Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - A History of the C-Word

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

WARNING: This episode includes adult content and explicit language. As offensive terms go, you are entering a hard hat area.It’s one of the most taboo words in the English dictionary. In Scotland, it can be a term of endearment, but in the US it's one of the worst offences out there, and it would more than likely get you fired if you said it to your boss at work. It starts with c, and ends in t and we're not talking about a coconut.Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets for our 100th episode by our favourite Kathy Burke and linguist legend Professor Deborah Cameron to talk about the etymology and cultural meaning of the c-word.Why is a word that simply means the vulva regarded as the most offensive word in the English language? Where does the word come from? And were medieval people really calling their children the c-bomb?Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, what's that? No, it's not a terrible impression of a 90s rave. That's actually my siren noise, my warning siren to be exact, because I have been told in quite a serious way that I have to be very serious when I'm giving you the warning about this episode. So I thought that if I gave it a siren,

that it's definitely serious then, like how many warnings come with a siren? This one does. This one definitely does. And why is this one extra specially naughty? Well, it's because we're only looking at the history of the sea bomb. Oh, yes, we are. And that is such a divisive and naughty and scandalous word.

It still has such power that I have been told that you need to have an extra specially essential. strong warning. So everybody knows what they're getting into in this episode. Will that do? Do you feel seriously warned? Right. Well, now that I've given you the extra serious warning, I'll give you your fair do's warning. Fair dues. This is definitely an episode that's going to offend some people. Absolutely. I mean, you'd be kind of upset if it wasn't, right? But for anybody that's new here, for anybody that perhaps wasn't quite aware of what they were stumbling into, This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way,

and you have to be an adult as well. So now you've been warned that if you stay with us, and if you listen to this episode and your delicate shell likes are offended, well, fair do's, we did warn you. And for the rest of you mucky books, who just can't get enough of this, you are my people, and I am ready if you are. It's one of the most taboo words in the English language. It just is. In Scotland, for example, it's a term of endearment.

But if you say it in the US, oh, no, no, no, no, no. It is seriously offensive. And it's very context-dependent, isn't it? My friends quite happily call me a silly cunt all day long, but if my boss said it to me at work, they'd still be right, but they'd probably be fired. Here's the question that we're looking into today. Why is it so offensive?

Cunt is a word that simply means vulva. That's it, that's it in a nutshell. And yet it is regarded as one of the most offensive words that we have. Today for our 100th episode, yes, we are centarians. We are celebrating by delving into the moist and deep history of Cunt. And when I was having to think about who could possibly tell us about the word cunt and how it can be used, I could only think of my comedy hero who uses the word cunt with the linguistic dexterity of a ninja. Ladies and gentlemen and others, it's only Kathy Burke.

So, my thoughts on the word cunt, well, okay. The word cunt isn't something I've ever associated. with my fanny. And I know that's where the word originates from. But growing up in North London, I never really knew it came from talking about fannies. I never knew that was its origin. I just knew it as a word that people called each other,

either in anger or in jest. So sometimes I use the word if I'm being funny or trying to be funny. funny, i.e., hello, you silly cunt, or you're a dothcunt, aren't you? Or, what a silly cunt? You know, I do feel it could be used quite lightly. But then used in anger, it isn't really a word I used that much to express anger because it's so aggressive in its punch. You know, the word cunt. It could be very aggressive. So, I think. the only time I've used it meaning to call somebody an absolute cunt

is when I'm tweeting or talking about someone like who I do think is an absolute cunt. But then I also did a tweet, I remember a few years ago, that Joe Lyset expressed to me as being one of his favourite tweets, was when these sort of white red-faced men were getting very angry about Breit and stuff and people started to refer to them as gammon. And they didn't like this. They took great offence at being called gammon.

And so I did a little tweet saying, oh, so you don't like being called gammon? Fair enough. Back to cunts, it is then. So that can be seen as quite a light-hearted way to express the word. See, yes, I just think it's a fab word. I think it could be used in many different ways.

I would certainly call a cunt, but I wouldn't call my auntie one. I'd choose it very carefully and wisely, I hope. Some would disagree, no doubt. But anyway, that's it, that's me. So I wish you all the best. And lots of love, you silly cunt. Thank you so much, Kathy.

I mean, how can you even follow that? Well, we're going to try. Because today we are doing a whole episode on that word. And it seems to be a subject that not just myself and Kathy are interested in, because we've had emails. We've had emails from betwixters Sophie Hall and Kat Mays, who also got in touch specifically to ask for an episode on the history of this controversial swear word. And then to tell us more about the etymology of the seabom, we're only going to be talking to the linguistic legend that is Professor Deborah Cameron. who'll be talking to us about Cunt's origin, attempts to reclaim Cunt,

and whether it'll ever be allowed back off the naughty step. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done.

Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Welcome to the 100th episode of Bertwicks the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society. With me, Kate Lister. Today, we are going right back to the very beginning of Cunt. One of the oldest words for the vulva, in fact, the oldest word for the vulva that we have in the English language. We're going to be finding out where the word comes from. We're going to be hearing about how medieval people were actually calling their children, cunts. Yes, really.

and we'll be having a look at cunt jokes in Shakespearean times and in the restoration period with poets like our friend John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, who used the word cunt with free abandon in his poetry. And while we're talking about Rochester, if you want to hear more about him and his naughty poetry, we actually did a special episode

with none of the Neil Gaiman and Rebecca Radeal a few months back. Please scroll down our feed if you want to listen to that one, where you'll also be able to hear Neil reading some of the cunt-filled poetry like this clip right here. The imperfect enjoyment. In liquid raptures, I dissolve all ore. Melt into sperm and spend at every pore. A touch from any part of her had dunt. Her hand, her foot.

Her very looks a cunt. Thank you, Neil, you top cunt. It's just a funny word. I love this word so much. Oh, and right back to today's episode, where we will move on from the 17th century into the Victorian era. They enjoyed a lot of well-placed cunts in their erotica, like this sexy nursery rhyme that was published in the Pearl magazine. There once was a young lady of Hitchin, who was scratching her cunt in the kitchen. Her father said, Rose, it's the crabs, I suppose. You're right, pa, the buggers are itching. Not quite so buttoned down and frumpy now, are they?

Yeah, that really was a genuine Victorian poem published in 1879. And then we will move from the Mucky Victorians right up to now. Because as long as there have been human beings walking this earth, there have been cunts, literally and figuratively. But it still ranks as one of the most offensive words ever. Why? What did cunt do wrong? Well, today we are damn well going to find out. Enjoy. And welcome to Bertwix the sheet. I'm only talking to Professor Deborah Cameron. How are you?

I'm fine. Looking forward to it. I'm really looking forward to this one. I want to give everyone your full title because it is impressive as hell. Not only professor, but you currently hold the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University. That's right. That is impressive. And you have written about... about linguistics and particular feminist linguistics. So I can't think of anyone better place to talk to me about the word cunt today than you. Possibly a Glasgowian, because their use of the word cunt is utterly spectacular. Well, in point of fact, I am a Glasgow. Oh my God, dear, look at that, the fates of a line. You can't tell it from my voice because my parents were economic migrants, but yes, I was born in Glasgow and I also lived there for the whole of the 1990s.

Oh my. Right. Well, that's it. Then you've got to be queen cunt. What I love about the Glasgowian use of it, and I think one of the things I love most about this word, is that it's very dexterous. It can be used in many ways. But in Glasgow, they use it and it almost doesn't mean anything. It just means person. Well, you know, sort of. In fact, it usually means man. Oh, okay. Maybe they don't use it to say, woman. If they say, oh, this cunt over here, they mean a man. It'll be a man, yeah.

I have some data, if you want to come to that. Not my personal data, but there is data. My first question to you, I suppose, is do you like the word cunt? Because it's really divisive. There's something that can't even bear to hear it. And there are other people that love it. Yeah, it is a word that polarises opinion. I mean, in a way, your question is the wrong one to ask a linguist

because I am a linguist. Nothing linguistic is alien to me. So we don't have likes and dislikes about words. I suppose my view as a feminist, is that all attempts to reclaim this word really have failed. And for me, that's a data point. It's interesting to think about why that is. I mean, Cunt continues to be identified in surveys

that are done periodically by Offcom or by the British Board of Film classification or whatever it calls itself now. Of the traditional swear words, it is always at the top of the Offensive League for most people. So there's a five-point scale that's often been used and the only two words at five are cunt and motherfucker. So fuck would be a four,

bitch would be like a two, whore would be a three, that kind of thing. I love the idea of people sat around a table with all these words giving them points of like, how offensive do we think that one is? It's definitely a two. Well, they'd do a survey.

They'd get a representative sample of the population and make them fill in this questionnaire. But of course, that's taking the words completely out of context. People very much agree on what their offensiveness ranking is when you do that. But in context, I think it's a bit more complicated. So, for example, I would say that, well, not just me, but that we have evidence that among women, in fact, in context, words like slag-slut-hoom may in fact be more offensive to them than cunters.

Wow. Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. No, not many people know this. I'm getting ahead of myself. we should talk about the history of this, because one of the things I do love about the word cunt is it is old. It is an old, old, old, old. It's one of those words that is so old. We're not quite sure where it comes from. Is that right?

