Not in Front of the Children (4)/25 Hour News
We started with sex and – surprise, surprise – here we go again. Race and disability can take a back seat; when it comes to Percy Filth, we Brits excel like few others. Yet, this week’s word is perhaps more common across the pond and probably emanates from Ancient Greek. It’s a tragedy.
MOTHERFUCKER
As an insult that places the target amongst the lowest of the low, motherfucker once had few peers. Perhaps it’s been superseded now in terms of a sexual slur by the oddly acceptable ‘Paedo’ and by the fact that motherfucker itself has now become something of a meaningless word, used with careless colloquial frequency within black culture and, courtesy of black culture’s worldwide reach, virtually everyone else under 40. In one respect, the fact the word has been rendered somewhat without meaning could be viewed as a good thing; the more of these taboo words that become absorbed into a kind of universal white noise slang, the fewer of them we’ll have. But it is strange that a word describing something so wrong can have slipped down the charts when what it signifies remains an illicit sin everywhere bar the Forest of Dean and the odd East Anglian outpost.
The ultimate moral minefield as far as carnal relations go, incest of the mother/son variety nevertheless recurs regularly throughout popular culture and has done all the way back to ‘Oedipus Rex’. With the loosening of numerous restrictions on film-makers in the 1970s, directors weren’t slow to take advantage, yet most cinematic portrayals, such as Louis Malle’s ‘Le Souffle au Coeur’, Bertolucci’s ‘La Luna’ and the more recent ‘Spanking the Monkey’, have all covered this tricky subject with both wit and sensitivity, largely eschewing sensation.
The censor’s scissors were taken to two tracks on the debut LP by The Doors; the first was indicative of the times, as the ‘She gets high’ line on ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side)’ was pruned of its offending druggy buzzword so that it became the considerably more nonsensical ‘She gets…’ However, it was ‘The End’, the album’s epic closing track, which presented the band’s record label with a problem and reflected the uniquely erudite leanings of The Doors. Jim Morrison tapped into the Oedipus myth with the memorable couplet, ‘Father, I want to kill you/Mother, I want to fuck you’. Even counter-cultural poster-boys could only get away with so much in 1967, and the line became ‘Mother, I want to…’ The rest was left to the listener’s imagination.
Around twenty years later, when Derek Jarman’s 1976 movie ‘Sebastiane’ was screened on Channel 4, the sight of Roman soldiers touching each other up didn’t worry the broadcaster, whereas the English subtitles did. Motherfucker was spoken on screen in Latin, yet the translators baulked at spelling it out for those non-Latin speakers following the arty bum-action. They probably wouldn’t consider it a problem now. Like Cunt, Motherfucker was intended to be used as the worst word that could be conjured up to describe an especially unpleasant person, though it’s now perilously close to becoming a term of endearment.
Mind you, don’t expect ‘Blue Peter’ presenters to start referring to each other as motherfuckers in a jocular manner. It could very easily have an eye out.
Petunia Winegum
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June 20, 2015 at 9:21 am -
Blue Peter? Well, there’s already Blue David:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YBumQHPAeU
Love the “constitutional tyranny” line in the 25 Hour News.
P.S. Have you ever checked out badlipreading.tumblr.com? Your news compilation brought it to mind. -
June 20, 2015 at 9:25 am -
* it is strange that a word describing something so wrong *
I’m sure I read once that there was one of those “enlightened but primitive” island societies in the South Seas where it was regarded as part of the mothering duties to inculcate her boys into adult pursuits. It may however have just been one of those fantasies of the Victorian mind, along with Hottentots. I’m guessing that anyone regarding themselves as a son of a bitch would at least have ruled out becoming a motherfucker.-
June 20, 2015 at 9:51 am -
where it was regarded as part of the mothering duties to inculcate her boys into adult pursuits.
Apparently this tradition has been revived by pushy Japanese mothers of blossoming Salarymen or doctors. Son-san needing to concentrate all his energies on studying and not wooing the ‘Hello Kitty’ knickers off some sailor suited, doe eyed, school girl.
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June 20, 2015 at 10:49 am -
In a world without contraception, this behaviour is likely to produce genetic anomalies, and is the equivalent to father-daughter or sibling incest. Indeed, it could be (I’m no geneticist) worse even than cousin marriage. There is therefore a biological reason to prohibit it. (If you don’t, you just get more cretins).
With effective contraception, the act becomes just one more boundary to push, or yet one more ‘position’ in one’s Kuma Sutran bucket list.
Now what’s that saying that links Hell with Handcarts?
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June 20, 2015 at 10:58 am -
* (If you don’t, you just get more cretins) *
Going by that theory, motherfucking must be quite prevalant in the English-speaking world.-
June 20, 2015 at 1:44 pm -
I actually wrote ‘Pakis’ but somehow autocorrect on my computer altered the spelling. Your computer may be set to change it to ‘Lawyers’ or ‘Blairites’ or anything you choose.
