· ‘cuntface’
· ‘cunt away!’ (expression of surprise, c.f. ‘get away!’, used by Patrick Marber)
· ‘red c’ (‘red cunt’, i.e. ginger pubic hair)
· ‘he’s a cunt and a half’, and ‘Cunts In Velvet’ (‘City Imperial Volunteers’ and ‘Criminal Investigation Department’)
‘Cunt’ acronyms include
· "Carlton United Network Television" (Jonathon Ross at the 1999 British Comedy Awards)
· "Concentration, Understanding, Nouce, and Tenacity" (The Fast Show, 1997)
· "Charlie Uncle Norfolk Tango"
· "Completely Unbearable Neo-Trash Shoreditchians" (Sharon O’Connell in Time Out, reviewing Madonna
· and [unintentionally!] ‘Coventry University Netball Team’.
So when – and why - did “cunt” become obscene?
The word has been taboo for over five hundred years, though there’s also evidence that it once suffered no social prohibitions or negative connotations. Although once used in the names of people and places, by Chaucer’s time he disguised it as ‘queynte’.
The earliest known English swearwords are of Christian origin – even the terms ‘swear’, ‘profanity’, and ‘cursing’ have religious derivations. In Expletives Deleted, Jonathon Green cites ‘gog’ and ‘cokk’ as the earliest known expletives, both of which mean ‘God’. Similar are terms such as ‘’snails’ (‘God’s nails’), ‘’slids’ (‘God’s eyelids’), ‘’sblood’ (‘God’s blood’), ‘’sbody’ (‘God’s body’), ‘’sfoot’ (‘God’s foot’), and ‘zounds’ (‘God’s wounds’).
This reflects the power exercised by the church in Mediaeval times. As Geoffrey Hughes notes in Swearing, since the Reformation and the decline in the power of the Catholic church, “genital, copulatory, excretory and incestuous swearing has largely replaced religious oaths… the grisly invocation of Christ’s body, blood and nails in the agony of the Crucifixion seems as grotesque and bizarre to us now as modern... swearing would have seemed to medievals".
Still, you had to be cautious: the Privy Council and the Master of the King’s Revels were watching. Thus, Shakespeare’s references to ‘cunt’ are all disguised: in Henry V, Katherine confuses the English terms ‘foot’ and ‘coun’ (‘gown’) with the phonetically similar French ‘foutre’ (‘fuck’) and ‘con’ (‘cunt’), calling them "mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique". In Twelfth Night, Malvolio virtually spells out the word:
"These be her very C’s, her U’s, ’n’ her T’s and
Thus makes she her great P’s".
The ‘N’ is formed from the first "and", and "P’s" is a pun on ‘pees’ (‘urinates’). It’s convoluted, but similar euphemisms are still used today. One is ‘see you next tuesday’, the ‘n’ and ‘t’ of ‘cunt’ being the initials of the final two words. Shakespeare’s most famous ‘cunt’ pun is from Hamlet: the Prince’s reference to "country matters", with its phonetical allusion to ‘cunt’, is qualified by "lie in your lap... my head upon your lap... lie between maid’s legs" in the same scene.
It isn’t the word which is offensive, of course, but what it represents: sex, which is tainted by association with original sin. This is quite irrational, it has no actual Biblical provenance - as Obeler points out, "Jesus said absolutely nothing about either original sin or the Fall; not one of the four Gospels quotes any statement by Jesus Christ on these topics. Nowhere in the words of Jesus can there be found any statement that the physical side of sexual life is evil."
Nonetheless, first ecclesiatical and later secular authorities prohibited “obscenity” as they believed it caused moral corruption. Sex is dirty, therefore so are sex organs, so they musn’t be discussed – not that this stopped art, such as the Restoration poetry of John Wilmot, the Earl Of Rochester, which Hughes describes as "a world seen from crotch level" writing of "the best cunts in Christendome" and "The savory scent of salt swoln Cunt".
