This conversation about "Bad Words" reminded me of an article that was
just in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. I hope you find it as
interesting as I did.
- Meg
Boston Globe, The (MA)
October 3, 2004
Edition: THIRD
Section: Ideas
Page: D3
Index Terms:
SUN
DISSING THE DIRT
Author: Jan Freeman
Article Text:
IN A NEW YORKER profile a couple of weeks ago, Teresa Heinz Kerry got some
grief for her grasp of English idiom after she called her detractors
"scumbags." "I doubt that she knows the literal meaning of `scumbag,'
wrote the reporter, Judith Thurman, "but perhaps, after forty years in
America, nearly thirty of them as a political wife . . . she should have
learned it."
Thurman does not, however, enlighten her audience; maybe she assumes that
all New Yorker readers know what Heinz Kerry does not. If so, I suspect
she's wrong: When I wrote about the word in 1998, after Indiana
congressman Dan Burton called President Clinton a scumbag, dozens of
people who knew scumbag told me they'd had no idea of its origins.
Though it's now usually just an all-purpose derogation, a cop-show synonym
for dirtbag or creep or lowlife, scumbag originally meant "condom" (to
many, "used condom" - scum being slang for semen). But if lots of
Americans, including Teresa Heinz Kerry, don't know this, do we really
want to spread the word? Or are we better off letting scumbag enjoy life
as a nonspecifically nasty term of abuse?
A few slang words, after all, have outrun their unsavory origins. Bollix
for "mess up" is no longer vulgar, having left "ballocks" in the dust;
nuts (though it used to be euphemized "nerts") is likewise untainted by
its past. Screw up is now acceptable, though other uses of screw vary in
their vulgarity ratings. Futz around, which may be either a euphemism for
you-know-what or a descendant of the Yiddish "arumfarzen" (no translation
necessary), is not uncommon in print nowadays, and even putz around is
gaining ground. (Its resemblance to "putter" may make it seem milder than
futz, though in fact its root is Yiddish slang for "penis.")
Origins are not, in any case, what makes a term taboo; it was cultural
consensus, not any secret meaning, that once made bloody Britain's worst
swear word. These days, though, consensus can be hard to find. Newspapers
try to hold a conservative line on language - The New York Times, for
instance, will print "crap shoot," but you can't say "crap" unless you're
Lyndon Johnson (and dead).
But print editors are the Canutes of usage, trying to turn back the usage
tide rolling in from TV, pop music, and the Internet. For would-be
gatekeepers, the speed of slang evolution keeps reviving the essential
scumbag question: How dirty can a word be if nobody knows it's dirty?
For the past decade, the slang word most delicately balanced on this usage
bubble has been sucks, as in "Mom, these sneakers suck." Seven years ago,
when I first wrote about it, I was sure it was headed for respectability:
The kids using the term had no sense of any sexual meaning, after all, and
(as my then-teenage daughter pointed out) the new usage was intransitive;
there was no grammatical object being sucked. Sucks may have been borrowed
from the slang for fellating, but innocent employment, I thought, would
neutralize its iffy past.
It had respectable relatives, too. Sucks to you! (origin unknown) had been
ordinary British youthspeak since the early 20th century, and suck up to,
though probably of indelicate ancestry, was so thoroughly domesticated
that in 1953, C.S. Lewis used it in one of his Narnia books for children.
Besides, suck has so many standard uses that you can't really quarantine
the syllable. Sucker meaning "dupe," for instance, is merely a babe in the
woods, a still-suckling newborn; and to children in many parts of the
country, a sucker is an innocent lollipop.
But I didn't reckon with the literalists, who decided kids should know
this was a bad word, even if they'd prefer that someone else explained
why.
We could have told the kids "sucks" was short for "sucks lemons" and left
well enough alone, but no: Parents banned it, then Red Sox fans adopted it
for their (increasingly pathetic) slogan, and some of them, just to show
that they really meant to be crude, wore their "Yankees suck" T-shirts
with "Jeter swallows" on the back.
This is a shame, for though every civilization needs a store of taboo
words, sucks is a useful slang verb. The finger-waggers say we should use
"more descriptive" words - "that movie was execrable," perhaps, and "the
Yankees are evil" - but in fact, sucks energetically fills a syntactical
role that would otherwise belong to "to be," that essential but
uninspiring verb. Strunk and White ("Use the active voice") would have to
approve, and so do I.
E-mail: freeman@globe.com.
Memo:
THE WORD
******************************************************************************************************************
Megan Frazer
Librarian
Commonwealth School
151 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, MA 02116
mfrazer@commschool.org
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