We think that it is a Germanic word because in the other Germanic languages, English is a Germanic language, but in other German and the Scandinavian languages and Dutch, there are cognates with it words which mean the same thing in a very similar in form. But in fact, if you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the go-to for the recorded history of words in writing, the evidence doesn't really start until Middle English, so after the Norman conquest of 1066. And in fact, I think the earliest ones are in the 1200s. And at that point, very interestingly, CUNT doesn't actually seem to be very offensive. Where you find it in the very earliest references is in place names and by names, sort of surnames before there were surnames.

So if there were 14 people called Richard in your village, you'd give them by names to distinguish them, and they'd be things like occupational titles. There were medieval people walking around whose last name was cunt. There was a guy called Godwin Clawcunt, possibly he was a groper. A woman has been recorded called something like Bell Wide Cunt. Oh my God, that's incredible.

I live in Oxford, and in Oxford there's a street now called Magpie Lane, which in medieval times was called Grope Cunt Lane. They didn't mess around, did they? Presumably, it was where you went to find commercial sex or whatever. And there were also topographical features which were named something Cunt, and it seems to have been just because they looked like them. would be a hill with a big cleft in it or something like that. Wow. Cunt Hill. Sort of, yes, exactly. By 1400, you're finding cunt in surgical textbooks. So it doesn't seem

to have been a swear word at this period. It's by the 1600s and so on that it's obscene in the 18th century, the early comprehensive dictionary makers start recording it as an obscenity. But in the 1400s, people were explaining it in surgical textbooks by translating it into Latin, saying this is the English word for pudenda muleabris, so the shameful parts of a woman, which was the Latin term. I mean, the word pudender, shameful parts, actually still is used in medicine today. Isn't that crazy that in order to sanitise it and not use an offensive word, people would say pudender, but that actually means shameful part? Yes. There have been campaigns within medicine that actually,

that word ought to go. But it's been quite controversial. People still refer to the pudendal nerve, for example. The shameful nerve. Wow. I don't know if there'll be a campaign to have a cunt brought back in a medical setting. Well, you know, that would be one of those. Let's reclaim it and just make it an ordinary word, but it's actually never worked. But it was in the medieval period, it seems. I mean, if it's turning up in medical books. Yes, it seems to have been fairly ordinary. Of course, from the resources that we have to reconstruct this, what we're lacking is, speech, obviously. So we only have written records pretty much for anything before the 20th century. But sometimes we have commentary on speech. But no, in the medieval period, what we've got are these

by names, these street names, topographic names. And they make it seem as though it was just what people called the female genitals, you know, the vagina or the vulva. I mean, that's another thing that can't isn't clear on what exactly it names. The same is true of most terms for female genitals. there's a lot of disagreement on what are we actually talking about here. Because if you mix up vagina and vulva on social media, people will put you straight damn quick, weren't they? They'll just be like, I think that you mean... Well, some people will, but I think surveys show that actually most people don't really get that distinction.

And vagina is probably much better known than vulva, although actually what you see is the vulva. And vagina comes from the Latin meaning sheath or a scabbard. Yeah, it's a sheath that you put a sword in. Like, that's offensive as well. You're basically calling it a cockholder. That's pretty much what vagina means. But think about this metaphor is actually everywhere. So one place where it is is electronics,

where you talk about male and female bits of a gadget and what you mean is plug and socket, really. So the thing I just plugged my headphones into my computer, I use the male connector. So the thing on the end of my headphones that comes to a point, I shoved it into a hole, that would be the female connector. And again, there's been discussion among women in electronics. Can we not get rid of this metaphor?

I didn't know that they were called that. I've never used that terminology before. I think it's more used among people who actually are techs. Yeah, that makes sense, which is not me at all, no. I've never liked Volvo, because it sounds too close to Volvo, to mean. It conveys sort of a functionality that I'm not quite comfortable with. Yeah, well, I suppose it does have the advantage of more, precision. I mean, we've got a huge number of terms for the female genitals and research has been

done saying, you know, here's a list of words now put on this diagram of the body what they mean. And people just totally have no consensus. So things like fanny and pussy as well as cunt. What actually are we talking about here? And then when you add in all the euphemisms that people feel obliged to use, you know, even in the doctor's surgery, you know, lady garden and undercarriage. Apparently that one's quite popular with doctors. Undercarriage. I know. I know. Just you'd like to pop up on this couch and I'll take a look at your undercarriage. The doctor said that and leave. I would have a word, but maybe you and I are not typical. Yeah. Just for anyone listening who isn't sure of the difference, the vulva, that's like the shop front, isn't it? That's everything that's external. The vagina is...