The Catholics and Puritans banned ‘cunt’ - and ‘fuck’, ‘cock’, and ‘shit’; later, the Victorians – so conservative and repressive in public, yet the most prolific producers and consumers of pornography in history - edited even milder terms such as ‘piss’, ‘arse’, and ‘bugger’ out of daily language. As Jonathon Green notes, "there is no doubt that the language-police come down and a lot of words which really didn’t cause too much trouble... words that really no-one really worried about very much in the eighteenth century... became taboo". Meaden concurs: "[‘cunt’ was] a perfectly normal, useful word... until a puritanical government legislated against it".
The only place where discussion of sexual matters was permissible was in a scientific context, for which new words were coined – for instance, the term ‘homosexuality’ in 1869. It is no surprise, then, that My Secret Life, the diaries of sexual conquests written by ‘Walter’ ("After the blessed sun, sure the cunt ought to be worshipped as the source of all human happiness... God bless cunt", c. 1880) were published only surreptitiously.
It is in Establishment attitudes to such ‘obscene’ literature that the hypocrisy of censorship is revealed. Some of the most acclaimed works of twentieth century literature have been tried for obscenity simply because they were considered incoherent: Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer ("I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt", 1934); Allen Ginsberg’s Howl ("fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt", 1956); and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch ("They could have heard you squealing over in Cunt Lick County", 1959).
The archetypal demonstration of the flaws in this ideology, however, was the trial of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The novel (Lawrence, 1928) was found not to be obscene, despite its graphic language: "‘Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth![’]... ‘What is cunt?’ she said. ‘An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer... Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!’". It escaped prosecution largely due to a revision of the Obscene Publications Act in 1959 which required a defence of artistic merit to be considered.
Today, feminists seek to return to the pride of the Wyf of Bathe in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tales Of Caunterbury: "she is certainly remarkably free in thought and speech, given the general constraints on women of her status in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the broadness of her language makes her virtually unique as a literary figure in her times", as Hughes. In her Prologe (Chaucer, c. 1400:331-332) she assures her betrothed:
"For, certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve,
Ye shul have queynte right ynogh at eve".
The Millere is equally graphic in his Prologe (ibid.:90): "And pryuely he caughte hire by the queynte". Middle English spelling was not standardised, though ‘queynte’ does seem more arcanely spelt than other Chaucerian terms, especially considering that its 1066 appearance as ‘cunte’ in the name Clawcunte (Donald, 1994:84) is almost identical to the modern spelling. It may be, then, that ‘cunt’ first became taboo between 1066 and 1400, and was thus disguised by Chaucer. This literary camouflage was also used by Andrew Marvell in To His Coy Mistress (1653), with a reference to "quaint honour". Related euphemistic mispronounciations of ‘cunt’ include ‘coynte’, ‘quiff’, and ‘quoniam’.
During the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial, the word ‘cunt’ became part of the national news agenda, but it remained largely an underground manifestation. The next filtration of ‘cunt’ into the mainstream media came some ten years after the Chatterley trial, in 1970, when it was uttered on live television.
David Frost was interviewing a counter-culture group of young anti-war activists when he referred to one, Jerry Rubin, as "a reasonable man", and group-member Stew Albert shouts back, "He’s not a reasonable man, he’s the most unreasonable cunt I’ve ever known in my life!" (ibid.). There was an atmosphere of general pandemonium. Albert (1999) later boasted of having "started a riot" in the studio.
The first use of ‘cunt’ in the cinema came the following year, 1971, in Carnal Knowledge, when Jack Nicholson called Ann-Margret a "ball-bustin’ son-of-a-cunt bitch". The next year, Pink Flamingos included the line "You’re a real cunt, you know that?! A real fucking cunt!", though a scene in which a character says "A lot of people like cunt... but your eyes are like a cunt to me... Them cunt-eyes" was cut before the film’s release.
By the late 90s, it’s used extensively in Nil By Mouth in which Ray Winstone brutally assaults Kathy Burke while shouting "You cunt! You cunt! You fuckin’ cunt!". Winstone also similarly assaulted Crissy Rock Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird by calling her "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!..."
