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  Swearing in Europe: A Cautionary Note

  No European language (though to be honest I haven’t checked whatever it is they speak in Lapland) has a word that equates to every diverse usage of ‘fuck’ in the English tongue. Indeed, ‘fuck’ might lay claim to being Europe’s most versatile word, though don’t quote me on that. (You want statistics, call an accountant.)

  What quickly becomes apparent when you talk to natives of other countries is that swearing is an art best acquired through experience – in other words, you really need to be born there. Just as the F-word has subtly different meanings depending on the context, and the tone of voice, the same applies to profanities in foreign languages.

  In France, for example, where what we consider to be ‘bad language’ is never censored on TV, both ‘Je m’en fous’ and ‘J’en ai rien à foutre’ mean something along the lines of our ‘I don’t give a fuck’. ‘Foutre’ equates to the sexual meaning of the F-word; but then so does ‘baiser’, though the latter can also refer to nothing more graphic than kissing (so use with care, in other words). On the streets of Paris, though, the word most commonly heard from passers-by is ‘putain’, which literally means ‘whore’. It’s actually an all-purpose explanation, which works whether you’re admiring someone’s new haircut or trapping your finger in a car door. Don’t shout it at women sheltering from the rain in shop doorways, however, unless you want to hear them shout it back.

  German swearing is more inclined to favour bathroom functions over sexuality (something that we Brits, with our ‘arse’, ‘fart’, ‘turd’, ‘piss’, and ‘shit’, ought to appreciate). The verb ‘ficken’ literally means ‘to fuck’, but it’s rarely used as a profanity. You’ll more often hear ‘Scheisse’ (shit), ‘Arschloch’ (arsehole), or ‘Wichser’ (wanker) as outbursts than anything directly related to the act of intercourse.

  Spanish swearing is complicated by the fact that every area, and every Latin American country that speaks the language, has its own specific swear-words. ‘Joder’ is a useful ‘fuck’ verb to remember, though. And depending where you are in Italy, a blast of ‘fottiti’ or ‘vaffanculo’ will persuade your listener to go and fuck themselves, if they’re so inclined.

  Perhaps the most sensible swearers in Europe are the Scandinavians. Though they have plenty of their own rude words, they have gradually assimilated some of ours too. Which is why viewers of The Killing have become used to hearing Sarah Lund mutter ‘fuck’ every time she discovers that another of her sidekicks is actually a serial killer. There you are: I’ve managed to use the words ‘fuck’ and ‘Sarah Lund’ in the same sentence, without saying anything about how strangely, compellingly, devilishly attractive the woman is, especially when she’s angry – which is pretty much all the time. You’d be the same if your sidekick was a serial killer.

  Baptisms

  Kenneth Tynan’s TV Burp

  In the far-off days of the Sixties, when Mary Whitehouse was prepared to lead her battalion of clean-up TV campaigners into action at the first hint of an innuendo, even the mildest profanity was likely to arouse a storm of press-primed outrage. No one on television upset Mrs Whitehouse’s sensitive ears more than Alf Garnett, the authentic voice of middle-aged English prejudice in Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part. Yet for all his reputation as the doyen of comic filth, Alf was comparatively restrained in his choice of expletives. While Mary’s diligent statisticians calculated the precise number of ‘bloodys’ and ‘damns’ in each episode, Alf never let slip the four-letter word that would have been most likely to spew from the lips of a real-life Garnett. Indeed, Andy Murray says the F-word more often in an average tennis match (especially if his first serve isn’t working) than Alf did throughout his entire twenty-five-year run on TV.

  So it was left to an altogether more educated voice to widen the vocabulary of the Innocent British Public. The Oxford-educated Kenneth Tynan was a renowned theatre critic for the Evening Standard, the New Yorker and The Observer, and – by 1965 – the literary manager, no less, of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. Though he still preferred to think of himself as the enfant terrible of British cultural life, he was 38 years old and at the heart of the establishment.