Yeah, the vagina is just the English for it would be birth canal. It's the... channel out of which a baby comes from the uterus into the outside world. The rest of it, the outer genitalia, you know, that's the vulva. Do we have any sense throughout history of what was an offensive term? Because it seems that reading about the history of swearing and what we regard as offensive shifts is what our social values shift, in the medieval period, you don't seem to have got a lot of offensive words around the body like you do now. They seem to be descriptive. If you were a medieval person, I mean, you'd just take cunt like it was nothing, but what would be an offensive word to you? What would make people go, probably profane cursing.

Oh, blasphemy. Taking the name of God in vain and things to do with the devil. Right, okay. But we don't have any sense that there were body words that they found offensive. Words, of course, have a range of usage. So the fact that we only have written records is a limitation on what we know about how they were used. Now, when I hear that a woman was called Bell Widekunt that that was her by name. It still makes me laugh. That's amazing. It does make me think probably nasty things were said about Bell. Yes.

God, imagine that being your legacy for history. And, you know, Mr. Clor-Cunt as well. I don't think those were necessarily affectionate to buy names. But who knows? We just don't have the evidence. I like to think maybe it was a drag name. Like Bell Widecunt was on the medieval balesque circuit. I'm reaching.

Chaucer makes cunt jokes, doesn't he, quite famously. that's often glossed over in GCSE. Well, there's a lot in choice that's glossed over at GCSE, isn't there? I mean, yes, people make jokes then, you know, also about arse and so on. I mean, I think that does go with them being fairly matter of fact. I mean, the joke is about what people are doing with it. Yeah, it's grabbing somebody by the cunt. By the 1600s, it's certainly offensive.

What happens to make it offensive? How did we go from doctors going? Hello, Miss Lister. You're here to talk to me about your cunt, to suddenly it being really offensive. What happens? What would usually happen to shift the semantics of a word is that it's being used in discourse, you know, in a derogatory way, and that becomes what people learn because it becomes so common.

So the origin of, let's say, Hussie is a derogatory term. Hussie is from Hussif, housewife. How it became derogatory must be because people were talking in a derogatory way about housewives a lot. And so anyone listening to them kind of picked up the impression that it was a derogatory word. I mean, I think words for the genitals were always probably poised to become insults because it's taboo to talk about them at all, except maybe in the context of medicine and whatever. So there's a bunch of evidence that's missing, but we know that by the 1600s,

People are saying things like city cunts are dangerous sport. Whitehall cunts are fit for no man. That's in the Oxford English dictionary, an example from 1675. And cunt has clearly become a metonym. It means a woman, the whole woman. And a bit later on, it comes to mean a man. So first it's applied as a metonym for women. Then it broadens out and is used to refer to a man in a derogatory way. And in fact, also to an object. So one of the great slang lexicographers makes an observation about British soldiers in the First World War,

how they would call anything that they didn't like or that was pissing them off, a cunt. And that meant, you know, their rifle, their knapsack. Indeed, almost any object, occasion or person, they will describe it as a cunt. Like that. So, yeah, a friend of mine reported just the other week that she'd called her dog a pointless cunt, because it had done something that irritated her in some way. This usage is now very common, and the man usage is now commoner than the women usage, but that seems to be a fairly recent development.

You forget that, don't you? That when you talk about the history of a word, it starts off meaning vulva, and then suddenly it starts to take on new uses. Like you could call somebody a cunt or someone could be cuntish, and it starts to change its meaning, not just its level of offence, but how it's used. I mean, we'll never know, but wouldn't you love to know the first person in the history who was called a cunt? Like, what was the moment on a Monday after?

Well, in a way, it was these people with the by names, wasn't it? Oh, Bell, yes. It's not being used as a medical terminology then by the time we get to the 18th century. That's gone. Well, the thing is that English was not the language of medical terminology anyway. It was Latin and Greek. So anatomical terms usually are taken from the classical. The standard international textbook of anatomical terms, its title is Latin, even there.

That makes sense. Okay. And I guess that's when we talk about Anglo-Saxon. words, this delineation between what's high Latin-French origin and kind of be gutteral Anglo-Saxons cuss. Exactly. So by the time we get to the 18th century, it is offensive. Yeah. So this is the time when gross, the slang lexicographer, his definition of it is a nasty word for a nasty thing. So that's not very informative, is it? So Bailey, who made the first what's usually considered a modern-style dictionary that had all words in it rather than just hard

words. He defined it in Latin, predendum malleabrous, the shameful part of a woman. Dr. Johnson, his dictionary just missed it out. And that was traditional for some time. It was only really in the 1960s when the obscenity laws relaxed that the first dictionary that had it in not slang dictionary would have been a penguin dictionary in 1965 in Britain and the 1961 edition of Merriam-Webster in America. Did Johnson and Coe have words for the pedundum in their dictionary? Or was it just cunt that they boulderised and took out? Or was it any reference at all to it? Well, they took out a lot of stuff, to be honest. This is always in a way being the case of dictionaries, even if they're trying to be,

or claiming to be comprehensive, there is stuff that goes around that they don't put in. The Oxford English Dictionary needs written evidence, but also it was very squeamish in the past. So in the 1930s, it passed up the chance to put in an entry for lesbians. Oh, we don't need that. We need to put in some more cricketing terms. It just really made me laugh. The idea of a bunch of people sat around a table just like, lesbian? Oh, no.