More recently, Liam Gallagher of Oasis, during a live interview on Steve Lamacq’s Evening Session on Radio One, threatened to "beat the fucking living daylight shit out of... any other cunts that give me shit". He was previously somewhat renowned for his coinage of the insult "cuntybollocks". The Radio One Breakfast Show has also managed it by mispronouncing The Cult Of Ant And Dec as "The Cunt Of Ant And Dec". The DJ laughed and commented on his Freudian slip, though no serious apology was made. According to Lamacq, Radio One has a swear word hierarchy, in which "one c[unt is] as bad as five f[uck]s".
The first scripted use of ‘cunt’ on television was in the Thames drama No Mama No (1979):
"What did he say?"
"He said your Dr. Cawston is a cunt".
Producer Verity Lambert says: "I had a lot of correspondence with the IBA about that word. I think it was a real insult, and she needed to say that particular word. And, in the end, to be fair to them, they accepted that as an explanation".
While ITV had the earliest both live and scripted uses of ‘cunt’ on television, it’s Channel Four which has subsequently almost monopolised the broadcasting of ‘cunt’. It has a deserved reputation as a broadcaster that pushes further than others do at the boundaries of acceptability. While BBC Two, and sometimes ITV and Channel Five, will occasionally tolerate ‘cunt’ in the films they broadcast, the notion of ‘cunt’ appearing in programmes made specifically for television is - with very few exceptions - anathema to all but Channel Four.
In 1987, the channel broadcast a recital by Tony Harrison of his poem V (1984), in which he attacks the "cunts" who desecrated his parents’ graves. This prompted the front-page banner headline in The Daily Mail: "FOUR-LETTER TV POEM FURY". When a prison guard shouts "You cunt!" in the drama series Mosley, The Mail On Sunday reported: "[Channel Four] will break the last taboo over bad language on television... with the deliberate use of the only word in the English language considered more offensive than the F-word". Co-writer of Mosley, Laurence Marks, explained that the decision to include ‘cunt’ was not an easy one because "it is intensely powerful... we debated long and hard about using the word. There were many on the production team who thought we should not" (ibid.).
Another Channel Four drama - The Granton Star Cause - is distinguished as the most linguistically obscene programme ever screened. The Granton Star Cause contains thirty-seven uses of ‘cunt’, most of which are spoken by a character identified as God. God, played as a man with supernatural powers drinking in a pub, describes himself as "a lazy, apathetic, slovenly cunt". These character traits are his explanation for the continued existence of greed, famine, and war in the world he created. This juxtaposing of the sacred and the profane - God saying "cunt" - is similar to the "JESUS IS A CUNT" Cradle Of Filth t-shirt slogan (19--), inspired by the Happy Mondays lyric "You see that Jesus is a cunt" (1987). Cradle Of Filth's aim was to construct a sentence which was as offensive as possible and also as short as possible. By appropriating our culture’s most revered icon (Jesus) and equating it with our greatest taboo (‘cunt’), they achieved their goal. Similar, though in no way sensationalistic, are these lines from Exorcising His Life, John Meer’s poem about his reaction to his father’s death (1997):
"Fucking bastards! Fucking bastards!
IF THERE IS A GOD HE’S A CUNT".
It’s also used three times each in Queer As Folk - and Sex And The City, an unprecedented event in American television history. The American media simply do not use ‘cunt’ at all: their newspapers do not print it (unlike British broadsheets The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, and The Independent On Sunday) and their television and radio stations do not broadcast it. Possibly, they got away with it because it was used in a strictly anatomical sense rather than as an insult. In 1994, chat show host Phil Donahue used the word "in relating and condemning an employer’s insult to a female employee", though this instance is the exception which proves the rule.
Channel Four has devoted three documentaries to the subject of swearing, although sometimes “cunt” is bleeped out; however, BBC2’s Arena broadcast unbleeped extracts from the ‘Derek’ and ‘Clive’ sketch This Bloke Came Up To Me:
"some bloke came up to me... and he said, ‘You cunt!’"...
