Talking Dirty
TALKING DIRTY
(Or why four-letters word rock…)
(c) David Astle
A fishmonger at Pyrmont Markets is bellowing for the world to hear, “Damn fish, damn fish for sale!”
Blush? I almost faint. I can’t believe the depths to which society has sunk. I approach the sole trader on my high horse and say, “Hey, good man, watch your tongue.”
“What’s your effing problem?” asks the vendor. (Effing wasn’t exactly his adjective but will have to suffice on these pages.) “Me brother caught these effing fish in Warra-effing-gamba Dam so that makes ‘em dam effing fish, doesn’t it?”
True enough. I get off my horse and apologise. In future I’d expect Pyrmont Markets to issue a homophone warning. In the meantime I shell out $15 and buy some dam fish for the family.
I quarter limes. I parcel the fish in foil and tamarind. I let them bake for 12 minutes max and lay them on the table, steaming in their juices Hawaiian style. The kids tuck in. The evening is going swimmingly.
“How do you like the dam fish?” I ask Jasper, aged 9, whose eyes light up. “The damn fish is fine, Dad. It’s the effing tamarind that tastes like shit.”
Such a remark costs Jasper 30 cents from his pocket money, being 20 cents for the F word, and 10 cents the S. (We’ve given up on bloody and bugger.) The family cuss box is a takeaway tub that my daughter, aged 7, a potty-mouth of note, has decorated with those little squirls and planets you associate with swearing. Every year we blow the cuss fund on a family excursion to the movies – with change left over.
Not that you can escape cussing at the cinema. Au contraire, mofo. Take Jurassic Park, a PG-romp with 17 dirty words sprinkled in its script. (Not bad considering Laura Dern and Sam Neill spend the best part of an hour with raptors up their clackers.)
These days a prudent parent can tap into the advocacy group for kid-friendly media, www.youngmedia.org.au to scope a film’s saltier outbursts (Suddenly 30, I learn in advance, has several ‘oh my gods’, a few bitches and a reference to ball-squeezing for good measure.) Either way, you’re damned if you check, and damned if you don’t.
Switch your gaze from silver to small screen and the cussing accumulates. Australian volunteers working for the Parents Television Council last year had their senses assaulted by 1135 naughty words across 29 episodes of reality TV, specifically Big Brother 3, Survivor and Meet My Folks. Such profanity marks a 273% increase since a similar study in 2002, which is a bloody big increase in anyone’s language.
You, me, fishmongers: we’re swearing more. Shopping and F***ing is a West End play. Four Weddings and a Funeral kicked off with four fantabulous f***s. Sports stars cuss on replay. SMS codes incorporate the F word ATT (All The Time). Triple J announcers spend half their shift issuing token language warnings to songs. French Connection United Kingdom continue to plaster FCUK all over town in a bid to engender shock - not.
Car ads are regular culprits. The Bugger campaign of Toyota shares the airwaves with the Bloody Idiot push for road safety in Victoria. Linguist Ruth Wajnryb couldn’t believe her ears when her 2-year-old son was having trouble clicking Lego blocks together, inspiring his yell, “Bloody Volvo drivers!”
Wajnryb (pronounced Vine-Rib) is the author of Language Most Foul (Allen & Unwin, $29.95), a passionate rave on this impulsive habit of ours. Her work embraces such chapters as Shit Happens, The Wild Thing and A C*** of a Word.
All up, Wajnryb identifies the dirty dozen, from the namby-pamby “Hell” upwards. She examines the rules and roles of each. The F word is the most flexible, covering eight forms of speech. As the least lithe, the C-word carries the highest taboo. Shit is the happy universal in between.
“I’ve always been a big swearer,” concedes Wajnryb, the daughter of Polish Jews who grew up in the cuss-cauldron of Sydney’s Campbelltown. “I can get away with it more easily now. There’s more tolerance these days. People used to be shocked and horrified when I swore in lectures or social events. Because I’m now older you’d expect them to be even more horrified, but they’re not…”
Of course, prudish forces are afoot to stifle the filth. New on the American market is the TV Guardian, a puritanical piece of software that pledges to filter the verbal trash of pre-scripted shows. According to the literature, TVG will either bleep the gutter-talk or swap such words as ass for tail, bitch for nag, and sex for hugging! (The pious will be relieved to learn that the blasphemy mode can be relaxed for shows of a religious nature.)
Also in the US, the Cuss Control Academy (at www.cusscontrol.com) offers 10 tips on tongue-taming, from “Cope, Don’t Cuss” to “Practise Being Patient”. The lamest tip deserves to be “Use Alternative Words”: “Instead of BS [coy for bullshit], word choices range from lie, fabrication, nonsense and exaggeration to bunk, baloney, drivel, malarkey, hokum, hogwash and balderdash. They might not give you satisfaction at first but they will eventually.”
To counter the soap brigade, other sites have appeared on-line, including the massive Swearsaurus that spits out cusses from 163 languages at www.insultmonger.com or the mealy-mouthed Swearotron that barks filth at the twitch of a cursor.
On the activist front, the Society to Highlight Ingrate Terms (or SHIT) was established by loose-tongued lobbyist Chip Rowe, because “sometimes a good f***! or shit! provides the release I need.”
