This rule allowing us to add -er to a verb to create a new noun is particularly robust in English and pervades both profane and nonprofane language. Other mundane examples are catcher and pencil sharpener, and profane ones include cock-blocker, shit-eater, and muff-diver. But the application of a rule to generate a new word is only part of the story. Subsequently, rooster and all these other constructed words have to come to be used with this specific new meaning. They have to become “conventionalized”—the linguistic community has to decide that this word will be preferentially interpreted as having this specific meaning. We now agree, by convention, that rooster refers just to the adult male chicken and not to anything that happens to be on a roost. For instance, if an egg or a nest were on a roost, we wouldn’t refer to it as a rooster. It’s the same with other words invented using normal English processes. Cock-blocker has become a conventionalized word in English. We can tell because it has a specific meaning—it only refers to one type of cock (the type without feathers) and only to blocking of (and not by) that cock. Motherfucker is another word created using the same noun-verb-er template in surprisingly recent history; it is first recorded in the twentieth century!23 But since then, it has come into very frequent use and now merits being considered a word in its own right. And like rooster and cock-blocker, motherfucker has a specific, conventional set of meanings.
Adding a suffix to an existing word, as in these cases, isn’t the only way to coin new words, of course. As we’ve already seen, totally new words can sprout in a language, assembled from the generative grammatical and lexical resources that the language makes available. Some are constructed by blending together existing words—merging them together to form a new, socalled portmanteau word that sounds something like a combination of them. For instance, mangina is a blend of man and vagina. In the same way, fucking and ugly give us fugly, and pornography plus cornucopia yield pornucopia.
Any of these tools for innovating words can create replacements for words tainted by new, profane meanings and can fill a gap in the language.
So, to take stock of where we are, we’ve now seen that banal words can change meaning to the point where they are candidates for becoming taboo. In the eventuality that this happens, people start to avoid using the words in their earlier senses and need to find or create a replacement, which the language in general provides various tools for. One small change in the meaning of one word can have downstream consequences for other words as well.
Step six: minced oaths
There’s another way around using profane words—another externality of words becoming taboo. Once people start avoiding a word in certain circumstances, what do they say instead? Let’s say you’re in pain because you slammed your finger in a car door. Or you’re angry because your neighbor is laughing at you for slamming your finger in the car door. This is prime profanity territory. And yet, if for reasons personal, religious, cultural, or otherwise, you decide that an expletive fuck! or shit! is out of line, then what do you do?
One option is to say something that sounds like a particular taboo word but isn’t, like frick or dang. These are known as “minced oaths.” Sometimes these minced oaths are actual, existing words used in new ways, like shoot or fudge. They get more elaborate, too, like cheese and rice! as a minced oath for Jesus Christ! or Shut the front door! to replace Shut the fuck up! But minced oaths can also be entirely new words. For example, over the years, people have come up with novel ways to avoid saying Jesus Christ, like sheesh, gee whiz, or crickey. Other invented minced oaths like gosh, shucks, and frig sound equally similar to the words they’re used instead of.
There’s a fine line to walk with minced oaths. They have to sound similar enough to their taboo target to be recognized as standing in for it. But they have to be different enough for the speaker to maintain plausible deniability—no, of course I didn’t mean that filthy word (wink, wink). Quite often, the sounds at the front end of a minced oath are similar to the taboo word they’re shadowing, as in the examples above. This might be related to the strategy that some people with coprolalia deploy—reshaping an expletive once it’s started.
But minced oaths can also rhyme with the profane words they’re replacing, and some of the most elaborate minced oaths to be found occur in a British form of slang called Cockney rhyming slang.24 This linguistic art form starts by taking an expression that rhymes with a swearword. For instance, Richard the Third rhymes with turd. Cattle truck rhymes with fuck. So that expression comes to stand as a sort of minced oath for the profane word. But rhyming slang takes it one step further and uses some other, nonrhyming word from the same expression as a disguised cue for the whole thing. So instead of saying cattle truck or just truck to mean fuck, people say cattle. To mean fuck. Got it? OK, England, that’s a little subtler.
A more concise strategy is to abbreviate the profane word. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the now rather tame (but formerly very profane) zounds is an abbreviation of God’s wounds. In the most extreme case, the offending word is reduced to a single letter, as in acronyms. WTF or MILF take the first letters of the words in taboo expressions. Other similar cases are BJ and T&A. And for the most potent words, we can even refer to them simply by one letter. The F-word isn’t the only word in English that starts with F—it’s not even close to being the most frequent one. (That crown belongs to for, which is among the top twenty most frequent words in English.)25 Nor are the C-word or the N-word particularly outstanding representatives of the language, except in terms of their offensiveness. These acronyms can be used to refer to the words in question (He said the N-word!), but they can also be used as replacements for the words themselves in normal use. For instance, F replaces fuck in expressions like F off! or F you in the A! or, of course, What the F?
