Purple Prose

by Liz Byrski

  In our family, we considered it one of her idiosyncrasies, like the way my uncle was missing several toes from playing near hot new bitumen as a toddler, or my grandmother’s strange left eye, which had a mind of its own regarding direction and was always a little phlegmy first thing in the morning. When I was small, I never heard my father say one word about her language, but sometimes he would wince and flinch as though she’d raised her hand to him, even when she was talking about a mozzie or the weather or something else entirely.

  My mother’s is the kind of language we would call ‘blue’ these days, but the way she spoke always seemed purple to me: ripe and heavy as a plum, as full of meaning and subtext as a bruise. Blue is the colour of the sky and the sea and relaxation, of the eyes of calm Scandinavians and the ties of white middle-aged Tories. Common usage is clearly wrong in this regard, yet somehow, of the many definitions of purple in my fat Macquarie Dictionary, only one refers to language and it’s this: full of elaborate literary devices and pretentious effects. This is what we refer to as ‘purple prose’, a valid and common use of the colour that derives originally from the Roman habit of stitching bits of purple fabric onto normal clothes to show off wealth and privilege, but that’s not the kind of purple I mean. Our American cousins get it right. The Collins and the Webster know that another meaning of purple language is: profane or obscene.

  It wasn’t always this way. I’ve hunted back through newspaper archives in search of evidence of this missing use of purple, and I’ve found many examples.

  From The Northern Miner, a newspaper from Charters Towers in Queensland, October 23rd, 1919, comes a report from an inquest into a shipboard mutiny. Witnesses alleged terrible conditions on board, including rotten food: ‘The meat was blue on one occasion and when he complained the steward swore at him.’ The title of the article was ‘Blue Meat and Purple Language’.1

  The Nepean Times, from Penrith in New South Wales, devoted a long inch-thick column on the front page to a trial for indecent language in Castlereagh on November 10th, 1928. ‘The police had to repeat a rapid succession of very blanky words …“Every second word was practically a swear word,” said one witness. “It would scarcely be correct to say that language that was given in evidence … was ‘blue’. It was a much deeper shade – perhaps a dark purple.” ’2

  And in another trial, this time of a man accused of stabbing his neighbour in the face, head and side with a broken bottle, reported in the Recorder from Port Pirie in South Australia on January 21st, 1938: ‘Leighton admitted that he had about a “couple of rows a week with his wife,” during which the language became “purple,” and that he had smacked his wife in the face.’3 (In this case, the swearing, smacking Leighton was the victim, not the accused. It seems that, even in the 1930s, the victim was also on trial.)

  I did not grow up in Charters Towers or Penrith or Port Pirie, but I bet we would have used the word ‘purple’ the same way back home. We lived in Morningside, a suburb of Brisbane with the feeling of a small town in the 70s, and I sometimes sensed that women wouldn’t linger on the street or at the school gate with my mother for fear they’d catch cursing like a leprous rash. It was never a question of her intent: it was unrelated to a wish to offend. I never felt embarrassed by her language. She was simply the way she was. If anyone had asked her, she would have said, I don’t know who makes up these stupid fucking rules, but I didn’t vote for them so I’ll speak the way I fucking well choose.

  In this, she’s identified the arbitrariness of swearing, something I’ve always been intrigued by. It’s always seemed to me that many societal taboos are more about power than righteousness. Who did make up these stupid fucking rules? What makes ‘intercourse’ more acceptable than ‘fuck’, and ‘faeces’ more acceptable than ‘shit’? Is it simply an undefinable malice behind the syllables, or does it betray our deep societal inhibitions? Or perhaps it’s simply a quick and shallow means of class identification: easy generalising for fun and profit, in our allegedly classless society.

  The acceptability of swearing is also deeply gendered. My mother, despite her years as a successful small business–owner and single mother, was a long way from being a feminist, but the idea that certain words are not considered ‘ladylike’ would have made her wild. It makes me wild. In your box, ladies. Certain words, and the emotions that may or may not lie behind them, like rage or free expression, are not for the likes of you. And the fact that our most heinous term of abuse is slang for female genitals? When we open our mouths without self-censorship, humans reveal our deepest selves and our values. All of us.

  That’s not the end of my mother’s wisdom about swearing. Despite her talent across the spectrum of profanity, fuck was by far her favourite. She sometimes said, What other word has the same fucking meaning and gives the same relief as fuck? Not one, not that I fucking know of. If you slam your finger in a cupboard, do you think that saying blast or damn will make it feel better? Fuck that!

  Try it, next time you slam your finger in a cupboard. You’ll find that she was right. In a study that is both elegant and hilarious, published in NeuroReport in 2009, researchers from Keele University in Staffordshire somehow enticed students to hold their hands in ice-water and repeat either a neutral word or an expletive of their choice. The researchers then measured their perception of pain. Not only did the swearers feel less pain, but they were able to hold their hands in the ice-water for about forty seconds longer than the prudes.

