by Rufus Lodge
Meanwhile, Ballard submitted the Reagan story to his book publishers in 1970, as part of a volume called (in Britain) The Atrocity Exhibition and (in America) Love & Napalm, Export USA. It took its place alongside other equally inventive uses of celebrity image, including several pieces hinged around the two Kennedy assassinations. The UK publication passed off without major incident, but in the USA, after copies had been printed, executives at Doubleday halted distribution and the entire first edition was pulped. Only two years later did the Grove Press, who had already defied the censors with editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Naked Lunch, enable the uncut text to reach the US market.
There was, according to Ballard, a strange postscript to the tale of Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. ‘At the 1980 Republican Convention’, he wrote, ‘a copy of my Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed to delegates. I’m told it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.’ It’s an enticing story; but also such a perfectly Ballardian incident, that one can’t help wondering whether Ballard invented it, as part of an altogether larger psychological study of the gullibility of readers, critics, and academics – a way of ensuring an afterlife for the most controversial pages of his remarkable career.
Another prominent figure of 1968, Black Power activist Eldridge Cleaver, hit upon a much easier way to take Reagan’s name in vain. Recently freed on bail after being charged with murdering a policeman, Cleaver was invited by the University of California to give a lecture about the Black Panther Party. When the Governor of California criticised this decision, Cleaver retaliated by asking five thousand students at a protest rally to chant: ‘Fuck Ronald Reagan’. I wonder how many of them voted for Reagan when he was finally elected President in 1980 …
Imposters
Love in Middle Age
How did Ye Olde Timers – blokes like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dr Johnson – talk about F-wording without using the F-word? Here are some of the terms that were at their disposal.
COVER: Used primarily of animals, presumably because the male ‘covered’ the female from view. Humans have the option of doing it the other way around.
FELTER: Alias ‘to couple’. Doesn’t imply that he ‘felter’ first, sadly for those wanting foreplay.
GOLEHEAD: A noun, as far as I can tell, with merry origins; might be usefully revived today to describe a man who insists on watching the football while he’s at it.
GROPE UNDER GORE: This is not a summary of Saw 2 or a follow-up to Hostel, but a way of suggesting that our distant ancestors liked to combine their resources without removing all their clothes, a ‘gore’ being a form of skirt and our ancestors not smelling too hot with their kit off.
HUMP: In the eighteenth century this term for fornication was regarded as virtually obsolete, but it made an unexpected recovery in the twentieth century, though its semi-humorous connotations have largely been superseded by the much more modern ‘bonk’.
JAPE (or sometimes IAPE): Another verb meaning ‘copulate’, from Middle English, which survives in the language as a noun meaning a jolly adventure.
MEDDLE: It might suggest somebody fumbling about where he or she shouldn’t be fumbling, but it actually refers to the full act of intercourse, from a Middle English word for coupling.
OCCUPY: This puts the global political movement of recent years into an entirely different perspective. Its origin seems obvious: one partner ‘occupies’ a place in the other. But the long-distant roots of the verb suggest a form of coupling rather than an invasion.
PILT: One of many Middle English verbs meaning thrust which were transferred to the sexual act in the age before foreplay.
PLAY UNDER CLOTH: There was no central heating in medieval times, so it was advisable to keep as many clothes on as possible.
PUTAGE: Sex as performed by a woman; note the link to the French ‘putain’, meaning whore, suggesting that a woman indulging in putage might be suspected of getting paid for it, or otherwise (worse still) actually enjoying it.
QUIFF: Can there possibly be a link between the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century use of this word to denote sexual intercourse, and its nineteenth-century emergence as a raised section of hair – one erection inspiring another, perhaps?
RAGE: With its associated noun, ‘ragynge’; it doesn’t mean that one or more partner is angry, merely that at least one of them is getting a bit carried away.
RIDE: Still used as a euphemism today, as in the Sixties R&B hit ‘Ride Your Pony’.
ROGER: First Roger was a name; then ‘roger’ was the slang word for a penis; and then there was a verb to illustrate one of the things you can do with a penis.
SAM: Another Middle English verb meaning ‘to couple’. ‘Sam Roger’ was probably the perfect porn star name for the sixteenth century.
