What the F

by Benjamin K. Bergen

  And finally, the third factor in a word’s success is in no small measure who is using it—the status of its users and how they’re connected within the network of people who make up a language community. Even assuming that you have a good innovation, which satisfies a particular linguistic niche and is intrinsically promising, that doesn’t guarantee it will spread throughout a population. Changes disperse through a language community in somewhat predictable ways. They spread first among people who talk to each other most and especially those who identify as belonging to the same social groups. We can quantify this in studies of how linguistic innovations spread over social media. For instance, one recent paper looked at what predicted whether a new word used by people in one city would spread to other cities.12 The researchers found that cities closer to each other are more likely to share new words and, in addition, that similar socioeconomic and ethnic makeups increase the likelihood that a change will spread between populations. So both geography and demographic similarity are important. We can interpret this to mean that changes will spread among people who communicate with, and think they’re similar to, each other.

  But change doesn’t flow in every direction equally. In any group—kids hanging around a locker room, coworkers hanging around the break room, or gamers hanging around an online chat room—individuals will be unequally dominant or influential. If the more influential ones use language in a new way, then others are likely to follow suit. Of course, the changes don’t spread as fast in the other direction. Differential influence has the most outsized effects in the mass media. Stephen Colbert can coin a term (and does frequently), then use it on his television show, and it will catch on, whereas one of his millions of fans will never enjoy the same success, no matter how hard he or she yells at the screen. Many profane words gain traction through the media.

  But this doesn’t necessarily mean that’s always where those words originated. For instance, many people believe the word MILF to be the brainchild of the writers of the 1999 movie American Pie, in which the acronym is spelled out amid boisterous chanting by teenage boys. But a little Internet sleuthing reveals that it dates to at least a few years earlier. The earliest attested use I was able to find dates from 1995, in a usenet post about a Playboy spread. Here’s the usenet post I foundd (though this might not be the earliest use—T. J. Kelleher reports an instance several years earlier in a slang dictionary by University of California, Los Angeles, linguistics students13):

  I contacted Mr. Andreano to ask where he thinks the word originated but didn’t hear back from him. In case you’re concerned that including his name here is a violation of his privacy, I was too, and I originally was going to anonymize the post. But I changed my mind for two reasons. First, the post is accessible online; a search that includes even a little of the text of the message will reveal the author’s signature. And second, I thought it would be a useful reminder that everything you do online will remain publicly accessible in perpetuity.

  WOW! I saw the pictorial in the Feb issue and boy was I impressed.

  Those moms are babes!! Almost unbelieveable [sic], especially that union worker one towards the front, you almost have to look twice . . .

  We have a term for it around here, its [sic] called “MILF”

  It stands for “Mothers I’d Like to Fuck.”

  Maybe that is what they should have titled the section :)

  -Just my $0.02

  Mike

  Michael Andreano Chi Phi Fraternity

  Hoboken, NJ Stevens Insititute [sic] of Technology

  Although the term had a life prior to the movie, its current popularity no doubt results from its use on screen rather than on a Playboy fan newsgroup. Likewise, the popularity of the word Johnson for “penis” exploded after it appeared in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. But just as MILF has roots preceding the release of the movie, so the Nihilists in The Big Lebowski were far from the first people to talk about harm to people’s Johnsons. Take a look at the following entry from Walter Butler Cheadle’s Journal of a Trip Across Canada, which predates the 1998 Coen Brothers film and describes an expedition from Quebec across the Canadian Rockies to British Columbia: “Neck frozen. Face ditto; tights ditto; Johnson ditto, & sphincter vesicae partially paralyzed.” Walter Cheadle put pen to frigid paper to write that journal entry in 1863.14

  In modern times, it’s comparatively easier to track how words disseminate throughout a speech community. For instance, we know that ctfu (“cracking the fuck up”) spread mostly from Cleveland to a number of other mid-Atlantic cities, as you can see in the figure on the next page.15 And we know this because people leave quantifiable records of their language use in the form of GPS-coded tweets.

  But we have no such luxury for changes that occurred in the deep history of English—pre-Internet. So we know little about exactly how cock’s new meaning spread throughout the English-speaking world starting in the fifteenth century. But we do know what niche it filled. Every language has a way to describe human sexual organs. They’re pretty important, culturally, biologically, personally. It seems reasonable to assume that the new use of cock was somewhat motivated—there’s a passing similarity between a rooster and a penis—and we now know that as a closed monosyllable, it conforms to the sound pattern of English taboo words. We don’t know, however, who used it first or how it spread. It’s very likely that it diffused through networks of people talking to one another, where the status of the people using the word influenced its ultimate success. And mass media of the day—songs and poems and eventually books and newspapers, for instance—may have played a role, as they do to this day in spreading changes in a language.