Oh, no, we don't need that. Yeah, no, they seem to have been actually pretty squeamish about it. Although, you know, in the 1930s, there had been all this public discourse about, you know, Radcliffe Hall, the well of loneliness and so on. It would have been quite a topical word to put in. It's fairly ridiculous that they hadn't put it in before. That's amazing. I mean, nowadays, of course, you can fit forward.

more into a dictionary because they're mostly used online. So you're not thinking how much can I get into this much paper. Good point, yeah. But in the past, they did have to make selections. But, you know, cunt has been in the Oxford English Dictionary for a while and it continues to get revised. So, you know, I read it once in a while to see what's going on with it. It also has some compounds that are now dead. So cunt-beaten used to mean impotent. And cunt-bitten used to mean infected with a sexually transmitted disease. These have got to be G for a revival, surely. And there's also a naval knot, a way of splicing rope together,

which is called a cunt splice. I'll be back with Professor Deborah Cameron and cunt after this short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, not just the Tudors from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dung hill up against your neighbour's wall, you're going to cause rising damp. Would Henry the 8th ever consider executing his wife, the Queen of England, and Berlin?

I'm not even sure if the Billins took it seriously, because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry the 8th would really get rid of his queen? And why do men grow beards? During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body pushes out, pushes out the hair in the face. So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

Twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the ways I love it being used is in 19th century pornography. Because obviously it meant photography and videos and had lots of pornography of pornography their own, but literary pornography,

it's used a lot in that, along with Quim and something like Fanny Hill, which is the century before by John Cleland, he famously wrote it without any rude words in it, which is why you get ridiculous descriptions of like Venus's mossy grotto and just mad stuff. I mean, just give me cunt any day. If I was with somebody that said Venus's mossy grotto, I think I'd leave. Yeah, you did have to look out for the obscenity laws for the censors, though, didn't you? So, you know, D.H. Lawrence tried to sort of use it in a kind of serious way, I think, as well. but, you know, for erotic purposes.

But, you know, once a word has become that metonym and you can use it for your rifle that's gone wrong in your knapsack or whatever, I do think that that undermines its erotic potential somewhat. It's such a strange word, isn't it? Because is it erotic anymore? In Victorian pornography, it clearly is. It's a very descriptive and powerful word.

They like dropping here and there. But then they've also got quims and they've also got Venus monruses and stuff like that. But it's interesting, is it still being used in an erotic context today? I think it might take you by surprise if somebody tried to do that. Well, what linguists have to go on is the evidence of very large corpora, so big collections of authentic text that you can computer search and make kind of statistical generalisations about who uses it for what, how often,

all that kind of thing. That would suggest that it's not much used in erotic context, no. No, we've kind of all signed up to pussy, haven't we? I mean, literal uses of it are fairly uncommon, in fact. I think normally it's the metonymic you're insulting a person. And what the data say is that very often overwhelmingly, actually, it's a man-to-man insult. Wow. I'm just trying to like mentally running through my head at the last time I saw on TV or read a book or something where they've actually used cunt to mean vulva, where it actually means that.

And I'm kind of struggling to think. I can only think of D.H. Lawrence now. Mellers uses it, he says, oh, thou are a good bitter cunt. But even then, he tries to define it in weird ways, doesn't it? Perhaps it doesn't mean VOLV her anymore. Here's a question that I'm really curious about. So we don't really know what happens to make it the most offensive word, but it gets there somehow. Has there ever been any male equivalent?

Has Dick, cock, shlong, any of these things? I mean, obviously, you probably wouldn't say them to the vicar over tea, but have any of them ever had that kind of power that the word cunt does, that it would make everyone to go, No, I would say no. And I think the reasons for that are fairly obvious. I mean, if you think about the data telling us that it has gradually become, in essence, a male-to-male insult, what it's partaking of is the general rule that if you want to really insult a man,

you compare him to a woman, or in this case a woman's body part, you impute to him submissiveness. You are the thing that is penetrated by a real, man. And you know, you can't rival that exactly. So words for the male genitals certainly are insults, dick, prick, all the rest of those. But they have nothing like the same force when used in either direction. So male to male is the communist, male to female as the second communist. And that's reducing a woman to the fuckable part of her saying, you know, you're a receptacle for my use. And the third most common would be a woman calling a man a cunt, where she's participating in that same derogation of him

by comparing him to what is shameful, what is submissive, and so on. What you don't find, in the British National Corpus, which was compiled in the 1990s, there is not a single example of a woman calling another woman a cunt. Not one. Not even one. I mean, we know that it's possible. We have other kinds of evidence, but in this representative sample of ordinary usage, No, and I think that can be explained, not simply exactly, but my theory about that would be, actually, when women are insulting each other, there are other words that do the job a lot better and they are the slag whore words.