  This study was not all good news though, especially for people like my mother. The researchers noted that frequent swearing dampened the effect. They surmised that, when swearwords are used more frequently, they lose their emotional intensity. It’s this emotional intensity that triggers a part of the limbic system deep in the temporal lobe, called the amygdala, to initiate the fight-or-flight response that reduces sensitivity to pain.4 For best results, then, save your cussing for when you really need it.

  Now that I am a full-time writer of fiction, listening to the way people speak is a part of my job. I think I’ve always listened, actually. Since I was a child, this idea that my mother spoke differently from other people has sharpened my sense of the meaning behind the words, of the way that character is revealed, subtly but true, in the words that we use, the unconscious part of our expression. If I wrote a character like my mother, I’d establish her strongly at the beginning with a few sentences of her exact vocabulary, but I wouldn’t continue with it. I believe in ‘getting a character in’ early on, hard and strong, and then removing things that will distract the reader as the piece continues. If I’ve done my job properly, the reader knows what that character’s about. I don’t need to beat it to death. Readers make suitable adjustments as they go on, and just as well, because if I were to type in every single fuck in every single sentence, I’d be a geriatric with RSI before I finished. If my mother was a character, for every: For God’s sake I attribute to her, the reader would mentally substitute: For fuck’s sake. Pop a fuck between every other word, and the odd fuckkity fuck fuck.

  Still, for many people, even this truncated voice is a step too far. One thing I know from speaking to readers around the country is many readers are offended by fictional characters who swear. I’m often stopped in libraries and festivals by readers to tell me about the decline in standards, the laziness of writers, the general debasement of language and values as evidenced by swearing in fiction. As a novelist, I’m trying to replicate real life, or some altered version of it. In real life, people swear – but many people don’t find this argument convincing. For some, it is instead evidence of our moral decay. We’re all going to hell in a handbasket, basically.

  This, of course, ignores the etymology of words like fuck, which likely dates from the fifteenth century. My mother always told me that fuck meant ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’, a sign hung about the necks of convicted adulterers as they awaited their shower of rotting fruit in the stocks, but there doesn’t seem much evidence for that. The real orig
in seems undetermined, regardless of the enthusiastic researches of vulgarophiles the world over; this might be because the very nature of curses precluded written records, despite their prevalence in speech. Even Shakespeare, not normally considered bashful, shied away. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sir Hugh Evans is testing William on his Latin conjunctions, but himself mispronounces ‘vocative’ case:

  Sir Hugh Evans: What is the focative case, William?

  William: O, vocativo, O …

  Sir Hugh Evans: Remember, William, focative is caret.

  Mistress Quickly: And that’s a good root.5

  I’m no Shakespearean scholar so I could be reading all these entirely wrong, but this, in Henry V, also seems awfully close. Pistol is interrogating a captured French soldier, with the aid of an interpreter:

  French Soldier: Monsieur le Fer.

  Boy: He says his name is Master Fer.

  Pistol: Master Fer! I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him: discuss the same in French unto him.

  Boy: I do not know the French for fer, and ferret, and firk.6

  Shakespeare’s most famous example of copulatory description is, of course, this from Othello:

  Iago: I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.7

  This doesn’t suit my purposes, though. Iago is being a shit all right, and trying to piss Brabantio off in the crudest way possible, but he’s still describing an act rather than peppering his language with profanity. Information rather than ejaculation, as it were.

  I don’t feel that the recent easing of taboos about bad language reflects anything upon our moral nature other than humankind’s glorious tendency to adore breaking rules. I certainly never felt that my mother’s swearing reflected upon her character in any way.

  Now my mother is a widow in her seventies, and I live two thousand kilometres away. She spends some of her days with her grandchildren, my niece and nephew, and she reads to them and speaks to them in plain, pure words. She sets no bad examples. Once a month she has an outing: lunch with the other white-haired women in her retirement village. By this I gather she has made friends, by this I assume she no longer speaks the way she did when she was younger, because her ‘village’ seems a proper place to live, and she seems surrounded by proper people. When we speak on the phone, she seems calmer. There is a new peace to her, now she has travelled most of her road. She makes me think of my favourite quote on ageing. This is Virginia Woolf, from Mrs Dalloway:

  The compensation of growing old … [is] … that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, – the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.8

  That’s good for my mother, of course. It’s great. I’m happy for her. Imagine gaining nothing from the experience of all those years, imagine being the same raging, spouting volcano in your seventies as you were in your twenties. That would be a tragedy.

  There is, however, a resignation in my mother now. It feels as though she is no longer at the height of her powers. Some of my fondest memories of her during my childhood remain the sheer vibrancy of her language and the fireworks of her eruptions. In her younger years she was utterly original, in spirit and in voice, and she showed the world who she was through the individuality of her casual utterances and the way she made people freeze and still without laying a hand upon them. In a sea of pale and beige words, she was always in technicolour. She was utterly authentic, completely natural. If there was one trait of my mother’s I wish I could inherit, it was this: her lack of self-consciousness.

  There was also a raw power to the way she spoke. When I was a child and there were no men in my life, I always felt safe with her, like she was armed with something visceral, like she would never be a victim. Perhaps this is why she began swearing during her first pregnancy: she was a small, thin woman protecting her baby in the best way she could. She’s earned her rest, I know, but I miss the energy when her purple words went flying.