  Step three: all the action is in the reaction

  So we’ve arrived at the point in our story where a previously unremarkable word has gained a new meaning that has spread within a language community. Dick now means not only Richard but also penis, and a lot of people are using it this way. But to be clear, these words have not yet become profane. Dick and cock came to refer to the penis in the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, but those shifts by themselves didn’t make the words profane. Fuck has referred to sexual intercourse since at least the fourteenth century, but it only became so taboo as to disappear from the correspondence of upper-class ladies at the end of the eighteenth century.16

  Tracking the use of ctfu over time via GPS-coded tweets. Source: J. Eisenstein et al. (2014).

  The same is true of the word cunt. It had been in general use for centuries with the meaning “vagina” before people began to find it offensive. In fact, it was apparently of such widespread and untainted use in early English that it even appeared in people’s names. The Oxford English Dictionary lists several names built from cunt, like John Fillecunt (1246), Robert Clevecunt (1302), and Bele Wydecunthe (1328). Cunt also appeared in placenames. It was a long-standing tradition in England to name streets after the economic activities that predominated on them. This produced names like Silver Street and Fish Street. And in many English towns of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, when prostitution was concentrated in specific places, these streets were commonly named some variant of Gropecunt Lane. Let’s be clear: that’s Gropecunt, as in grope plus cunt.17 Not very subtle, England. And cunt was so pervasive because, at the time, the word was a straightforward and inoffensive description of female genitalia. It even shows up in Middle English medical texts like Lanfrank’s Science of Cirurgie18 from AD 1400:

  In wymmen þe necke of þe bladdre is schort, & is maad fast to the cunte.

  “In women, the neck of the bladder is short, and is made fast to the cunt.”

  This shows that becoming profane is a social change, not a semantic one. Like other human behaviors, language use is at the whim of cultural beliefs, norms, expectations, and prohibitions. Consider the way that norms for acceptable attire change over time and from culture to culture. We often think of history as making inexorable progress toward increased freedom, and you can take, for
instance, norms about how people dress at the beach as an example of this, from Victorian full-body tunics through the bikini and speedo a hundred years later. But clothing norms ebb and flow. Over the last several decades, Afghanistan and Iran, for example, have seen substantial decreases in the parts of the body—particularly the female body—that people can acceptably show in public. The same goes for other behaviors, which are accepted or prohibited differently over time and across cultures. For example, spitting on the ground is illegal in Hong Kong, where it carries a fine of thousands of dollars, while Taiwanese people consider spitting out bones onto the table or floor while eating preferable to using their hands.

  The point is that while beliefs about what behaviors are permissible in what contexts may often have some moral, spiritual, religious, scientific, or medical foundation, they’re also culturally relative. What’s sanctioned in one place, or at one time, or when done by one person might be socially unacceptable in other circumstances. And so it is with language.

  There are different reasons why people at a given time or place might find a word unacceptable. Perhaps they find it offensive because it leads to thoughts that they don’t wish to have—about taboo concepts, for instance. Or perhaps they find the word insulting to them or a social group they belong to. (We’ll look in more detail at slurs and where they come from in Chapter 10.) These personal feelings about acceptable behavior become social norms when enough people engage in actions that constrain the behavior. Everything from public indecency laws down to muttered indications of displeasure enforce norms about clothing or spitting: Can you believe he’s wearing THAT? And these same types of enforcement take linguistic innovations—new words or new ways of using words—into the realm of profanity. Marginalizing a word through direct interpersonal action, like ostracizing or punishing people who use it, or indirectly through social and state actors that impose censorship will render those words profane.

  Step four: the balance shifts

  Once a word has gained additional meaning and once that additional meaning has come to be socially proscribed, as happened for dick and cock, the new meaning starts to color any use of the word. When words have multiple meanings, as many words do, it’s often impossible to use them in one way without activating other possible interpretations in people’s heads. For example, when you hear a news anchor tie up a report featuring a variety of exotic animals, including a lion, by saying, “Nice pussy!”19 it’s simply impossible to contain your interpretation to the single, intended sense of pussy. You shouldn’t feel guilty about this. It’s just how your brain works. When a word has multiple meanings, you systematically and automatically activate the different meanings, regardless of whether the speaker intended them or not.20

  This is equally true for cock and dick. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Dick was living parallel lives. At the same time that it was referring to sexual organs, there were still children, adolescents, and adults named Dick. The word had several meanings. That led to confusion, some unintentional, some quite deliberate. For an example of what I can only imagine is the latter, enjoy the actual campaign button for Richard Nixon reproduced on the next page.

  This effect—the spontaneous activation of the multiple meanings of a word—is so overwhelming that only under the rarest conspiracy of conditions does pussy evoke only the thought of a cat.21 For that to happen, the context has to be strongly compatible with the intended sense but totally incompatible with the unintended one. What a nice pussy is compatible with both interpretations, and you really have to stretch your imagination to find contexts only consistent with the feline one. Perhaps I predict that my cat is going to give birth to a calico pussy would be an example. But maybe not. And second, in order for the unintended sense to remain out of mind, it has to be a peripheral and infrequent sense of the word. The genitalia sense of pussy does not currently qualify as peripheral and infrequent. Tea-bag might be a better example of a word that, at least for many people, has an infrequent and peripheral profane sense. But profane senses for words can become central quickly. As we saw earlier, profanity grows deep roots into the brain’s emotion systems. Merely seeing or hearing a word that has a profane meaning activates this meaning immediately, context be damned. There’s no number of cat videos that would keep pussy from activating the other meaning in your mind.