Because if I call you a whore, I'm implying that I'm not one. I can't call you a cunt without implicating myself because this is a thing that all women have in common. Wow. I'd never, ever, ever thought of it like that, but that is true. I'm going to have to say. sit with this for a while after we've finished talking. So what year was that when no woman called another woman a cunt? Well, the recordings were made in the late 80s, early 90s. This is the British National Corpus. I mean, the incidence of cunt, if you're making a sample, even if it's 100 million words, which actually it wasn't 100 million words of speech, but a large multi-million word sample, you're not going to find an enormous number of instances of cunt because it actually isn't said that much. It's got a baseline frequency of, well, it's much more frequent for men

than women, but you know, you're not going to find more than, on average, it's going to be about five instances per 100,000 words. It's a word that people do avoid in many contexts, as you've pointed out, tea with the vicar and so on, but even in ordinary conversation, there are certain kinds of conversation where it's much more likely to occur than others. So you don't get enormous samples of it. I mean, the most frequent swear word now is fuck and it's various other forms, you know, fucking fucked all the rest of that. Cunt is quite low down the frequency list because it's so offensive. Let's talk about efforts to reclaim it because there have been many. And I can understand why, because when you look at it and you think, but this is a word that just means

vulva, pedendum, vagina, snapped, whatever it is. Like, what are we suggesting in that? That that is the most offensive thing, that that's what the most obscene thing is. So there have been efforts to attempt to reclaim it, haven't there? Yes. And in the modern feminist era, I suppose the most notable early one is Jermaine Greer, saying we should reclaim, can't, it should just be an ordinary word. Later, she would say that she was actually quite glad that it hadn't managed to be reclaimed because it was that it remained powerful. You know, it was the one word to do women that had some power and some kind of force. But I think that's a bit of a trap because what you're saying then

and most efforts to reclaim it have been along the lines of it names women's sexual power. The thing is, I don't want sexual power. I want power. The idea that the only way women can have power is through their sexuality is to me very intensely patriarchal. And so, you know, that argument has never much appealed to me. As for trying to make it, just an ordinary word that designates a certain part of the body. Like, I don't know, bum, but for any Americans listening. First of all, I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's like putting toothpaste back in the tube or turning back time or whatever.

We've talked about the progress this word is made over time away from that, really. But I do think it would be good if we did have other words. The idea that we're choosing between sort of Latin medical terminology and ridiculous things like undercarriage is kind of terrible. And I think it's also genuinely a problem that people are bringing up little girls and they haven't got a term that's like, you know, Willie for boys. I've thought this. It's been my number one question to new doctors when I see them and go in them.

It's like, what is the name that your patients call their genitals? Because I'm endlessly fascinated by it. Because the simple point is that if we don't have the language to talk about it, we're fucked. How do we express ourselves? how do we talk about these things that are really important. If even in a doctor's setting, we're going in and referring to undercarriage, they've almost all said that the most common one they hear is down there,

but normally said in a kind of down there, slightly embarrassed, sort of, you know, down somewhere. Or front bottom, that is a really terrible one. And I think it's what was it called when you were a child, what name was given to it? And you hear some mad stuff like foof and minky, fairy tuppance, all of these things. Yeah, exactly. Or foof. Absolutely awful.

You've got these incredibly childish ones that as an adult, you're not going to say that. You can't say that to a doctor. But then it seems to jump from that. And then what's on offer is highly medicalized language, vagina vulva pedendum, I said Latin words that also when you actually break them down are pretty terrible. And then what else is on offer? You've got really sexualized ones, pussy, or awful ones, like clunge or axe wound or minge. And it's like, where it's just the word like dick, where it's just as it is. It's. It's not loaded. We're always cultural shame. Yeah, it would be nice to be able to put cunt back into that slot. But speaking as a linguist, I really just don't think it's going to happen. So inventing is probably better. And, you know, let me just say it's not just medical context, is it? It's also the context in which people are disclosing assaults.