  But he had form when it came to startling the horses (or at least those horses who could read). In 1960, he had persuaded his editor at The Observer to allow him to use the word ‘fuck’ in a commentary on the trial that would determine whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was fit for human consumption. Even so, the BBC producers who invited him to appear on the late-night show BBC-3 in November 1965 must have assumed that he would respect the niceties of the era. BBC-3 mixed satire and cultural discussion in the tradition of That Was the Week That Was, gently lampooning prominent figures and puncturing holes in the British class system. On 13 November, Tynan took part in a high-brow (particularly on the part of the interviewer, Robert ‘Combover’ Robinson) discussion with American novelist Mary McCarthy about the issue of censorship. In 1965, all British theatrical discussions had to meet the approval of the Lord Chamberlain, who could snip or slash a script without the right of appeal.

  Robinson asked Tynan whether he would be willing, if censorship were abolished, to sanction a National Theatre production that featured an act of sexual intercourse. It was the moment Tynan had been waiting for. ‘Oh, I think so, certainly,’ he drawled in his peculiar, stuttering, slightly contemptuous tone. Then, rather than attempting to tackle Robinson’s question, he delivered a line that he had clearly prepared in advance: ‘I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word “fuck” is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden’.

  It was a calculated stab in the vitals of British censorship and propriety. Even today, most TV presenters would panic, and splutter an apology, to be repeated ad infinitum throughout the remainder of the programme. But Robinson was made of stronger stock, and calmly proceeded with the conversation as if we were all men and women of the world.

  There the matter might have rested, if the British outrage industry hadn’t geared itself up for maximum production. There were newspaper calls for the BBC to ‘Sack 4-Letter Tynan’ and cries that he had perpetrated an ‘Insult To Womanhood’ (men presumably being too worldly to shock). The BBC merely issued an ‘expression of regret’, while senior executive Hugh Wheldon declared that the subject had been handled ‘responsibly, intelligently, and reasonably’.

  The House of Commons was dragged into the dispute: four Conservative members tabled motions attacking the BBC; three Labour MPs countered with amendments declaring their support for Tynan and the corporation. Tynan himself issued a statement: ‘I used an Old English word in a completely neutral way to illustrate a serious point, just as I would have used it in similar conversation with any group of grown-up people. To have censored myself would, in my view, have been rather an insult to the viewers’ intelligence.’

  Many members of the public took the issue more seriously, inundating Tynan’s post-bag with letters of disgust. (The fact that most of them had not seen the programme, which was broadcast just before midnight, didn’t dampen their anger.) Tynan showed his friends one choice example. ‘You will soon have the sack,’ it trumpeted, ‘and my friends and I will be waiting for you, to give you the best licking that you have ever had.’ Which, ironically, might have been right up Tynan’s street: posthumous publication of his diaries revealed that the theatre critic and professional controversialist was also a keen sado-masochist, who enjoyed nothing more than the prospect of a stiff hand smacking a bare bottom.

  It was left to cartoonist Trog, in The Observer a week after Tynan’s calculated outburst, to apply some British common sense to the affair. He pictured a drinker in a bar, telling his mate: ‘I ’ad a few ----ing drinks in the ----ing boozer, then I ----ed off ’ome an’ turned on the ----ing telly an’ ---- me if Ken ----ing Tynan don’t open his ----ing mouth an’ come out with this ----ing word for sexual intercourse.’

  And Now on Fi
lm Four-Letter Word

  Shy, retiring creatures that they are, especially in Hollywood, American film-makers were slow to respond to the liberation of the four-letter word in the late Sixties. The Korean War satire M*A*S*H (1970) is generally agreed to have been the first mainstream US movie to toss the word around with gay abandon.

  In Britain, however, the taboos were stretched a full three years earlier. In December 1967, Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget Whatshisname was premiered in London. Marianne Faithfull, already notorious as the girlfriend of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger and as ‘the naked girl in a rug’ at the Stones’ 1967 drugs bust, made a two-minute cameo as Oliver Reed’s love interest. That was time enough for her to purr her dialogue like a convent girl, strip off, take a bath, and then feature in a kaleidoscopic nightmare. In a voice less like that of a convent girl and more like a psychotic fishwife’s, she screams at Reed: ‘You fucking bastard, you come out here.’ Some of the impact is masked by the blare of a car horn, however, which was added at the request of the British Board of Film Censorship.