"And you replied, ‘You fucking cunt!’"...
"I said, ‘Who are you fucking calling ‘cunt’, cunt?!’"
One indication of the increasing mainstream acceptance of ‘cunt’ is the euphemistic references to it in recent comedy. The Monty Python sketch Crunchy Frog includes a character called Constable Kuntt ("Constable Kuntt and myself are from the hygiene squad"), and their Travel Agent sketch features a character who calls himself "a silly bunt" after establishing that he always replaces the letter ‘c’ with ‘b’ (as ‘bunt’ with a ‘c’ is ‘cunt’). Twenty years after ‘bunt’ came ‘Lunt’: Jack Dee (in Live At The Duke Of York’s Theatre, 1992) joked about a schoolteacher of his who was teased because his sirname was ‘Lunt’.
"SEE YOU EN TEE" (‘C U N T’, from the euphemistic phrase ‘c u next tuesday’) was written on the sleeve of the ‘Derek’ and ‘Clive’ Come Again album (Cook & Moore, 1977). In It’s Only T.V. But I Like It, this was repeated virtually identically by Jonathon Ross and Julian Clary:
"See you-"
"N T".
In The League Of Gentlemen, the line "Sit up straight, you bone-idle, lazy cun[t]" is cut off before the word ‘cunt’ is uttered in its entirety. Ricky Gervais, on The Eleven O’Clock Show, has turned "you stupid c-" into a long-running catchphrase. In Let Them Eat Cake, by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, there are several references to "the old Comte". (Saunders has said of ‘cunt’, "because it’s still the only taboo word, it’s the funniest word") One episode of the situation comedy Hippies was a parody of the Oz obscenity trial, with an image of an "I AM A CUN[T]" speech-bubble on the front-cover of the fictional Mouth magazine (the ‘T’ being obscured by someone’s finger). In Goodness Gracious Me, "FUKCNT" is shown on a series of Scrabble tiles. Jonathon Ross has obliquely described ‘cunt’ as "consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant" at the 1998 British Comedy Awards.
One of Kenny Everett’s characters was called ‘Cupid Stunt’, a Spoonerism of ‘Stupid Cunt’, as is ‘Cunning Stunts’ - ‘Stunning Cunts’ - a female theatre group. Kenneth Williams and Bob Monkhouse have both joked about ‘cult’ being suggestive, and Johnny Vaughn (on The Big Breakfast, 1999) has joked about ‘Kent’ sounding obscene. On the Radio One Breakfast Show in 1999 Zoë Ball read out an alternative version of Mary Had A Little Lamb that ends with a conspicuous silence as it requires a rhyme for ‘front’. Ball was singled out by the Radio Authority's Listening 2000 annual report, which criticised morning radio programmes in general - and Ball's in particular - for their offensive content (Morrison, 2000).
There was even a reference to ‘cunt’ in the children’s cartoon Willo The Wisp (Spargo, 1981). In the Food For Thought episode a bookworm says, "You are an ignoramus. I say, why not join me for breakfast?". This [may!] be a disguised reference to the famous comment by Noel Coward: "you are a cunt. Come and have dinner with me" (and, of course, Coward was something of a bookworm himself).
The various ‘cunt’ euphemisms in modern British comedy demonstrate an increasing willingness to acknowledge the word’s existence and an attempt to belittle the taboo against it. By laughing at our inability to utter a forbidden word (i.e. by referring to ‘cunt’ euphemistically) we recognise the arcane nature of the taboo and begin to challenge it. Satirist Ian Hislop (2000), in a speech at Coventry Cathedral, joked about "a four-letter word beginning with ‘cu’[. That isn’t] ‘cute’". This example is especially interesting, due to the context in which it was spoken. Hislop’s speech was made to a primarily middle-aged audience at Coventry Cathedral, a religious building, and he was introduced by the Bishop of Coventry. It is a clear indication of the increasing public tolerance of ‘cunt’ that it can be joked about even in such a revered institution.
