Be Excellent To Each Other

Absolute scientific proof (within acceptable margins of error) that it's absolutely fine to say "cunt":
https://twitter.com/NikTShirts/status/1 ... 6803152896

Trying to learn from my experiences of being banned from twitter, and examine my own behaviour and reasoning, to understand if I'm unintentionally making women uncomfortable:
If I use the word "cunts" to insult a mixed-gender (including men) group, is it insulting to all women?

— Nik's T-Shirts (@NikTShirts) April 2, 2019

I wonder how many people replying to your poll were men.

That's the first time I've done a poll on twitter, and I'm a bit disappointed you can't see who voted. Obviously you raise a very good point.

If only 5% of people said wheelchair access was important, would that mean we could stop building wheelchair access everywhere?

as a person who is a woman: I don't mind if you call ppl cunt, I'd prefer it if you didn't call me one, but not on womanly grounds just on general "what did I do?" grounds
n=1 doesn't help your scientific inquiry so carry on

Indeed.

You fucking monster.

Hah!

I didn’t see your poll (because my Twitter client doesn’t show polls...) but regardless of how I feel about the word itself, I’d have voted no because I’d have read ‘offensive to all women’ to mean that all women would be offended by it. Clearly not all 100% of women would find it offensive, so I’d have voted ‘no’, but that doesn’t really cover my belief that a lot of women don’t like the word, especially when used by men, because it’s a word designated to the most intimate part of a woman’s body, so often abused forcefully by men in particular, now used as a violent word of disgust and hatred.

Sorry, that sentence structure is awful, but I’m struggling with my words of late.

I understood Mimi, and that’s what women have told me previously.

Thank you. I tend to use far too many words and repeat things when I’m nervous saying how I feel on a subject, so I garble it.

The earliest known use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was as part of a placename of a London street, Gropecunt Lane, c. 1230. Use of the word as a term of abuse is relatively recent, dating from the late nineteenth century.[4] The word appears not to have been taboo in the Middle Ages, but became taboo towards the end of the eighteenth century, and was then not generally admissible in print until the latter part of the twentieth century. The term has various derivative senses, including adjective and verb uses. Feminist writer and English professor Germaine Greer argues that cunt "is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock".

It's weird, really, don't you think, for it to be 'one of the few words with a genuine power to shock' when it simply refers to a female body part? It's really only offensive because society has decided it is, and that it's the worst insult to use about someone, whereas dickhead is deemed to be far less insulting.

I don’t really find it that weird. The N word simply refers to a dark skin tone. Of COURSE, it doesn’t. It refers to many years of oppression and abuse of a huge group of people and uses as a marker the most obvious physical difference in setting them apart as the other, and the word is used in hatred. I feel similarity with this word. Yes, it IS about a part of a woman’s body. It is the part of the body that has been used to oppress women for millennia. It is all too often subjected to rape, and abuse, to set women apart, and then the word is used In hatred, to mean the most vile of people. Words, however strange people may come to find tbe meanings attached to them in an etymological sense, have power, and they are used to convey power over others.

I know it is the favourite word of one of my favourite people (The Toksvig) and I hope she enjoys using it, and hearing it. And I hope she celebrates it. I feel she is perhaps entitled to, as are all women if they so want. And I don’t feel upset or angry or offended if people use it, because it is too big an argument to have, and when I’ve spoken about it before I’ve been roundly shouted down, by men, because I’m wrong to feel the way I do. I’m not at all offended by Nik using it, because I know it’s just in common usage, and just part of our world. But I sort of wish it wasn’t in the form that it is. It stings me when it’s said with a snarl.

I take your points, all of them. I just wonder how the C word has ended up being deemed the worst insult, as opposed to a body part used for expelling waste i.e. arsehole, or a useless one such as the appendix. In fact, why a body part at all? Then again, appendix doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily, but arsehole does.

I very, very rarely use the C word as I know many people fing it deeply offensive and I flinch when I hear it used offensively. I’d have to be extremely angry or have momentarily lost the plot to use it. I’m far more likely to refer to someone who I hold in very low esteem as an arsehole, dick head or shithead.