Minced oaths and abbreviations have the advantage of preserving enough of the sound or spelling of the unsaid term that the sufficiently perspicacious audience can easily retrieve the intended but unsaid word. But some situations warrant a more delicate approach. If you don’t want to be on the hook for even having thought about the profane word that you subsequently didn’t say, then you need a euphemism. For example, people often want to avoid talking about death directly using the word die. Instead, they retreat to words and expressions that refer to the concept indirectly, such as to pass on or to leave us. Similarly, talking about the male member as a Johnson or a wiener is a way to euphemistically avoid overtly vulgar language.
As a case in point, below you can see a whole stable of words and expressions that all refer to broadly the same thing but with varying degrees of likelihood of offending sensibilities. The words and expressions toward the top, like powder my nose and visit the ladies’ room are euphemisms. They tend to incorporate words that do not refer directly to the described act but instead mention related, innocuous activities.
powder my nose
visit the ladies’ room
go to the bathroom
use the toilet
defecate
take a shit
cop a squat
do some paperwork
drop the kids off at the pool
pinch off a loaf
As you work your way down to the bottom of the list, you find ways to describe the same act much more vividly. These terms at the bottom go as far toward impropriety as the euphemisms at the top of the list go away from it. They’re filling another niche. Whereas the euphemisms at the top fulfill the desire to describe a taboo topic in the most linguistically hygienic way possible, the dysphemisms at the bottom satisfy an urge to offend, impress, or entertain through lurid, evocative language. Oftentimes they describe vivid details of the described event (like squat or pinch). Sometimes they metaphorically describe the activity in terms of something else that itself evokes vivid imagery (like loaf). This makes for language that’s particularly graphic, creative, or descriptive, while crucially not being strictly profane. A child who says she needs to pinch off a loaf might be chastised for being disgusting bu
t not due to any of the specific words she selected. Dysphemisms abound, especially around taboo topics. In place of to die, people might choose to use stronger words like to croak, to bite it, to eat it. And for our current purposes, the most important bit is that in all of these cases, the meanings of existing words have been extended to cover new ground—croak now means more than just “to make a croaking sound.”
Dysphemisms are just the other side of the same coin that euphemisms and minced oaths are embossed on. Profane words have external effects on the rest of the language, as people scramble to not say, or say without saying, or say even better, words that they know are taboo.
Step seven: change is the only constant
Words continue to change throughout their lifespans—becoming profane isn’t an end point but a waypoint. This is clearly visible in the histories of dick and cock. For instance, even after gaining anatomical meanings, they came also to refer to an unpleasant person. And although that person originally had to be male, recent usage shows that for some English speakers, maleness is not a prerequisite to being labeled with one of these words; nor does it necessarily shield one from being addressed as bitch or cunt.
Even more radical changes are apparent in the history of profanity. Some words change their grammatical category, or part of speech. Of course, we’ve already seen how dick and many other profane words have become vulgar minimizers in expressions like You don’t know dick. But that’s just the beginning. Although dick and cock started their lives as nouns—referring to things—they soon came to be used as verbs as well. Cock gained its verb use—to cock—in the seventeenth century, and dick was verbed, as in to dick around or to dick someone over, only in the twentieth century. And other examples abound. For instance, tea-bag now acts as a verb as well as a noun, as in Dave fell asleep at the party so Ray tea-bagged him. (That means that Ray put his scrotum on Dave—and knowing the two of them, there’s probably a picture of it somewhere.) English, as it turns out, is particularly prolific at verbing nouns or nouning verbs. Conversions from one grammatical category to another generate new meanings. In the recent history of the language, the noun nut (which had previously been extended metaphorically to mean “testicle”) has also been verbed, perhaps via the expression to bust a nut, to become the verb to nut, meaning “to ejaculate.”
And like all things, profane words eventually meet their end, ultimately fading away into banality and then obscurity. In the fifteenth century, the word swive (meaning “screw”) was used similarly to our modern-day word fuck. But you’ve probably never heard it because it’s disappeared since and in fact hasn’t been used in hundreds of years, except perhaps in heated exchanges between impassioned maidens fighting over a mutton chop behind the bleachers at the Renaissance Faire.
Swive isn’t the only profane word we’ve lost. You’ve probably never been called a fart-sucker. But that used to be a common term to describe the same thing as brown-noser, for reasons that you can surely surmise. And the list of now obsolete profanity goes on . . . zounds and gadzooks, which we’ve already discussed, as well as others, like consarn, which means something like damn, as in consarn it! You can see zounds wane over time in the chart on the next page (swive predates it by several centuries, where the written record is far sparser). Zounds had its moment in the 1800s, but by 1900, it had begun to peter out. Today, cunt is clearly in vogue. But this too will most likely pass, though probably not during this century.
