Forbidden Words

Forbidden Words: Taboo & The Censoring Of Language, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is an analysis of social and cultural linguistic suppression.

The authors take an inclusive approach, finding space not only for swearwords and profanities but also for political correctness, proscriptive usage, and even jargon. Each chapter begins with an abstract, though an introduction outlining the various areas of enquiry might be a useful addition, given the wide scope of the book.

The first chapter explores the origins of social taboos and literary censorship, material which will be familiar to many readers. More interesting is the next chapter, which discusses euphemistic language; here, the authors coin a new term, 'orthophemism', to describe literal vocabulary which is neither euphemistic nor dysphemistic. The bulk of the book is a series of thematic chapters describing linguistic taboos against sex, bodily fluids, food, disease, and death.

t-shirt leads to arrest

A teenager (whose name has not been revealed) has been arrested in Helensvale, Australia, for wearing an 'offensive' Cradle Of Filth t-shirt. Amazingly, in news reports about the case, Rev. Matthew Hunt of Helensvale Church is quoted in support of the arrest. I assure you that this Matthew Hunt is not me, because I actually own this t-shirt.

The C Word

The C Word, rather cumbersomely subtitled How We Came To Swear By It, was broadcast by BBC3 in the UK on 30th July 2007. The programme, directed by Pete Woods, was an hour-long investigation into attitudes towards the c-word, making Channel 4's A Brief History Of The F-Word (2000) seem tame by comparison. It was a fascinating programme which managed to touch on all of the major debates surrounding the word.

The presenter, Will Smith, was quite annoyingly middle-class; he looked a bit like a young Stephen Fry, and I wonder why Fry himself didn't present the show instead. Smith made the class aspect of the word a major focus, which is something I've always avoided because I feel that it's out-dated. Also, he interviewed the increasingly ridiculous Eve Ensler for far too long, perhaps because more important people such as Germaine Greer had clearly turned him down. (Greer made a ten-minute segment about the c-word for BBC1's Balderdash & Piffle in 2006.) Smith told us that the word's first appearance in a newspaper was in The Independent in the 1980s; this 'fact' has been regularly repeated, though my own research has antedated the c-word's first appearance by over a decade.

[Full disclosure: I was invited to take part in this programme, but I couldn't fly back to the UK at a suitable time.]

Jane [bleep] Fonda

On Thursday, Jane Fonda made an appearance on Today, a morning TV show in America. She was with Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues. Fonda explained her own involvement with the Monologues, and used the c-word on live television. That doesn't happen very often in the UK, and it hardly ever happens in the US. The host didn't even seem to notice, and continued with the interview, though she did apologise a few minutes later after she realised what had happened.

This is almost an exact replay of a situation on UK TV in 2002, when Caprice appeared on This Morning, also to discuss her performance of The Vagina Monologues. Caprice used the same word, and the presenters didn't notice, so the live interview continued.

Another Book

Another Book, by Jon Link and Mick Bunnage, is the second compilation of material from the comic Modern Toss (the third and fourth issues; issues one and two were featured in the first Modern Toss book). The star character from the first book, Mr Tourette, is still included. He is a sign-writer, and he specialises in painting outrageously obscene slogans (often revolving around a certain word) for unsuspecting businesses.

The dominant character in this second book is Alan, who appears to have anger-management issues, creating havoc and then undergoing psychotherapy. My favourite element, though, is a series of cartoons called Work, in which the banality of corporate life is exposed with blunt simplicity, such as an office drone telling his manager: "I just got one of your pencils stuck in my eye, see you in court". All the Work cartoons have been collected into their own book, and I'm hoping that Mr Tourette will eventually get his own spin-off, too.

Potty Fartwell & Knob

Potty Fartwell & Knob: Extraordinary But True Names Of British People, by Russell Ash, is a pre-Christmas, stocking-filler book. Ash has compiled thematic lists of unusual names, all taken from census records, registers of marriages, and other public documents.

Thus, for example, we learn that there was a man named Jesus Christ who was born in 1940 and died in 2004. I'd like to give more examples, but the best ones are too rude to include here. My favourite word is given its very own chapter, and the book lists twenty first names and surnames which incorporate it. (Anyone familiar with the English town Scunthorpe will get the general idea; as a personal nomenclature, it appears in even less disguised forms.)

In his introduction, Ash stresses that "wherever possible original documents have been checked" to avoid mistakes, though he also writes that his research involved "access to online material". Exactly how many census records he checked online, and how many he examined in their original versions, is unclear. I'm not convinced that all of the names listed are genuine, as it's too easy for mistakes or spoofs to creep in when records are typed into databases.

#1 on google.com!

My website is currently the first result on google.com, when searching for a certain word. (My site features a definitive cultural history of the word.) I've been in Google's top-ten ever since I uploaded the original version in 2000, but recently wikipedia.org (which links to my page) had been beating me to the #1 spot.

Cassell's Dictionary Of Slang

Jonathon Green is probably the world's foremost authority on slang. His first comprehensive lexicon, The Cassell Dictionary Of Slang, was published in 1998. This new book is a revised and expanded second edition, with a slightly tweaked title.

The new title is subtly though surprisingly different. The first edition was published by Cassell, so the title made perfect sense, though this new edition is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, an imprint of Orion (Cassell's parent company). The name Cassell doesn't appear anywhere except in the title. Also, "Cassell's" implies that the book was written by Cassell, not published by them. (Compare The Oxford English Dictionary - it would never appear as Oxford's English Dictionary.)