Misogyny, one imagines.

There is a certain cadence and harshness to the sound, which can give it an aggresive feel that other words don't really have,. Combine that with the way that pretty much any word to do with the various holes found towards the bottom end of your body tends to veer towards taboo in the UK to some degree or other, and with it not getting so overused since the 1800s to have become normalised (it's not a word I ever encountered at school, maybe even at university. I suspect WoS may have been my first exposure, so to speak. ) ...

World of Sport?? Good grief, I don't remember hearing Dicky Davis using it on air, but you may be right.

Misogyny, yes, I guess so. And I guess it's up to the speaker to decide whether cunt or dick are their insult of choice when used in an aggressive way.

Thanks everyone for indulging my sweary tangent on this thread. (Do we need to maybe split this stuff out into a swearing thread?) It's an interesting discussion and lovely to be able to have it here, where we can do so without descending into just condemnation or (ironically) name-calling.


Ah, apologies for the ambiguity (something I find quite irritating in questions like this). I tried to avoid it by saying "insulting to all women" rather than "offensive to all women", but I probably should have said something more like "does it insult all women?". This may have skewed the results of the poll. By the way, for the sake of clarity, I was not in any way being remotely serious when I suggested that a poll of 19 self-selecting people on twitter was proof of anything whatsoever! I'd hoped that was obvious, but it may not have been (I am terrible at knowing when I've been clear or not - hence ambiguity in poll - possibly for reasons that need not detain us here).

I realise this is going to seem like a weak defence, but I use swear words quite separately from their literal meanings when using them "as" swear words (i.e. to express anger, irritation, disgust etc.). Consciously, at least, I would no more be intending to convey the meaning of a woman's genitals when using the c-word than I would (in conversation of a non-sexual nature) use the f-word to mean having sexual intercourse, "bugger" to refer to anal penetration or "bloody" (in its more common - to me, at least - usage) to imply bloodshed. I've also never bought into the "if you don't have one, you can't use the word" argument. At its simplest, I can't remember who it was (a comedian, I think - googling is drawing a blank for me) who said something like "I don't own an umbrella; does that mean I can't say the word?". Perhaps a better analogy is that it would be ridiculous to suggest women shouldn't use "cock" as an insult. If a woman were to call Piers Morgan (first handy example that came to mind, for some reason) a cock, would that imply a (possibly subconscious) dislike of penises, or latent misandry?

But (and this is why it's a weak defence) all that is to ignore the word in question's history. Even if it isn't being used to express misogyny, it's almost certainly (as Doc G says) gained its taboo place in modern English because of misogyny so, regardless of intention, it's not a huge leap for its usage to still be taken as such, particularly when the audience has not otherwise had a chance to form much of an opinion of the character of the speaker, in this regard. (I'd like to think one of the reasons Mimi is not offended by me using the word is that she knows I'm not a misogynist, but I may well be over-confident in this belief.) Words have histories and multiple meanings that can't always (and often shouldn't) be separated from current usage. It would be unthinkable to start using the n-word as an insult (regardless of ethnicity of the target) and claiming you're using it with a different meaning to that with which it's been used previously.

A lot of the suitability and acceptability of the use of swear-words comes down to the audience. It's a lot more forgivable for someone to launch into an expletive-ridden monologue when in the exclusive company of a group of friends you've known for years than it is to do so, for example, on a bus (tempting as it often is, but that's another discussion). It's easy to forget that forums like this (and, to some extent, Twitter) are publicly accessible and aren't just a bunch of mates (particularly as creating that illusion is probably this place’s biggest strength). While one may be free to use whatever words one wishes here (and, although seemingly to a lesser extent, given my recent bannings, on Twitter), those reading it, with varying degrees of acquaintance with the writer, are free to make their own inferences on the writer’s personality, based on the language used. This is something I’ve often failed to consider before posting tweets, replies on here, etc.

With that in mind (and because frankly the last thing I want to do in the world ever at all is to cause Mimi to feel stung), I’m going to try to tone down my swearing in public.