[end here?]
Repetition And Over-Use.
In tandem with these frequent euphemistic references is a trend towards over-use and exaggerated emphasis. Over-use of ‘cunt’ can be traced back to a series of drunken improvisations by comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the ‘Derek’ and ‘Clive’ recordings. Their You Stupid Cunt sketch begins with the words "Hello, cunt! You stupid cunt!" (Cook & Moore, 1977), and what is remarkable about these recordings is that they are completely unrestrained and yet have been censored neither by the record company nor the artists themselves. For example, ‘Clive’ jokes about rape and domestic violence: "I’ve never raped anybody for fun. When I’ve raped somebody it’s because, y’know, I felt my knob throbbing and it was necessary to poke it into something... I kicked her and I kicked her in the cunt for half a fucking hour ’til I was exhausted" (Cook & Moore, 1978a & 1978b). One of Alexie Sayle’s stage characters was called ‘Mr. Sweary’, and his routine consisted of the words "Fucking cunt, you wanker. Fucking cunt, you wanker. Fucking cunt, you wanker..." (in Higgins, 1999). Sayle was heckled during his ‘What’s On In Stoke Newington’ routine (1979), and he replied, "fuck off, you cunt!". This moment was later removed from commercially available recordings of the routine.
Two comedians - Jerry Sadowitz and Matt Lucas - have become indelibly associated with ‘cunt’ on the comedy circuit, due to their frequent usage of the word. Sadowitz is "famous for being the bloke who said "c***" [sic] on stage" (Marshall, 1998:13), and Lucas is known as "the c*** [sic] comedian" (Lucas, 2000). Similarly, one of the people who has corresponded with me about ‘cunt’ uses it as ubiquitously as possible: "Oh cunting hell, I’ve cunting well forgotten to pay my cunting telephone bill and now those mothercunters British cunting Telecom are going to cunting cut me off" [email from Gav, 10/2/2000].
Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1998) "regularly got theatres full of women, and celebrities like Melanie Griffith and Gillian Anderson, to chant "C***!" [sic] over and over again, as a way to exorcise the venom from the word" (Goldman, 1999). With less noble intentions, "a woman [spent] an hour shouting the word "cunt" at the top of her voice" (Wilde, 1997:73) as part of a performance art event called Art Shock Blowup! in the 1980s. Irvine Welsh has also chanted "cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt...", on the Primal Scream single The Big Man And The Scream Team Meet The Barmy Army Uptown (1996). In fact, Irvine Welsh has been one of the most prominent over-exposers of ‘cunt’ (which he describes as "the all-purpose term for someone else, either friendly or unfriendly" in Vulliamy, 1999), notably in his novel Trainspotting ("That cunt, that cunt ’n’ his fuckin’ mates back thair, that’s the cunts thit fuckin’ stabbed ma brar!", 1993:82) and the film of the book ("That lassie got glassed and nae cunt leaves here ’til we find oot what cunt did it!", Boyle, 1996). Publisher Maya Baran describes Welsh’s extensive usage: "For Irvine, saying c*** [sic] was like Americans saying the word ‘like’... We would have to send him to a speech therapist and a hypnotist to make him stop" (in Goldman, 1999).
The title of Stewart Home’s novel - Cunt ("it will take forever to get the bastard stiff enough to ram him up my cunt", 1999a:58) - made it "difficult finding a publisher" [letter from Stewart Home, 1/12/1999], because "the word ‘cunt’ is very problematic" (Home, 1998). Forty-three printers rejected it, until it was finally decided not to print the title on the spine but instead to print "CUNT" stickers that could be stuck onto the book after purchase. Thirty-four companies then refused to print the stickers. The names of the two companies which did finally agree to print the novel and stickers have not been made public, at their request. The novel’s publishers, Do Not Press, were raided by the Obscene Publications Squad (Morris, 1999). The delays in publication afforded Time Out and Die Wochenzeitung the opportunity to pun on the ‘countdown’ to Cunt’s release, with the respective headlines The Final ‘Cunt’down and Final Cuntdown (both 1999).