  Into the Whipstick – Anne Manne

  I am concentrating. I am puffing and growing red-faced with the effort of pulling my ninety-year-old mother out of my little car. Mum has grown heavier with age, and her muscles are now weak. She is trying to heave herself up out of the seat and into a standing position. Both my feet are planted firmly either side of the car door, her hands on my wrists, mine on hers. She rises, then collapses back. We start again. Foolishly, I have parked on a slight slope and her door has to open slightly up a hill. It is hard enough getting my mother out of the car on flat ground. We are weakening our effort by laughing. Finally, I winch her out.

  We are standing in the middle of a great forest, called the Whipstick, in Central Victoria. It is a huge stretch of ironbark forest on flat terrain, thick scrubby bush interspersed with great tracts of ominous, dark-trunked gums, threaded with paths of ochre-coloured clay. There is no easy beauty here, except in the springtime, when suddenly the undergrowth blooms with wildflowers. I am travelling up each week from Melbourne to see my mother, after a hectic year of work. I bring her here and every time the predominant bloom changes, now yellow, or cream, or pink flowers on bushes or ground covers, spreading puffballs of colour against the dark bark of the trees. I collect Mum from the nursing home, slip in a CD playing an opera and turn it up very loud, because she is now profoundly deaf. Sometimes we pause at the lights with some lout next to us with a heavy metal beat pulsing out of his car. I turn up the volume and outdo him, and zoom off, Puccini soaring, sunlight flashing through the trees. My mother taps happily on her knees in time to the music, occasionally raising her arm in an airy, conductor’s wave.

  This week we have spotted a new flower, a little in the distance. The rain has made the clay bright orange and spongy, the dams and small creeks are swollen, and there are large, milky brown puddles to navigate. Mum’s walking trolley sinks into the ground, leaving wheel marks. I am watching her every step as closely as one watches a toddler taking their first steps. I am anxious. The risk is that, having got her out of the car, I won’t get her back into it. Or she falls and I can’t get her up again, out here in the bush, miles from anywhere. Finally we get there, to the Holy Grail of wildflowers. It is a delicate, pale purple orchid. We are exultant.

  Back in the car I hand her a chocolate brownie. I have discovered my mother loves sweet things after a lifetime of apparent indifference to fine food. I am afraid I throw health piety to the winds and bring her chocolates, KitKats, Tim Tams … She polishes them off with relish – crumbs flying every which way. It has taken me a while to work out what kind of outing gives her pleasure. She is as puncturing of other people’s good intentions as ever. Delicious lunches come and go without comment. With my daughter, I took her to the local art gallery to see a magnificent exhibition of Greek statues and artefacts from the British Museum. She looked hard at one of the two-thousand-year-old marble statues, with people cooing enchantment left and right. Unimpressed, she frowned and said, ‘It is very … small.’

  When we return to the nursing home I wonder if she will remember these trips. But I dismiss it. Slowly I have learned that whether my mother remembers something is irrelevant. We all assume something like an inner camera recording experience and laying down memories is what makes an experience worthwhile. That is not really true. Long before the capacity for language or explicit memory develops, a very young child feels pleasure at a mother’s embrace and the warmth and bright pricking light of a sunbeam, long before they can put a name to the sensation or can remember what happens. The feeling of what happens – benign, pleasurable, vibrant, or angry, cold, hard – can be enough. For an older adult losing their memory, the ‘feeling of what happens’ is again enough, even as they may not remember actual events. Our relation to experience can even be corrupted by the idea we must remember what happens or it is not worthwhile. And yet the consequences of good experiences are there. Without exactly being
conscious of it at the time, I realise later my visits have been not only busy with practical aspects of care, but purposive in another way. I want my mother to inhabit that part of herself where she experiences being fully alive to the world. The best way, I have discovered through trial and error, is to give her music and take her out into nature. Out here in the vast, unending landscape of the Whipstick forest, there are no complaints.

  If I were on an imaginary psychoanalyst’s couch, doing a word association, the word which would fly out of my mouth at the prompt of the word purple would be fidelity.

  The next word would be grief. I first really knew when she held up a standard kitchen grater that she had been using for eighty years and said, ‘What is this?’ I paused from packing away the shopping, lifting my head out of the vegetable drawer of the fridge. I was staring at it, staring at her. The world wheeled sideways and for the briefest of moments the shock made time slow. The room went dark and then came back into focus. She was still waiting for my answer. Then I mustered a frozen smile and deliberately changed my voice so it did not register the inward shock, the ‘Oh no,’ and instead spoke in the rueful tone of humorous indulgence we might use for a loved one’s everyday foibles. ‘Mum,’ I said, as if amused, ‘that is a grater.’ I made light of it. But later sitting in the car I covered my face with my hands and wept, giving full recognition to the meaning of not just that moment, but all the other moments of her growing thinner and thinner before I took over meal production, of sand to repel ants spread all over the kitchen benches, of multiple phone calls and visits to sort out leaking roofs and simple maintenance, of minor car accidents and getting lost trying to find the street of her book club that she had been going to for many years. My highly intelligent mother was losing her memory.