SCREW: It implies a circular motion (see ‘swive’) and some use of force (see ‘sting’ and ‘pilt’), which probably explains why this verb is still in use today.
SHAG: It’s a bird, a dance, a repeated motif in the Austin Powers movies and – in Britain, of course – a just about socially acceptable word for a ‘fuck’. American innocence about this term continues nonetheless, resulting in such marvellous CD titles as Music to Shag By.
STING: Which otherwise means ‘to stab’. Women expecting an orgasm should maybe look elsewhere.
SWINK: In common use during the middle centuries of the last millennium. Its origin is the Old English verb ‘swink’, meaning toil or labour, which suggests that we have more fun in bed than they did 600 years ago. Chaucer uses this word in The Reeve’s Tale.
SWIVE (or, often, SWYVE): Another mid-millennium favourite, which was perhaps as familiar to the world of 1500 and 1600 as ‘fuck’ is to us today. The origin is the Middle English verb ‘swifan’, which has also given us the modern word ‘swivel’, as it denotes movement in a circular fashion. Sex tips from the Middle Ages, boys and girls …
TREAD: Not as violent as it sounds, this referred only to coupling, not to trampling on one’s partner afterwards.
TUP: Used primarily of animals. Not related to Tupperware parties, except in farming circles.
Poor Fanny Adams
When her grieving parents erected an ornate and majestic headstone over the grave of their eight-year-old daughter Fanny Adams in 1867, they can hardly have imagined that her name would become familiar to millions: first as a cruel euphemism, and then more enduringly as a substitute for one of the ruder phrases in the language. We can only be grateful that they did not live to see their girl forgotten, but her name taken in vain around the English-speaking world.
The circumstances of her death are too appalling to be described in detail. On a summer Saturday afternoon, Fanny was sent off to play in the meadows near her Hampshire home with two girls of a similar age. They were approached by a young clerk, who enticed the girls with halfpennies to accompany him – there being no concept of ‘stranger danger’ in the 1860s. He picked blueberries for them, all the while weighing up the choice that fate had presented to him. Two of the girls were sent safely away with the coins; Fanny happily accepted his invitation to stay. Then he carried her into a hop field, beat her to death with a stone, and proceeded to dismantle her body, spreading her vital organs over a wide area; some parts of the corpse were never located. In his diary, he wrote simply: ‘Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot.’ (He claimed he had been acting as a reporter, and meant to write: ‘Killed: a little girl.’ But nobody believed him.) As he had made little effort to conceal his guilt, he was quickly caught, and hanged for murder on Christmas Eve.
So notorious was the crime that Fanny’s name remained in the public memory; and quickly entered into the realms of black humour. Any particularly ghastly meat dish was soon likely to be described (in coarse company) as looking like Fanny Adams, and her name became attached t
o the undesirable meat rations offered to lower ranks in the Royal Navy. Time changes words and their meaning, and by the end of the century Sweet Fanny Adams was no longer an unappetising meat dish, but an all-purpose nickname for anything of no great value – at which point Fanny Adams and the phrase ‘fuck all’ became entangled, by virtue of their shared initials, and ‘sweet FA’ became a polite abbreviation for them both. But Fanny’s gravestone is still visible at the cemetery in Alton, in memory of what must be the cruellest innovation in the history of the English language.
Saying F**k Without Saying F**k
BLANK: Quite common in nineteenth-century writing, though not in refined conversation, the word ‘blank’ was employed as an all-purpose tool of invective and obscenity, leaving the identity of the omitted (or blank) word to the imagination of the audience. So, in theory, a nineteenth-century novelist of the 1800s could have allowed one of his characters to say ‘I blanking well hope that he gives more of a blank than he blanking well did last time’ – though he probably wouldn’t have attracted any readers. Given that ‘blank’ was most commonly employed as a substitute for ‘fuck’, it is mildly amusing that one of the most popular British television game shows of the Eighties was titled Blankety-Blank; and more amusing that most of its viewers didn’t realise that the BBC programme they were watching was named after a string of expletives.