Cunt’s title is applicable in both the literal and abusive senses of the word, as the novel describes "a cunt in search of cunt" (Stewart Home in Morris, 1999). The pressure group Women Against Violent Language protested against the novel’s publication: "We believe the title... reduces this very personal and private aspect of women’s bodies to an obscene insult" (Fowley & Wiggins, 1999), though Home’s reply was, "Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!" (1999b), with support from the Feminists Against Censorship group (ibid.). Other ‘cunt’ book titles include A Good Cunt Boy Is Hard To Find by Doug Rice et al. (1998), Cunt Of Hope by Ben Prosser (2000), and two books by Gary G. Graham: Cannabis: Glasgow Cunt Sez Shite U No Like and Cannabis: More News From The Home Cunt? (both 1999).
A birthday card on sale in Brighton reads "happy birthday cunt" (1999). Bizarre magazine sold wrapping paper adorned with the words "You Cunt You Cunt" and "CUNT Cuntface CUNTING MOTHERFUCKER" (1999). Almighty Marketing sells "CUNT" t-shirts and badges ("Grrls - Wear your CUNT with pride!", 2000). These are evidence of the colonisation of cultural space by ‘cunt’, and thus of its colonisation of our collective consciousness. Viz magazine’s twentieth anniversary issue (2000) featured "[THE] SWEARIEST COVER EVER!", and marks the first appearance of ‘cunt’ on a mainstream magazine cover. (‘Cunt’ had previously been used in the titles of Cunts And Grunts and Sewer Cunt, though these were underground hard-core pornography magazines rather than mainstream publications.) On the internet, a search for ‘cunt’ as a keyword results in a long list of websites with hard-core sexual content, with names such as cuntpics.com, shitpisscuntfuck.com, thecunt.com, and cuntcollection.com.
The Cradle Of Filth t-shirt slogan ("JESUS IS A CUNT", 199-) is perhaps the most famous use of ‘cunt’ in the music industry. The most famous almost-use is surely that of The Sex Pistols, whose song Pretty Vacant is pronounced "pretty vay-cunt" (1977), with the final syllable being emphasised by the band. There have been occasional references in lyrics by Happy Mondays, Eminem, Frank Zappa, and others, though mainstream musicians very rarely use the word. Indeed, even The 2 Live Crew’s album As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989) - regarded as the epitome of rap’s violent, obscene, and misogynistic lyrical content - uses ‘cunt’ only once. ‘Cunt’ is primarily reserved for use by underground punk and metal bands such as Anal Cunt, Cunt Like A Bear-Trap, Sawthoothedcunt, and Unholified Through Cunt. It is traditional that, whenever disc-jockey John Peel appears at the Reading Festival, the crowd shouts "John Peel is a cunt!" (in Robinson, 2000:32), and music magazine Uncut is known amongst rivals as ‘ucunt’ (an anagram of the title, meaning ‘you cunt’).