Wajnryb describes this primal urge to cuss as the toe-stubbing function. We yell to lighten the neural load. Swearing has been around, reckons sociologist Richard Dooling, since the first caveman bumped his head on the way out to take a piss. Or cavewoman: the habit is quickly losing its stag elitism.
Nowadays women are as liable to cuss with the best of them. For Jane Austen and her sisters, the classic pressure valves were seen as swooning and tears. While crying remains cathartic for many of us, women in particular, there seems no doubt that yesteryear’s swooner is as likely to be today’s swearer.
‘We now know that while men show a statistcal tendency to swear more than women, the issue of gender variation is nowhere near as clear-cut as folk linguistics would have us believe,’ says Wajnryb in her chapter, Son of a Bitch. ‘A recent study of men, women and language asserts that the only solid evidence to emerge from the research is the abiding belief…that women ought to speak differently from men. But ‘ought’ tells us more about prescriptive beliefs than actual speech patterns.’
Comic Judith Lucy uses f-words like Nigella Lawson uses butter. In Crackerjack, Lucy’s film debut in 2002, her character begins with f*** off and finishes with ‘you’re f***ed’ – what the actress describes ‘as the full emotional journey’.
In the workplace, swearing is alive and kicking, especially in the larger firms, as a survey discovered, conducted by recruitment company, Talent2 this year. Among the 1000 people asked, all ages, both sexes, roughly a fifth reported potty-mouths in the ranks, with a lesser percentage admitting stress or discomfort with the fact.
Statistically, human resource staff cop the brunt of our #@^#!!, followed closely by it personnel. (Does that surprise?) In the same breath, we need to understand that swearing has as much a social function (separate from abuse, the toe-stubber’s balm) that emphasises interpersonal ease.
“The local Catholic Boys School allows its students to buy lunches across the road,” says Wajnryb, a veteran eavesdropper. “If I happen to go the shops around that time the streets are alive with the sound of f***. It’s like a chorus.’
By necessity, the history of swearing is furtive. Before Big Brother 3 was invented, the English hoi polloi were given to a pastime called flyting, essentially a swearing contest in tavern backrooms, much like a road-rage barney with ringside seats and a clap-o-meter.
Meantime, in 1785, a Pom with the god-given name of Grose coined the typography of f**k in his seminal work The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. In the same era, it’s argued, Captain Cook bestowed Goddamn to the peoples of Hawaii, taking home in return the new English word, tabu.
At this point we need to differentiate between cussing and cursing. To cuss is to yell ‘shit!!’ while to curse is to holler, ‘eat shit and die!’ (present company excepted). The first is secular; the second infers a higher force. When god exerted a greater presence in everyday life, humans were far more inclined to paint the town blue with oaths and evil fates, versus your average sexually-charged cuss. In her book, Wajnryb cites curses form around the world, including the perverse little Jewish wish: “May you marry a raving beauty, live next-door to the officers’ club and travel 10 months of the year.”
But times and invectives change. As the sound of church organs dwindle, the dominance of other organs take up the challenge. Not that sexuality been the sole recourse of the foul-mouthed through the ages. By all accounts, Greek whiz Pythagoras swore by the number 4, while Socrates relied on ‘cabbage’ as his profanity of choice. Finns love to bellow ravintolassa (or restaurant) because it sounds so venomously pleasing. Poles wish cholera upon their detractors, while Iraqis take the piss out of their enemy’s moustaches.
Like it or lump it, swearing lies at the heart of a language. Ex-pats feel at home as soon as they can swear in their new tongue. Master the art of exotic sledging and you’re as good as native. Despite what hygienists think, the business of swearing has complex rules (you can’t say “happy shitless” for example, or fan-tas-bloody-tic) and a subtle emotional register, from Goodness knows, to God knows, to Christ knows: each demanding a context to itself.
Darren Lehmann probably curses the day he was overheard mumbling “black c***s” when walking off the Gabba, the victim of a Sri Lankan run-out last summer. The Australian batsman was suspended for five matches under a code violation. Nobody doubts the taboo-loading of the remark, though Wajnryb asserts in a world of political correctness, it was as much the B-word that condemned Lehmann as the other.
“Ethnic slurs are regarded as taboo,” John Ayto, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Slang, told The Guardian in November, 2002. “I think if a politician were to be heard off-camera saying f***, it would be trivial. But if he said nigger, that would be the end of his career.”
“Taboo is the other side of the coin to swearing,” says Wajnryb. “As long as you’ve got a taboo, you’re going to have swearing. But taboos change over time. Once it was taking the Lord’s name in vain and then it was sexual function. Now it’s making deprecatory noises about the specific – height, race, age.”
Stand-up comics like Judith Lucy know every four-letter word in the book– and not a few personal slurs to boot. But it’s the pooh-bah of social snipers, Lenny Bruce, who puts the whole f*** thing in the clearest light: “If we were taught [screwing] was a sweet Christian act of procreation, it was the nicest thing we can do for each other, you’d use the term correctly and say, ‘Unscrew you mister!’”
[Sunday Life, October 2004]