  Yet Faithfull’s ‘fucking’ trailed in the wake of the front-runner in cinema’s four-letter sprint: Joseph Losey’s Ulysses, first screened in New York in March 1967, and then three months later in London. The delay was enforced by our old friend the censor, who kicked up such a stink about this movie that audiences flocked to the film, expecting nothing less than some full-bore rumpy-pumpy. They were disappointed: Ulysses was simply an honourable attempt to translate the epic all-human-life-in-a-day of James Joyce’s novel into two hours of (vaguely) narrative cinema. Its fidelity to the book meant that it had to reflect Molly Bloom’s 100-page stream-of-consciousness monologue, during which she (understandably, with 100 pages to fill) occasionally resorted to the shortest and bluntest of foul language. The result was that several ‘fucks’ made it into the script, alongside some fruity (for 1967) discussion of Leopold Bloom’s sexual performance. ‘Nyet,’ said the censor. Losey replied by snipping out the offending passages – no, not those kinds of passage – and replacing them with a blank white screen. He resubmitted the film, whereupon the censor saw the foolishness of his ways and allowed Losey to reinstate all his ‘fucks’ and ‘cocks’. A rare victory for fucking over fucking bureaucrats, you might say.

  There was an amusing postscript to this saga. In 1973, the BBC finally plucked up the courage to screen Ulysses on TV, although they ensured the minimum number of complaints by scheduling it in the early hours of the morning (well past Mary Whitehouse’s bedtime). When the film was over and Molly had uttered her final ‘fuck’, there was a brief summary of the news. It ended with a snippet about the controversy aroused by a new Rolling Stones song, ‘Starfucker’. Convinced that at two in the morning, a Ulysses-hardened audience was unlikely to complain, the bulletin not only named the song in question, but proceeded to play its equally graphic chorus in full – its first and last ever BBC broadcast. At which point even Mrs Whitehouse was too exhausted to complain.

  Five Movies That Dare Not Speak Their Name

  (1) FUCK (1968): Aware that even underground cinemas might be cautious about screening a film entitled Fuck, artist Andy Warhol revised the title of this epic to Blue Movie before its extremely limited release in 1969. Like his marathon Sleep (the ultimate in insomnia cures), Warhol’s Fuck lived up to its title, with his ‘superstar’ Viva and Louis Waldron devoting thirty minutes of their two-hour ‘fly-on-the-wall’ showcase to the act of making love. Thereafter, they effectively talk about the weather, the blue-tinted screen the only nod to the promise of the title. It’s not even a particularly erotic encounter. ‘We don’t want to see your ugly cock and balls,’ Viva complains at one point.

  (2) FUCK (1999): Premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and shown many years later at Tate Modern, Yves-Marie Mahé’s seven-minute avant-garde video features black-and-white clips of hardcore pornography, from erection to eruption, interrupted by flashing visual disturbance and the occasional scrawl of the movie’s title across the screen. Meanwhile, the soundtrack blares industrial white noise, occasionally giving way to a romantic French pop song. There are easier ways to get your kicks, believe me.

  (3) FUCK (2001): They’re definitely getting longer … though no easier to swallow. Make way for the full nine minutes of Sean Gallagher’s tale of a baffled Texan called Art. And baffled was the most generous response to this movie, awarded a special citation by film fans at the University of Texas for ‘cinematic intransigence’. I think that means they didn’t like it.

  (4) FUCK (2003): William Dickerson’s ten-minute drama proves conclusively that size doesn’t matter, as it compresses a lifetime of drama into the time it takes to carry an average woman halfway to orgasm (statistics courtesy of researchers Masters and Johnson). The hero of Dickerson’s Fuck lies on his hospital bed, recalling significant moments in his life, only to be interrupted when the bleeper on his life-support system suddenly stops. He has time for one last word: ‘Fuck’. I’ll leave you to guess what happens next.

  (5) FUCK (2005): This is the king of Fuck movies, the only one available on DVD, and the only one you could show to your ageing parents (although you should maybe press the ‘mute’ button first). It was billed as a ‘F*ckumentary film by Steve Anderson’, who assembled a montage of interviews, archive clips, folklore and hard fact about the English-speaking world’s favourite word. (Strange that nobody’s done a book like that.) Among the participants: Hunter S. Thompson, Billy Connolly, Alanis Morissette, and bland Fifties pop star Pat Boone, who reveals that whenever he’s aroused to a frenzy of emotion (e.g. whenever he sees himself described as a ‘bland Fifties pop star’), he shouts out ‘Oh, Boone!’. Anyone who’s heard his records will know what he means.