Profanity has been in flux for all of recorded English history. And it still is. The reason relates to the effects profanity has on people and the effort it takes to maintain those effects.
The decline of zounds and the rise of cunt.
Let me flesh that out. Using a profane word has an impact on people who have strong emotional associations with that word. But that impact weakens as a function of use. The first time you heard shit on television (possibly on the cartoon South Park), it was probably jarring—like the first time you bit into a chili pepper. But with uncensored cable television, podcasts, and social media now using the word de rigueur, your tolerance for this linguistic spiciness has increased. You might not even notice when you hear it. The more a profane word is used, the less impact it will come to have. But those words whose use is still restricted, like cunt, nigger, and to some extent fuck, continue to pack a punch. At least they do now. As they come to be used more, my best educated guess is that they’ll fade into innocuousness and then into obscurity, just like swive and zounds.
And so, as sad as it seems, by every indication the days of dick and cock are numbered. There may well be a time in the not-too-distant future when little Dicks once again play in the schoolyard next to Peters and Willies, innocent to what their names once meant. At the same time, while we can’t predict which they will be, we can be assured that other words will rise to fill the gaps dick and cock have left unoccupied in the ecology of the language.
8
Little Samoan Potty Mouths
There’s a good chance you know what your first word was. Mine, for what it’s worth, was apparently tick-tock. I say “apparently” because, like you, I have no personal recollection of anything that happened when I was twelve months old. You and I, like everyone else, only know what our first words were because parents and relatives have told and retold the stories of these words like the revealing pieces of our identities they’re believed to be. After all, a child’s first word is a critical developmental milestone. But whereas there’s little to distinguish your first smile or first step from mine, a first word reveals something unique about the individual. We tend to believe that what a child says first tells us something about her burgeoning mental life, about her values or interests. A child who says tick-tock might be particularly interested in sounds or mechanical devices or might be in a hurry. A child who says the dog’s name first (like my son did) might have a future as a biologist or might think the dog is more interesting than his parents.
So we care a lot about children’s first words, especially when we are personally invested caregivers. Words for dogs and clocks are actually relatively rare first words for English-speaking children. Far more often, children first name one of their parents. A 2010 poll conducted in Great Britain found that a full 63 percent of parents reported that their children said some variant of dada or mama as their first word. And probably not in the proportions you think. In that poll, 25 percent of children were reported to have articulated a variant of mama (including mom and mommy) as their first word, but fully 38 percent started with some variant of dada (including dad and daddy).1
The fact that most English-speaking children ostensibly first produce the name of a parent, caregiver, or other family member makes intuitive sense to a lot of people because it comports nicely with our belief that these people are the most important parts of the child’s developing universe. But interest alone can’t fully account for what words a child produces first. After all, we have no reason to believe that children who say dada before mama are more interested in their fathers or love them more than their mothers. Frequency of exposure might also play a role. In those cases where a mother talks to the child more than a father does, she might say names for other people (like dada, for instance) more frequently than for herself. Higher frequency of exposure to dada than mama could make learning dada first more likely. And for that matter, maybe some words are easier than others for a one-year-old to pronounce.
All in all, it’s quite hard to say why a child articulates a particular word as his or her first. And when we move beyond English, we find that it gets even more complicated. What if I told you that there’s a place, an island, where children don’t say mama or dada first. Nor do they say the name of the dog or an older brother or sister. And what’s more, these children don’t vary wildly like English-speaking children do, with some saying one word first and others another. On this island, all children say the same word first. And what if I told you that word was shit? That would probably change what you think a child
’s first word means and where it comes from.
In the late 1970s, University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologist Elinor Ochs recorded arguably the most surprising discovery ever made about how children acquire their first words, and she did it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Ochs was conducting research in Samoa, looking at how people there interact and use language.2 She spent time with locals, observing their daily routines and asking about their experiences. One question she asked mothers was what their child’s first word was. She doubtless expected something along the lines of patterns we’re familiar with from English and many other languages: names of (human or animal) members of the household or other nouns for common objects, like ball or bottle (or, as the British survey found, beer). She probably also expected a lot of variability. While over half of English-speaking kids do produce a name for a caregiver first, the distribution has a long tail. When I ask students in my classes, there are usually nearly as many first words as there are students.
But when Ochs asked the mothers in the families she was working with about their children’s first words, she got a completely unexpected response. Every single one of them reported the very same word. It did happen to be a noun, but it was a special one, used in a very specific way. It was the word tae, which, as suggested earlier, doesn’t mean “mommy” or “daddy.” It means “shit.” More precisely, it’s an abbreviation of the Samoan expression ‘ai tae, which means, “Eat shit.”
What the F Page 19