How to tell that someone didn't go to school in Middlesbrough: Part 1

"Daft Cunt" was a daily standard, possible even friendly insult in my school. We didn't say "Chinny Reckon" either. We said "Cheesy Beard" but I reckon that was just some Chinese Whispers version of the same thing.

This is an interesting side debate and that, but there's a word beginning with 's' that ends with 'plit' that seems appropriate here.

It's a female body part in the UK. In other countries it is the worst possible insult you can give to a woman.

If you watch Saturday Night Fever you will see its origin. It's, IIRC, an Italian word used to describe a woman who will sleep with any one. There's a scene where a girl sleeps with a couple of men in a car and John Travolta says "now you're a c word".

In South London it was used as a mild insult to people, kind of in the same way Americans call each other pussies. However, utter it in the USA? and yeah, they really didn't like that very much at all.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/085fab1a-6 ... c83dd7d502

There it is. It was removed from most versions of the film to gain the PG rating.

There are many theories of the origins of the word but not a single one theorising that it's Italian. It's just used as a gendered insult in the film, you're reading way too much into it.

ETA: there's a line earlier in the film of, "It's a decision a girl's gotta make early in life, if she's gonna be a nice girl or a cunt" so the later line you're referencing is just him saying that she'd made her decision, it's not meant to imply that cunt has the specific meaning you've given it.

I was taught my Chaucer by a nun, and we each had to take turns live translating into modern English. Of course that was my turn. Of course it was. The look on her face as she urged me on to the word, realising that my brain had already made the deduction but that I couldn’t possibly think she’d want me to read that out. But she did. And she looked like any naughty schoolchild.

She sounds like a right cunt.

She was obsessed with appearances (of the school) and when made headteacher would spend all the money on doing up the front of the school lobby rather than books and learning materials, so I didn’t like that, but she was good at what she taught.

I remember being staggered in my English Lit class once, when an audio recording of someone reading Byron had the line “Cant is stronger than Cunt” in it.

There was a lot of giggling.

Juliet's tits in the Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet film raised an eyebrow..

At least it was just an eyebrow.

Well I used to be married to an Italian American with a very Italian American family and apparently that's where the word came from.

Ed. I was just saying it had different meanings, I'm just shit at explaining things.

Of all the threads for a discussion of that word, I think this one is the most apt.

Well, then that is surely the only explanation. I shall inform the scholars.

In his diaries, if my memory serves, Pepys describes his wife catching him with his fingers up the housemaid's "cunny"

And Pepys was famously Italian.

I particularly like the most insulting Spanish word there is, pendejo. I knew it was a very insulting word from watching Cheech And Chong but I never knew why it was so insulting. I asked my Puerto Rican friend Delores and she didn't know, so I asked my pal in Spain, Antonio. Apparently pendejo are the small hairs around the browneye. Oh God, how I laughed.

Where the word "perjorative" comes from, little fact there for fans of MaliA's History of Stuff.

However insulting it may or may not be it's certainly the dirtiest.

I'm sure the guys in "Rome" the BBC/hbo series used cunny as well and I know that's not a documentary, but I thought the route of cunnilingus (Latin, not the BBC/hbo drama) came from that and was Latin in origin

Two pages and nobody yet has typed 'cunt' into Wikipedia and clicked on 'Etymology'.

Strap in, I'm a split this fucker.

The last two pages read like a pub argument in the days before Google and smartphones.

Yeah, I did. It said it came down the Germanic line of languages, which I said some posts ago. All the other sources I looked at said similar.

It’s Italian-American. Thread closed.

Though I just tried to quote that part and instead edited that post, so, you know, don’t look to me for any form of intelligence.

Latest research records it’s first known usage in Super Mario Bros.

I get the message. I apologise again for bringing up the subject, an act which I now regret.

Oh no, it's fine, I was just laughing at the made up etymology

It was the first thing I did, but the paragrpah begins with "The etymology of cunt is a matter of debate" and the other sites I looked at all agreed: no one knows for sure. And ultimately I just wanted to point out that John was talking shit as usual, I didn't really care past that.

Don't get me wrong, I like pub arguments!

The word cunt was first used in a Dolmio advert.

In 1997