  Bluest of the Blues

  To innocent white ears, ‘the dozens’ sounds like a card game – like a cross between poker and housey-housey. To African-Americans in the decades before television was invented, it was a primary form of entertainment, which could range from totally above-board to definitely behind-closed-doors. In ‘the dozens’, two people – men, usually – would trade insults, until one was so beaten down by the other’s brain-scrambling flights of verbal invention that he sacrificed his pride and admitted defeat. It was the midway point, if you like, between the ‘flyting’ of sixteenth-century Scotland and the battle raps of the 1980s.

  As a purely oral art form, the dozens lived in the moment: even the creators probably couldn’t remember their best lines five minutes after they’d been thrown across the bar-room (especially if there was moonshine on the menu). Perhaps the closest we can get to reliving the golden age of the dozens is to cock an ear to ‘Say Man’, a 1959 recording by the American R&B maestro Bo Diddley; or its successor, ‘Say Man, Back Again’. But both those tracks are decidedly tame by comparison with the peaks of sexual innuendo and foul-mouthed flippancy that could be heard when there was no white recording manager in the house.

  The same issue afflicted a 1929 session by the blues piano player Rufus Perryman, masquerading for the occasion as Speckled Red. He recorded not one but two versions of a tune called ‘The Dirty Dozens’, each of which was saucy, to say the least, and certainly laced with the hints and spices of sexuality, but entirely free of any language that might need to be snipped by the censors.

  In blues clubs, Perryman and his peers took several steps over the line. Audiences in back-country bars in the early Thirties lapped up tunes that laid their fornicating credentials right down on the table, regardless of who was watching. The challenge on the rare occasions when they were in front of a microphone was to retain the thrill of talking dirty about sex, without letting the boss man know what he was paying for.

  Another blues pianist, Roosevelt Sykes, was renowned for his salty tale of a ‘Dirty Motherfucker’, who was always ‘eating pussy’. As recorded for a 78 rpm single in 1936, the song was refined, but only slightly: the leading man was now a ‘Dirty Mother for You’, Sykes sliding the words together
to leave his intentions clear. A similar transformation was waiting for a rousing bar-room blues stomp originally written as ‘Drinkin’ Wine, Motherfucker, Goddam’ by guitarist Sticks McGhee. Unable to concoct a plausible substitute for the twelve-letter word, McGhee invented a nonsensical ten-letter one, ‘spo-dee-o-dee’ – and landed himself one of the biggest blues hits of the Forties.

  When the blues was ‘rediscovered’ by white scholars and collectors, the survivors of the pre-war era were finally able to come clean (or, in this instance, dirty). Speckled Red laid down his original ‘Dozens’: ‘Your sister loves to fuck and your brother sucks dick’. Lightnin’ Hopkins added his ‘Dozens’ to a monologue addressed to a ‘dirty black motherfucker’. But for the fullest exposition on the subject of ‘The Dirty Dozens’, we are indebted to blues piano player Jelly Roll Morton. When he was interviewed by the archivists of the Library of Congress way back in 1938, he told the government men everything he knew about the blues, their background, and the songs that were too risqué to be committed to record. As he soaked himself in whisky, his renditions grew ever more blue, in every sense of the word. His ‘Dirty Dozens’ included such poetic flights of fancy as this: ‘I said, look up bitch, you made me mad/I’ll tell you about the fuckers that your sister had … She fucked a hog, she fucked a dog/I know the dirty bitch would fuck a frog’. Dirty Mothers don’t come any dirtier than that.

  Lady Chatterley’s Lawyer

  We are indebted to Mr Mervyn Griffith-Jones, counsel for the prosecution, representative of Queen and country, for this illuminating piece of arithmetic. ‘The word “fuck” or “fucking” occurs no less than thirty times. I have added them up, but I do not guarantee that I have added them all up. “Cunt” fourteen times; “balls” thirteen times’; “shit” and “arse” six times apiece; “cock” four times; “piss” three times, and so on.’ After which Mr Griffith-Jones made the unfortunate suggestion to the members of the jury that they should ‘view those passages’, without specifying exactly which ones he had in mind.