A representative selection of ‘cunt’ song titles: Entrails Ripped From A Virgin’s Cunt by Cannibal Corpse (1992), Lady Love Your Cunt by S*M*A*S*H (1994), Anal Cunt by G.G. Allin (1994), Cunt-Suckin’ Canibal by G.G. Allin (1994), Bloody Mary’s Bloody Cunt by G.G. Allin (1995), Just Like A Cunt by Whitehouse (1995), Cunt by Diamanda Galßs (1996), I Want Cunt by The Queers (1996), Berkshire Cunt by Conflict (1996), Cunt Face by Bloody Fist (1996), Nazi Cunts by UK Subs (1997), Cunty The Feeling by Rageous Projectin (1997), Stick A Cross Up A Nun’s Cunt by G.G. Allin (1998), Jesus And Mother’s Cunt by G.G. Allin (1998), Conformist Cunt by Snap-Her (1998), Teenage Cunt by Rocking Dildos (1998), Trans Cunt Whip by Tsatthoggua (1998), A Cunt Like You by Whitehouse (1998), Drink The Cuntshake by Trash (1998), Just Another Cunt by Nobodys (1999), Stupid Drunkin Fuckin’ Cunt by Dayglo Abortions (1999), Fuck Off You Cunt What A... by Chaotic Dischord (1999), Cuntrie Girl by Da Shortiez (1999), Cunty by Kevin Aviance (1999), Cuntgirl by Spoonfed (2000), Cunt Face by Nasenbluten (2000), Cunt Maniac by Green Machine, Hard Nuts And Hard Cunts by Hard Skin, Bunch Of Pissed Cunts by Hard Skin, Ispellgodcunt by Cumchrist, Cunt Renaissance by Big, You’re A Fucking Cunt by Anal Cunt, Throws Cunt A Tear by To Live And Die in LA, Razor Cunt by Grotesque Blessings, Cunt Tease by Pussy Galore, Cunt Hunt by Rock, Cunt by ‘Caustic Window’ (Aphex Twin), and Cunt by Robbie Tronco.
‘Cunt’ As The New ‘Fuck’.
As the word ‘fuck’ becomes increasingly acceptable in mainstream popular culture, ‘cunt’ is left as the last swear word with any true power to shock: "Swear words are no longer truly obscene... Only the c-word has any real shock value" (Will Self in Tom Shone’s article Expletives Deleted?, 1994). Andrew Goldman notes, "It’s no secret that the F-word... has lost all footing as a truly offensive word" (1999). A Brief History Of The F-Word (Jeffcock, 2000) discusses the ubiquity of ‘fuck’: "So confident is the f-word today of its place in the nation’s affections that French Connection was able to use it to sell us clothes. The f-word is now glamorous".
The French Connection ‘fuck’ campaign centred around the acronym "fcuk" (‘French Connection United Kingdom’), and it bears a striking similarity to ‘Cnut’, an arcane spelling of the name of Viking invader King Canute. ‘Fcuk’ and ‘Cnut’ are both taboo words with their respective middle letters reversed, the difference being that ‘fcuk’ was a deliberate reference to ‘fuck’ whereas ‘Cnut’ was an accidental reference to ‘cunt’. This accidental reference may, however, explain why ‘Canute’ has replaced ‘Cnut’. Similarly, "It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title Count was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic Earl... precisely because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt" (Hughes, 1991:20), and ‘cuntur’ is now spelt ‘condor’ to avoid contention.
(The similarity of ‘cunt’ and ‘count’ was also highlighted by Billy Connolly (who, in 1979, called himself "the man who put the ‘count’ [i.e. ‘cunt’] in ‘country music’!"), Terry Wogan (who joked about ‘country and western’ sounding obscene on the Radio Two Breakfast Show in 1998), Lily Savage (who - in Kinane, 2000 - jokingly announced that she would release a ‘country and western’ album called "Total Country"), the rock band Nu Cuntry, and by a sign advertising a Millenium party in Singapore in 1999. The sign was intended to read ‘Countdown ’99’, with the ‘o’ of ‘Count’ represented not by a letter but by a circular light. Unfortunately, the light did not shine as brightly as had been thought, thus rendering the sign as "C untdown ’99", as Private Eye reported in 1999. Empire magazine (Marquee Meltdown!, 1998) predated this sign with one of their own: "THE C UNT OF MONTE CRISTO" (‘THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO’ with the ‘U’ omitted). Similarly, Angus Deayton once ended the comedy quiz Have I Got News For You (Wheeler, 1997) with the words, "So, for our winners: the chance to go to Michael Portillo's constituency and see the count. For our losers: the chance to retype that sentence without the spelling mistake!".)
Just as ‘fuck’ is used only once in films with ‘12’/‘PG-13’ classifications - such as Ghost (1990) - so ‘cunt’ is gaining mainstream acceptance through its single appearances in L’Ultimo Tango À Parigi (1972), Withnail And I (1987), Natural Born Killers (1994), American Beauty (1999), and others. Several of Martin Scorsese’s films - Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Casino (1995) - also contain one ‘cunt’ each.