Moor may well have better knowledge of motherfuckin’ (somehow, I don’t imagine it having a final ‘g’) but I was really talking about in-breeding in general …
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June 20, 2015 at 11:00 am
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June 20, 2015 at 11:02 am -
Thinking about the word (and with regard to Daft Lassie’s comment), with all “swear” words, I never think about their “real” meanings. calling someone a cunt doesn’t mean I think of someone as a vagina, ditto I wouldn’t literally be saying that someone has sex with their mother by “motherfucker”. It’s just an indicator of how I feel about a situation or a person, , maybe the intensity of the emotion being expressed.
My own mother had limits as to what were “acceptable” swear words and which were not – anything sexual in nature was way off limits (never, ever did I hear her or my father use “fuck” or “cunt”), but she would regularly use the words “sod” and “bugger” – I wonder if that’s where I got it from? (I don’t think she was thick and believe she would recognise the meanings of the words, though using them without associating them with sexual activity.)
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June 20, 2015 at 11:10 am -
I can recall my father remarking that folk who would use “frigging” were cowards and if they must swear they should have the guts to use the proper word. I’m not sure I ever heard him swear, other than perhaps where a word was necessary in order to tell a joke or relate a funny story (when I was grown up). Plainly he must have done so with his peers. I swore like a trooper even in Primary school, and was once called into the headmasters office about my known cursing-in-the-playground prediliction and advised that I was a bad influence and should curb my tongue, but I had acquired a supernatural ability to never swear in front of my parents. Nowadays we call all this sort of thing Hypocrisy.
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June 20, 2015 at 12:09 pm -
Yesterday in Florida I saw a mobile pizza truck called “Mothertruckin’ Pizza.”
Gross, and my mother would not have approved, or even understood the reference, but it just goes to show how debased is the popular culture that no one is even bothered.
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June 20, 2015 at 12:26 pm -
My favourite! It’s a close run thing, though, “cocksucker” often elbowing its way to the front of the queue.
I well remember my introduction to the word ‘motherfucker’ at the tender age of about 10. Our school received an intake from the local ‘gippo camp’, and one day I was aggressively questioned:
“Ugh. Are you a muthafucka?”
“Eh?!? … ?!?”
(I was already sure that I fancied girls – although I wasn’t sure why – but I don’t think I knew much about the mechanics of it all.)
“Uh. D’you fuck yer mutha? D’yer fuck yer mutha?”
“… … ?!?”
(Never having considered the possibility that ANYONE would do such a thing – without even being sure what that ‘thing’ was – I was confused into silence & a worried pondering.)In “big-school” a member of the clan remonstrated that they were not, in fact, gypsies at all: “We’re Travellers.” Such was the fear of offending them (‘Offend us one, offend us all’) that I had to bite my lip & not point out that they didn’t actually ‘travel’ anywhere, but instead reside in static-caravans on a Council-built plot complete with shower-blocks & the like.
(They were generally left alone & didn’t mix. One was friendly & loved by all, but the shower-blocks mentioned above were obviously not frequently used so it was difficult even being close by. They were all “in remedial”…)
Nowadays, I use the word when losing my rag with some dangerous driver – but always within the confines of the missus’ car! It belongs in my fantasy world of revenge, an amalgamation of childhood heroes & dreams: from the saddle I flick the corner of my poncho over the shoulder & take aim… “You mu – tha – fu – ka!!!” Or a ninja death-star is flung, to spear some shit in the forehead… “Cock – su – ka!!!” All good fun!
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June 20, 2015 at 3:52 pm -
I (almost) approve of jokes in which swear words are disguised by the context. Here’s a hoary old schoolboy example:
2 Scandanavian models are in a photograper’s studio.
Model 1: Helga, why are you taking off all of your clothes?
Model 2 (in a thick accent): Well, he said he just wanted to focus. -
June 20, 2015 at 4:32 pm -
I was once rung up in the wee small hours by a man with a lovely rural accent. He described himself as a travelling man. Wife in labour with eighth baby. Owner of 3 very tidy clean caravans and several trucks to pull em. Come into suburbia from Essex countryside due to mud and slutch the other side of Bishops Stortford. Caravans resting on concrete on the outskirts of my delivery patch. They spoke Romany to each other. She told me she was over 40, precise age unknown. First child at ?14…..shock horror. Elderly GP agreed to support the birth. Mum resembled a Red Indian Squaw. A proper gypsy lady. She had 3 friends egging her on to get on with it. Some 40 babies between the four Romany ladies!!!!! There was coloured cut glass in cabinets for visitors to marvel at.The baby was bathed in a huge cut glass pedestal bowl…..very posh. Notice all the now ‘forbidden words’ I have used. I would not have missed that day for all the world. I gave a young blond girl who was very helpful my wedding stilettos. This all happened probably 50 years ago, hence the calmness about age, number of births, delivering in the sticks in a caravan blah blah. It gave me respect for genuine travelling people. I kept getting told there were a load of dirty gippos on Carters Land. The police wanted to move them on and the EHO visited and agreed them to go ten days after the birth. The older sons moved off anyway….they were married with children. She had 8 sons. Different times….lawksamussy.
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