  Source: Gene Dillman of Old Politicals Auctions, www.oldpoliticals.com.

  And people seem to know this, whether consciously or unconsciously. Double entendres make use of this very feature of human language processing. Writers play on it all the time. The James Bond character Pussy Galore was not thus named blithely. On The Simpsons, in an early episode (“Treehouse of Horrors III”), Marge is about to board a ship, at which point Smithers (Mr. Burns’s assistant of ambiguous sexuality) comments, “I think that women and seamen don’t mix.” Mr. Burns’s response: “We know what you think.”e

  The astute linguist will have noticed that this is actually an example of homonymy—seamen and semen are distinct words that happen to be pronounced similarly. Nonetheless, taboo homonyms, as you can tell, exert the same tug on the mind that words with multiple senses do.

  The safest strategy for the speaker who doesn’t want to make a verbal misstep is simply to avoid those words in general that have a possible second meaning. I know that I for one simply don’t ever use the word pussy to refer to a cat, period. I don’t refer to a rooster as a cock. I will call my dog a bitch, but that’s always with malice aforethought, and I only do it when I think the audience will be forgiving or when I want to be a little edgy.

  So the consequence is this: When words acquire new meanings through natural processes of meaning extension, and when those new meanings are profane, then to the extent that speakers feel that those profane meanings will have negative consequences, they’ll start to use the words only when the profane meaning is what they intend. And they’ll avoid using the word with the original meaning. In the case of Dick, we can see why some people might find the ambiguity untenable. By the 1960s, it came to a head. The profane use was too much to overcome, and people gave up on Dick as a name. Similarly, we can presume that something similar happened with cock—that at some point, the profane meaning overwhelmed the original galline one.

  And just like that, the balance can shift, often quite quickly, from an older meaning to a new one. This is something special—or at least particularly pronounced—about profanity. We don’t readily see it with nonprofane word change. For instance, although cell now refers not just to a jail room and the basic structural unit of biological organisms but also to the thing in your pocket that you watch cat videos on, this hasn’t led us to stop using the word cell in its old senses as well. Same with mobile, which used to (and still does) describe the thing hanging over a crib, even though it now also refers to the cat video machine in your pocket (although some people might pronounce the two mobiles differently). That’s not to say that new meanings can’t usurp old ones unless they’re profane. Certainly they can. But they’re not as likely to do so, and they don’t do so as quickly or as completely.

  To be clear, this shift doesn’t have to happen. Although the earlier senses of cock and dick have largely fallen out of favor in American English, most other varieties of English have exhibited no such shift. Cock is still in favor as the default term for the rooster in most varieties of English spoken in Great Britain, for example. Clearly, in some times and places, speakers of particular language varieties are more comfortable with unintended innuendo. But the situation is unstable.

  Step five: the replacements

  So we’ve seen how, once a word gains a new, profane meaning, this new meaning can start to push out the old one. But this leaves a logical gap in the language. You need a way to refer to roosters, and you need a nickname for Richards. What do you do?

  Sometimes, there’s already a good alternative out there. As we saw, when Dick grew a new meaning, Rick stepped up and took its place. (You can see this in the S
SA naming data chart. Ever since 1970, there have been more Ricks than Dicks.) Similarly, as broad came to have a derogatory connotation for a woman, it was replaced in the name of the track-and-field event that became, in the late 1960s, the long jump. And although it’s a little cumbersome, female dog has largely (but not entirely) replaced bitch.

  In other cases, there doesn’t already exist a viable alternative to a word that has been made unusable in polite contexts. In this case, you have no other recourse than to make up a new word. People make up new words all the time in certain regular ways.

  Although rooster seems like a word that should be as old as English, as we’ve seen, it’s a relatively recent addition. The first recorded use dates from 1772, in the diary of a Boston schoolgirl.22 The word was actually manufactured by design. It was the end of the eighteenth century, and the balance of cock had shifted to the point where its “male member” meaning had gained prominence. As a result, to simply talk about a rooster, puritanical Americans had to tread delicately around this second taboo meaning of cock. So they simply invented a new word, rooster. And the way they did it was pretty straightforward. They already had the word roost at their disposal, which, as it still does, described the place where chickens hang out. There was also a verb to roost, which denoted the action of hanging out in that place. And these linguistic innovators figured that just adding -er to the end, in the normal way that English is fond of, would create a new word that described something that roosts without the “penis” meaning attached. And they were right. Rooster has been largely free of profane connotations for the two hundred or so years it’s been around.