Several comedians are also testing the water with single usages of ‘cunt’. Hence, Rob Newman's reference to compassion fatigue and the Ethiopian famine: "Wipe those flies off your face, you lazy cunt!" (in Bendelack, 1992). Jack Dee, in a reference to the difficulties of hanging wallpaper (in Live At The London Palladium, 1994), once shouted "Hang, you cunt!". Howard Stern has recorded a spoof of Candle In The Wind called Candle In My Cunt (199-). Elisabeth Belile has recorded a monologue called My Country My Cunt (1994). Chris Morris, in Brass Eye, flashed a subliminal message which read "[MICHAEL] GRADE IS A CUNT" and appeared on screen for only one fiftieth of a second (1997), and his later series Jam featured a t-shirt with the slogan "LITTLE CUNT" (2000). In the Innit video (1999), ‘Ali G.’ discusses the tape’s classification: "to get it an ‘18’ I is gonna ’ave to use a word which I ’as never used before... ‘cunt’". The irony of this is that the video was classified ‘15’. Several films which each include a handful of uses of ‘cunt’ - including Beautiful Thing (1996) and My Name Is Joe (1998) - have also been classified ‘15’, indicating that ‘cunt’ is becoming more acceptable to the censors.
As ‘fuck’ has, over time, become increasingly acceptable, so the acceptability of ‘cunt’ is also likely to increase: "‘fuck’ has become fairly acceptable in a relatively short space of time. Not long ago if ‘fuck’ was said on a live T.V programme a big deal would have been made. Now... all that is needed is a quick apology and it’s all forgotten about... within 20 years ‘cunt’ will hold the same place as ‘fuck’ does [sic] today... if you hear something often enough it loses its impact" [email from Emma Desborough, 19/2/2000]. ‘Cunt’ is currently undergoing a period of transition. As I have shown, feminist efforts to reappropriate it have achieved only limited success, and attempts to ingratiate it into popular culture have not yet seen it accorded the same ubiquity as ‘fuck’.
However, standards of acceptability are in constant flux. In the 1930s, the Motion Picture Production Code forbade the uses of even the most mild swear words. Then, in 1939, Gone With The Wind included the word ‘damn’. In 1967, I’ll Never Forget What’s ’is Name included the word ‘fuck’. In 1971, Carnal Knowledge included the word ‘cunt’. Today ‘fuck’ is used hundreds of times in Casino (1995) and ‘cunt’ is used repeatedly in Nil By Mouth (1997). Thus what is unacceptable to one generation becomes acceptable to the next, and there is no reason to suppose that this will not also apply to ‘cunt’ in due course. Gilbert Adair accepts this notion, though he is perturbed by it: "Nowadays, with fewer and fewer exceptions, print journalists are free, should the context require it, to bandy about... all four-letter words, not excluding the last to resist common usage, "cunt"... Thus individuals who would never dream of using the word "cunt" in their private verbal exchanges now risk finding themselves confronted with it on the printed newspaper page" (1999:1). Neil Lyndon also problematises the increasing popularity of ‘cunt’: "Today there is just one word - describing female genitalia - which is still considered taboo and is as impermissable on television as the word f*** [sic] was 20 years ago. F*** [sic] [is now] constantly in use... so you can see what will happen next" (2000:51).
Rather than condemning this as a coarsening of the language, however, we should celebrate it as a symbol of our collective liberation from cultural repression. If ‘cunt’ is used openly and freely its power as a misogynistic insult will be diluted, our language will become more accessible, and outdated notions of sin and obscenity will be discarded. In the words of comedian and writer Stephen Fry (The Roots Of English, 2000): "there won't be any swearing [in the future], because... almost every swear-word now is more-or-less acceptable in broadcasting and every other form [therefore] it is impossible to imagine that there will be any taboo words which are unsayable, unless you invent new disgusting parts of the body that we haven't thought of yet!".