The text has been thoroughly revised, with many words being dated more specifically, including substantial antedating. The entries and definitions have also been dramatically expanded, from 70,000 headwords in the first edition to 85,000 in the second. A typical example is the phrase 'done up like a kipper'. In the first edition, it was broadly dated to "20C" [20th century], and had only two definitions: "beaten up" and "caught red-handed". However, in the second edition, it has been dated more specifically as "1980s+", and an extra definition has been added: "utterly defeated".

There are, though, some inexplicable omissions. While there are thousands of new headwords, some old ones have gone. Turning to my favourite word, for example, an incredible forty-three new variants have been added to the second edition, though four have been mysteriously removed. Also, the (albeit limited) bibliography from the 1st edition has been deleted completely, replaced by a concise history of slang lexicography. (Green wrote a longer history of the subject in his excellent Chasing The Sun.)

JE Lighter's Historical Dictionary Of American Slang, a multi-volume work-in-progress, expects to define 35,000 headwords upon completion - less than half the number in Green's single volume. Green's work is also more geographically inclusive, covering English-language slang from all English-speaking nations, rather than limiting its scope only to America. The only other heavyweight modern slang lexicographer, the late Eric Partridge, died in 1979, though a new, two-volume edition of his Dictionary Of Slang & Unconventional English has recently been published (retitled the New Partridge Dictionary). This ninth edition runs to 65,000 headwords, though it concentrates solely on post-1945 vocabulary. Green, on the other hand, documents 500 years of slang.

Lighter's dictionary, and the two-volume edition of Partridge, are both based on historical principles - that is, they illustrate their definitions with citations, literary quotations to indicate usage in context. Green's single-volume dictionary does not include citations, for reasons of space, though the good news is that he is currently preparing his own multi-volume slang dictionary, on historical principles, with at least 100,000 headwords, to be published (hopefully) later this year.

An Encyclopedia Of Swearing

Geoffrey Hughes's 1991 book Swearing is still the only serious academic text on the subject, though it's quite thin and its sources are now outdated. So his new book, the much expanded (though not significantly updated) An Encyclopedia Of Swearing, is a milestone in the field.

The Encyclopedia includes entries for key historical periods (such as medieval, Renaissance, and Restoration), significant writers and texts (including William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Lady Chatterley's Lover), and swearwords themselves.

Of course, I turned first to one entry in particular. The entry for this word discusses medieval usage, a brief (Germanic and Latin) etymology, the Earl of Rochester, and two outdated variants. There is no mention of feminist reappropriation, though, and no discussion of contemporary usage.

In his introduction, Hughes explains that the book is not a dictionary - it does not include a comprehensive list of all known swearwords. (For a better analysis of offensive words, see Hugh Rawson's Dictionary Of Invective; for a definitive list of terms, see Jonathon Green's Cassell Dictionary Of Slang.) As an encyclopedia, however, this new book is valuable for its account of the history of swearing - a history often summarised, though rarely described in as much detail as found in Hughes's Encyclopedia.

There are brief repetitions throughout the book, with several anecdotes and quotations oddly duplicated in different entries. Also, he writes that Mary Whitehouse personally influenced Kubrick's decision to withdraw A Clockwork Orange from the UK: ""Her objection [...] led to the director withdrawing the film from showings in Britain", though in reality Kubrick's action was a result of death threats his family received.

The Encyclopedia provides a necessary historical account of swearing, though its sources don't seem sufficiently up-to-date. There are a couple of token references to HBO, though he appears much more comfortable when quoting from medieval manuscripts than with contemporary popular culture/media.

The Aristocrats

The Aristocrats (by Paul Provenza) is a documentary about the world's most offensive joke, supposedly an old Vaudeville tradition recited backstage amongst comedians as a furtive rite of passage.

The joke is as follows: a man walks into a talent-agent's office and says, "I have a great act for you". He describes it as a family act featuring him, his wife, their children, and assorted pets. The act consists of multitudinous defilements. After he finishes describing it, the talent-agent asks him what it's called. He replies: "The Aristocrats!".

The set-up and punch-line are always the same, with the body of the joke providing an opportunity for extended improvisation. In this documentary, 100 comedians give their own interpretations of the joke and its significance, with the film effectively representing a barometer of contemporary taboos.

Gilbert Gottfried, who was performing in New York a few weeks after the Twin Towers were destroyed, made a 9/11 joke and was heckled by the audience. To recover, he told them The Aristocrats instead, one of the first times it had been performed in public. In the documentary, Gottfried is praised as a fearless pioneer for daring to make The Aristocrats public, however it seems to me that he would have been more daring if he had continued with the 9/11 material. Our true contemporary taboos are race, sexuality, disability, religion, and terrorism - one comedian not involved in the documentary, Jerry Sadowitz, would have surely contributed the most truly fearless, shocking version of the joke.

Having said that, my favourite version of the joke is Howie Mandel's, because he claimed that the only English word his Polish grandmother knew was...

Balderdash & Piffle

Balderdash & Piffle, a BBC2 TV series about the etymologies of unusual words from the Oxford English Dictionary, accompanied by appeals for evidence of antedating, was broadcast in January. Although the whole series was quirky and interesting, most fascinating for me was Germaine Greer's exploration of one word in particular (The C-Words, 30th January).