But also, it's the context in which they might be discussing with a partner, what kind of sex they like and don't like. neither sexual violence nor sex positivity can be dealt with very easily if we are short of words that have any kind of precise meaning and are not overburdened with either hideously negative connotations or ew connotations like undercarriage and ladygarden ladygarden I mean for God's sake it's true that it's like if we're actually embarrassed to say this stuff then you can't talk about it, then you can't communicate it. And then we are in real trouble, aren't we? Well, I think so. I think it has everyday knock on effects. So a few years ago, the NHS had this absolutely terrible campaign to encourage young women to get cervical cancer screening where they used an image of three cats, a hairless one, a short head and a long head.

And they used the word pussy and they said, you know, why don't you remind you? your friends that they need to get a smear by posting an image of a cat to show what you're doing with your pussy at the moment. And I just thought we've got terribly, terribly confused about, I mean, this is porn, really, isn't it? And they said they were responding to the fact that a lot of young women had told some survey that they would be reluctant to go for a smear if they hadn't tidied up their pubic hair. And instead of saying, you know, that doesn't matter, this is a medical procedure, the NHS ran this peculiar campaign with the cats. It just seems mad. That just really seemed to be crazy. It's like, so, yeah, we don't want you to be ashamed of your pubic hair. So,

you know, why not post a coded message about it on Facebook? That's nothing to be ashamed of, but we're not actually going to use a language. We're just going to do a weird thing with cats. Well, they did use the word pussy. No, they didn't use the word pussy. They used the word cat, but obviously it was a reference to pussy. You know, you couldn't make. sense of it as being about cervical screening if you didn't make the connection pussy. Yeah. Oh, God. I don't know if Kunt will ever be allowed off the naughty step. I don't know if I'd want it to. I kind of like the fact that it's there is this obscene, that you can just drop into a conversation. But it's very serious, isn't it? Because it's cost people jobs.

It's a really big thing, especially in America. If you say it in America, you can get into all kinds of trouble. Yeah, of course, in fairness, that is true about all offensive language. And I would say that the basic explanation for it is that it's just a much more religious country. It's not just cunt. So I've lived and worked in America. And once I remember I was sitting in some sort of regional airport and some guy near me swore, not cunt. It wasn't anything like his offensive. Maybe it was busted or something.

And a guy came stomping up from three rows along in the gate and said, would you mind not speaking like that in public? and the other guy apologised, and I thought, I really can't imagine that happening in Britain, neither the challenge nor the backing down on it. But I've had many students in America who claimed to never swear, and of course you don't necessarily hear students swearing in class,

but they've had intense discussions about how they didn't use fake swear words either, because that would be kind of cheating. If you had made a promise to God that you weren't going to use obscene or profane language, you needed to stick by that and not be fiddling about with words like fudge or sugar. I can't even think how I would talk to people if I couldn't not only not swear but not use any substitute word like fudge and sugar. I'd be absolutely fudged.

I have to say I swear quite a bit. Sometimes the students laugh. I mean, I think they are surprised to hear it. So I said at a lecture last term when the tech went to hell, I said, look, I'm sorry I've fucked this up. and there was a laugh, right? Nobody complained or anything. I mean, in America, probably I would have got formal complaints. But people do. I mean, the comedian Samantha B in 2018 got in a lot of trouble for using the word cunt, didn't she? I wrote a blog post about that when it happened, when she called Ivanka Trump a cunt. That broke the rule that women don't call other women cunt. You know, that's an example of woman-to-woman usage, which is very, very rare as we know.

but what she managed to do by doing that was to give Ivanka Trump the moral high ground so to my mind that was a big mistake and she herself apologised and I don't know whether it was just because she was forced to by the network or because she thought actually no I was trying to do something but it didn't come off

I think it never will come off for women to do that to other women because what are you saying about yourself it's that problem again it is isn't it that's true Just earlier you were saying that when people attempt to reclaim words, it never really works. What do you mean by that? I said that cunt hadn't worked.

Some words have worked better. But in a way, I feel a bit like when Maut Cedong was asked about the French Revolution and he said it's too soon to comment, we know from looking at the historical timeline over a long period that words do completely change their meanings and connotations. But it's a very slow process. And in the beginning, it's contested. remains contested. So some people would give queer as an example of a word that's been successfully reclaimed. You know, in the 1950s and 60s, it's a slur for gay men. And today, it's part of the

rainbow alphabet, what have you. But actually, this is still very contested. There are lots of gay men who absolutely hate queer because either they have their own memories of when it was used as a slur, or they know that history and they just think you're setting what was behind. it aside. So I think we have to wait longer to know what will eventually happen with queer because I don't think it can be accurately said that it has been fully reclaimed and is now inoffensive to everybody or just a category label for anyone not heterosexual or whatever, a non-heteranormative label. It's much more contested than that. And there are many labels that are only reclaimed for use by the in-group.