BLEEP: The twentieth-century equivalent of ‘blank’, named after the tendency for broadcasters to hide unwanted language on radio and television behind an electronic noise. Coming soon to BBC1: a game show entitled Bleepity-Bleep.
CHUCK: Though it rhymes with the F-word, and might therefore lend itself to easy exclamations of ‘chuck off’, this particular C-word only seems to have entered the dictionary of dirty talk in one phrase: ‘Chuck you, Farly’. Which, as any relatives of the late Reverend Dr Spooner will instantly realise, is a playful inversion of a wartime expression (First World War, in fact), ‘Fuck you, Charlie’. The latter phrase is often aimed at ‘Jack’ instead of ‘Charlie’, but somehow ‘Juck you, Fack’ doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way.
EFF: This is almost as varied as the F-word itself, extending easily into exclamations (‘eff off!’), participles (‘effing’), tenses (‘effed’), adjectives (yep, we’re ‘effing’ again) and extensions (‘em-eff’). Delivered with sufficient venom, it can carry nearly as much force as the full effing expletive.
FLIP: Or rather ‘flipping’, as a way of intensifying a statement – in Britain, more often than not, applied to the state of the weather, and as mild an outburst as you can imagine. It was first applied as a substitute for ‘fucking’ in the nineteenth century, which was when use of the F-word and its derivatives among the English-speaking population appears to have boomed, and genteel disguises were therefore much in demand.
FRIG: Two sexual activities are captured in one word here, as ‘frig’ entered our language as a quick way of saying ‘masturbation’, and then within the last two hundred years invited others to join in by becoming an alternative for ‘fuck’ in the strictly sexual sense. ‘Frigging’ is sometimes heard as a description of intercourse, or as an intensifier (‘frigging typical’). But ‘frig off’ merely sounds clumsy. It’s safe to say that ‘frig’ was less safe to use in polite company in 1800 than it is today, when a large proportion of your audience won’t know what you’re talking about.
FUDGE: Fudge is to ‘fuck’ as sugar is to ‘shit’: polite, inoffensive, safe for work. Any number of words beginning with the crucial F will serve just as well – fiddlesticks, for example, though not forks.
NAFF: As expressed most vocally by Princess Anne in 1982, who surprised a group of royal photographers by asking: ‘Why don’t you just naff off?’ The key elements of that phrase had entered mainstream British culture thanks to the TV sitcom Porridge. It was set in prison, where the language is not always as restrained as one might like, so to give the setting some sense of authenticity, there had to be some bad language in the air. Characters’ repeated invitations to each other to ‘naff off’ satisfied that desire, without disturbing the horses or other members of the royal household. But like so many examples of vulgarity in the English language, ‘naff’ owes its origins to the services, specifically the Royal Air Force in the Second World War. It was revived briefly by novelist Keith Waterhouse in Billy Liar, and then lay dormant for more than a decade until it reappeared in the mouth of Porridge star Ronnie Barker in 1974.
SCREW: It works in some circumstances, but not others. ‘Screw you!’ is a genuinely cathartic release of anger and contempt, while ‘screw’ has long been an alternative way of describing sexual intercourse. In the latter sense, the word can be traced back to the Latin word for a sow, ‘scrofa’, and thence to the fifteenth-century French word, ‘escroue’. Why a sow? Well, as we have had cause to mention elsewhere in this book, pigs have curly tails, and so the suggestion of any (how can I put this delicately?) circularity in the motion of two lovers brought to mind the action of, er, screwing a screw. Talking of which: a ‘screw’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was less likely to be the act of copulation, but someone for a man to copulate with – in other words, it was one of the many words available to describe a common strumpet or whore. Finally, returning to the use of ‘screw’ as a euphemism for the F-word, we find that it is distressingly limited: you could claim to be ‘screwing annoyed’, or call someone a ‘screwer’ in a moment of exasperation, but neither usage is likely to win you an argument.
WHO/WHAT THE …: Which leaves the unspeakable word unspoken, and allows generous-minded people to think that you were about to say ‘who the hell?’ or ‘what the blazes?’. In twenty-first-century social intercourse, ‘WTF?’ serves much the same purpose.
