Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 21, 2011 15:53:11 GMT 12
The C-bomb
Lid lifted on the most offensive word
By NIKKI MACDONALD - The Dominion Post | 12:07PM - Monday, 21 March 2011
Even women are finally embracing feminist Germaine Greer's call of almost 40 years ago to reclaim the c-word.
THERE'S NO DOUBT THE C-WORD remains one of the last taboos of the English language. Type it into your cellphone and it quaintly morphs into Cynthia or aunt. When I try to save it into this story, an "obscene check" demands I sanitise it to ‘c...’. Kiwis surveyed put it 8 percentage points clear of the next most offensive word on television — nigger.
But it's leaching power by the day, as blokes call their mates good c**t, bloggers fire it off like tumbleweed in the Wellington wind and even women are finally embracing feminist Germaine Greer's call of almost 40 years ago to reclaim the word. Sexual swearing is being supplanted by a new crop of linguistic taboos.
When New South Wales Aussie rules coach Andrew Johns called Aboriginal player Greg Inglis a "black c**t", all hell broke loose and he was forced to resign. But it wasn't the c-word they were upset about. Black has become a racist slur. It's a fair bet that it was also the "black" bit that incensed Kiwis league star Benji Marshall, who has been charged with assault after allegedly punching a man outside a fast food outlet after the man reportedly called him a "black c**t".
Nothing new in that, says part-Maori Mediaworks broadcast standards manager Quinta Wilson, who remembers using the term "half caste" when she was little. Now it's considered derogatory.
"Laws against ‘ist’ language have replaced relaxing laws against sexual obscenity, which have replaced laws against blasphemy and profanity," says swearing expert Kate Burridge, of Australia's Monash University. "The cycle goes on. Taboo is dynamic. That will change and the words will wear out."
Take the f-word: it's now so widely used that only half of all Kiwis find it offensive on TV.
The c-word is still a way off being binned from overuse, but it's definitely showing signs of wear. It first screened unbleeped on New Zealand television in Sex and the City in the early 90s.
When New Zealand's favourite bogan Cheryl West angrily declared "You're not giving a cent to that c**t" in Outrageous Fortune last year, about 8.40pm, 21 people complained to the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA). Mediaworks agreed that was unacceptable and apologised.
It remains one of the surest paths to a broadcasting complaint, with three- quarters of Kiwi viewers (but only half of 15 to 24-year-olds) saying they still find it offensive.
Nonetheless, its use is on the rise. Take British drama Skins — with each new season the number of c-words has stepped up. Even the venerable BBC devoted 15 minutes of its Balderdash and Piffle programme to Germaine Greer's enduring obsession with the word. BSA chief executive Dominic Sheehan says he's had more c-word complaints in the past three years than in the past 10 to 15.
"Part of the reason is maybe that the word is being said."
It's all about context. Last year's incident was the second time the c-word had appeared uncensored on Outrageous Fortune. The first, screened at 10.30pm, passed without complaint. It was all right in Closer, when it was used as a noun. It was all right in period piece Atonement, in Robbie's letter of lust (they axed it from the original film trailer but obviously changed their mind). But in In Bruges, TVNZ decided 15 utterances of the c-word was just plain excessive.
And it's not just on television that c**t is getting an increased airing. Politicians have used it; comedians use it; women use it, though some apparently temper its hard edge by instead saying "cee-nut", or "dunt".
Even articulate writers use it: when Sunday Star-Times columnist Steve Braunias parted ways with his employer after calling a reader a c**t in a heated email exchange, in response to being labelled an "ugly f**ker", he said his use of the c-word was not out of character.
If Victoria University PhD student Nick Wilson's research is anything to go by, no-one bats an eyelash when the c-word is scattered liberally around rugby locker rooms.
Wilson, who is investigating language's role in leadership and identity in rugby teams, says teams use swearing to build solidarity, as in this pre-match huddle transcript:
Captain: "Forwards, we're in these c**ts' faces all f**king day". We dominate these c**ts."
Top Kiwi comedian Ben Hurley refuses to use the c-word.
Not the word itself, but the sanitised version.
"I think that's a copout. I don't think there's anything wrong with the word. But the n-word I'll never say."
That and faggot, he argues, are far more offensive, because they're associated with oppression.
While he believes its use is becoming much more mainstream in New Zealand, Hurley reckons the c-word is still far more acceptable in the mother country, where he performed for four years. There he would joke that the c-word was less offensive than calling football soccer. Here, he steers clear of it in standup.
"I don't use it in my act here, because I have and you can just feel half the audience freeze. Not a good response."
But he's not shy of using it himself.
"When you stub your toe and you say c**t you feel a little bit better than if you say f**k. I don't know why that is. When you're really angry there's really few words you can go to now to make yourself feel better."
Funny thing is, the c-word started out as a perfectly innocent little noun, thought to have derived from kuna — meaning woman, Kunti — an Indian mother goddess, or the Latin cuneus — meaning wedge-shaped.
Hard to take offence at any of those.
And nobody did.
It appeared in medical texts in the Middle Ages, as a titillation-free word for female genitals. It was so loosely bandied around it even made it on to a street sign — one of London's prostitute haunts was named Gropecuntlane.
Chaucer used an old variation — quentye in The Miller's Tale and Shakespeare cheekily used "country matters", knowing the word would be spoken.
According to Catherine Blackledge's The Story of V, the c-word's unfair maligning began around the 15th century. From 1700 to 1959 it was considered so obscene it was a legal offence to publish the word in full. In his 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Francis Grose couldn't even bring himself to write the first letter, bleeping it out entirely with four asterisks. That's not surprising when you consider his definition — "a nasty name for a nasty thing".
But it seems we English speakers are the only ones to have taken such exception to the word.
Its French equivalent is nowhere near as offensive. In Finnish, you can apparently get rid of someone by telling them to "go pull a c**t over your head".
Burridge says the bastardisation of the c-word was in line with the general shift of swearing to physically based words in the early 1900s. But no-one knows why the c-word holds so much more power than, for example, pussy or prick.
"That's the mystery of all these words. Even in modern times, when we are not superstitious or like to think we're not, it's interesting that you still see the extraordinary magic of these words. Their ability to wound."
But also their ability to bond. In New Zealand, as in Australia, the more offensive the swearing, the better the friends, Burridge says.
"The use of a very strong swear word as a term of endearment has been in the English language for a long time, but is particularly striking in the Antipodes. There's this lovely Punch cartoon where there's two people standing together and one says ‘Hello, you priceless old ass’ and the other one says ‘Hello, you congenital idiot’ and someone else standing by says, ‘I didn't think you two knew each other so well’."
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THE SWEAR BOX
- Twenty-one people complained to the BSA when the c-word was mistakenly aired, uncensored, on Outrageous Fortune last year, at 8.40pm.
- 74 per cent of Kiwis (but only half of 15 to 24-year-olds) find the c-word unacceptable in TV drama, even when screened after 8.30pm. According to the BSA's 2009 What Not to Swear survey, the next worst are nigger and motherf**ker, at 66 per cent.
- 2008: political commentator Matthew Hooton called former foreign minister Winston Peters a "f**king c**t" on Willie Jackson's Eye to Eye show. Fortunately, the cameras had stopped rolling.
- 2009: National Party backbencher Tau Henare called Rodney Hide a c**t to journalists, over his threat to quit as local government minister if Maori seats were included in Auckland's new super city council.