So I could call myself a dyke. If someone else called me a dyke, I'd be suspicious. And this also goes for, you know, Crip among disability activists is okay, but nobody else is going to call them that. It's a way of putting other people in the wrong. It's a political tactic. And sometimes that changes very abruptly. So until quite recently, the N-word was usable by the in-group as a term of solidarity. that's really quite recent. If you think about NWA, the rap group, that's what the N stands for. But now, I think a consensus has sort of formed that actually it's not cerebral in any context whatsoever and anyone who wants to be thought in line with the cause, either an in-group member or an ally. It's so shocking, in fact, that we've gone to the extreme of you've got

these things happening on campuses where somebody reads a text from 150 years ago in which it features and there's a formal complaint and they get disciplined for having repeated an old use of it. So it's become an utterly taboo word. And that happened quite quickly after it had been for certain solidarity purposes and in certain communities reclaimed. So, you know, things can turn on a knife edge and you do need the long timeline to know how the history actually will unfold. You can't tell and even, well, how long have we been reclaiming queer since probably the 80s? So that's 40 years and it's still contested. What do you think is the future of cunt?

I mean, I think that perhaps the N word, I think it's got to supersede it as the most offensive words. I'm not even saying it right now. We're having a conversation about cunt, which are quite happy to... Yeah, no, it's the only one that I wouldn't say, too. There is an interesting book by Randall Kennedy, which has the N-word as its title. It's the history of the word and campaigns against the word. And he feels that banning it entirely, treating us as an absolute taboo,

in a way, kind of gives it too much importance. And he is African-American, by the way. This is a word with very, very great power. I don't think Cunt has the same power, really, as the N-word does in contemporary culture. And in fact, all that those surveys I talked about before, about how offensive are different words for broadcasting companies and regulators, they now regularly find that racial slurs are considered more offensive than any of the traditional obscene terms like Cunt.

But, you know, Cunt stays at the top within the traditional obscenities, but it's been outstripped now by racial epithets. So I think you need a long timeline to assess this. So the future of Cunt, I don't know. Many things could happen, but, you know, what it looks like. So one thing is the British National Corpus, which is, where I got the date on who uses content to whom and how often. It's been redone. It was redone in 2014 because obviously usage changes. And interestingly, the use of swearing in general had gone down between 1994 and 2014. So is this like young people aren't drinking as much

as they used to? Because young people are the big swearers. The lead in swearing of all kinds is always taken by people probably under the age of about 28 or whatever the average age is of parenthood. I'm endlessly fascinated by the app TikTok, which is incredibly censorious when it comes to language. You cannot post anything sexual at all. It will take it down. And so what's leapt up in its place is lots of alternate languages. So instead of saying porn, they'll say corn. Instead of saying pussy, they'll say cat. Instead of saying sex, they'll say se, G-G-G-S. That's interesting of like it's created this whole weird lexicon of alternative sex terms, but they're not quite swearing.

That is interesting. I'm not on TikTok myself. But SEGS, yeah, that's great. So that's like when Norman Mailer published his novel, The Naked and the Dead, I mean, it was about the American Army in the Second World War. And so, of course, for realism, they said fucking all the time, but his publisher wouldn't let him have it. So it's all fugging this and fugging that.

It just says, I remember reading it and thinking, I just can't be doing with this. This is so ridiculous. Debra, you have been amazing to talk to. And my final question to you is, would you want cunt to be allowed back into polite conversation? Or are you of the opinion that it needs to stay naughty? Obviously, as a linguist, we don't have moral judgment around words. Well, I don't really think of it primarily as naughty. I think of it as, you know, sexist, misogynistic and insulting.

So if I could wave a magic wand, I'd take it back to where it was in medieval times. There's merely a word to refer to a buddy part. There's nothing wrong with it from that point of view. But as I've said, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. So I don't think that's going to happen. And the way it's used now, I don't feel any need to extend that any further than it's already gone. You've been amazing to talk to it. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Well, on my blog, which is called Language of Feminist Guide, where I talk about this and other issues. So talking about language and feminism since 2015, I'm writing a book on language, sexism and misogyny, which will one day be available in book-selling outlets, but that's probably a few months away by now. Amazing. Are you on Twitter or anything in social media? I am on Twitter. My handle is WordSpinsster. WordSpinsster. God, that's amazing. We could have you back to talk about that word. Deborah, you have been incredible.

Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about this. Thank you. Thank you so much to Kathy and to Deborah for this episode. I have enjoyed myself beyond all reasonable measure. And if you enjoyed this episode, please follow and review wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I know everybody asks you to do that, but it actually really does help us. And if there's a topic you would love us to explore or just something that you want to talk to us about, then you can now email us. You can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com.

Until next time, my marvellous cunts. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sounds.