Father Feck
So exactly how rude is the Irish word ‘feck’? Brought to popular acceptance in Great Britain via the TV sitcom Father Ted, ‘feck’ is widely assumed (by the English, Scottish, and Welsh) to be an invented substitute for the other F-word – presumably to enable Channel 4 to avoid criticism from easily outraged viewers.
But ‘feck’ existed centuries before Father Jack and his litany of ‘Feck! Arse! Drink!’ Like ‘fuck’, it can be extended into a personal noun (‘fecker’) and an adjective (‘fecking’, often with the ‘g’ dropped). There is one major difference between the two words, however. ‘Fuck’ suggests sexual intercourse; ‘feck’, at least in its pre-Jack form, doesn’t.
It exists, instead, as a word with three dominant meanings: to throw something; to steal something; or as a term of exasperation or abuse. The first two senses can trace their derivations back to the Middle Ages; the last was surely inspired by the term’s similarity to the English subject of this book. In Ireland, at least, it is less confrontational to tell someone to ‘feck off’ than it would be to exchange that vital ‘e’ for a ‘u’. It’s more humorous, less pointed, and more acceptable in polite society. But elsewhere, the Channel 4 effect is dominant: ‘feck’ might raise a smile among fellow aficionados of Father Ted, but it is still a four-letter word, best left to those who – like Father Jack – have profound intoxication as an excuse.
FCUK
Bus drivers in Vancouver must have been very sensitive. In March 2000, they successfully lobbied to have advertisements for the French Connection brand removed from their vehicles. The problem? The ads featured the company’s internationally notorious abbreviation, ‘FCUK’. Its presence, even in small print, so the drivers alleged, amounted to sexual harassment in the workplace. Rather than fight an embarrassing court case, their management agreed to impose a ban on the ‘FCUK’ campaign.
The story seems to beg the hashtag ‘political correctness gone mad’. But beyond the gentle souls who courageously operate public transport in Canada, the ‘FCUK’ logo (an abbreviation of French Connection UK) raised much larger issues about censorship around the world. The company had been flourishing for twenty-five years when, in 1997, advertising guru Trevor Beattie was invi
ted to maximise its awareness among the public. And so was born an eight-year campaign that pushed the boundaries of public decency to the limit, and divided its viewers between those who were outraged and those who were simply amused.
The original slogan was itself double-edged: ‘fcuk fashion’. The clever – or annoying, depending on your point of view – allusion to the four-letter word was launched on posters and billboards, and was soon transplanted into press ads and onto T-shirts. Within a year – a timeframe in which FCUK’s profits in Britain increased by 88 per cent – almost every aspect of the French Connection brand had been refashioned to include the controversial logo. Customers could choose from shirts proclaiming ‘too busy to fcuk’, ‘hot as fcuk’, and (in Australia, naturally) ‘no fcuking worries’.
In retrospect, what’s remarkable is how quickly the ‘fcuk’ gimmick was accepted. There was harrumphing from expected quarters, and a general feeling among people over a certain age that, really, while we are very broad-minded, this is taking things too far, and in any case, what about the influence this will have on our children? But the campaign and the posters continued without interference from the authorities, even when French Connection marked December 1998 with a ‘FCUK Christmas’ slogan. If pushed for an explanation of their cheeky behaviour, the company merely boasted that they had ‘created attention and provoked discussion’.
The new year began with British boxing champion Lennox Lewis sporting the ‘FCUK’ logo on his shorts in a world heavyweight title fight against Evander Holyfield. When trouble came, it was from an unexpected quarter: another business claiming the right to the website address fcuk.com. There was a court case, inevitably, at which French Connection’s lawyers asked for a sign of ‘goodwill’ from their opponents. This riled the judge, Mr Justice Rattee, who matched up to his name: ‘How can you talk about goodwill in connection with such a tasteless and obnoxious campaign? Fcuk is just a euphemism for the obscene expletive fuck. It may be you have been hoist by your own petard in using such an extraordinary advertising slogan.’ To which FC’s lawyer, Mary Vitoria, replied: ‘Your lordship might find it offensive. I might find it offensive. But young people who buy clothes do not find it offensive, they find it amusing.’