Classic

Classic Trefoil - Adidas-style (Leith, circa 1990).


The following article was sent to me by my cuz from Melbourne today. It reminded me of a moment from a family wedding two years ago in Ireland. It was an early morning invitation to a round of golf. Jacob, Moyra and I are still in bed in our hotel room. Door opens and in walk the 3 Ozzie boys - not even a "good morning"....

"You wanna a game o' golf, c**t?" in that classic Ozzie accent.

They use it a lot as a term of endearment.

A distinguished word, I'm sure you'll agree:


C--- does not have to be the dirtiest word

LAST week was (and please don't take this the wrong way because it really was, quite literally) a c--t of a week. First the City of Melbourne sent its fearless officers to tear down posters advertising an art exhibition called C---s.

Then Jane Fonda, bless her septuagenarian get-out-of-jail-free card, let the c-bomb drop on the US Today show during a discussion of the play The Vagina Monologues, to which she had been asked to contribute a speech titled with the offending word.

"I said, 'I don't think so, I've got enough problems'," Fonda said by way of explaining why she declined the offer, nonetheless forcing NBC into a grovelling apology to viewers.

Now, to call someone a c--t could be to call them a coot. That's could but, clearly, not. Those coy little dashes exist to obscure the confronting reality, reinforced by last week's double c-word whammy ? as if we needed the reminder ? that the English language's most insulting, heinous, dirty word is a slang term for female genitalia.

Contemporary language is seasoned with all sorts of expletives that are infiltrating the mainstream. Take c---'s ostensible male equivalents, prick, cock and dick ? no longer any shock value or asterisks there. Even in an august newspaper such as this, and depending on the benevolence of individual subeditors, we might even be able to get the word f--- to fly in its unannotated form, although usually in the context of quotes from fey British film directors or secret tapes of police force members.

Auditioning a new, more acceptable colloquial term for girlie bits that doesn't contain the world's worst insult is problematic. There's something so prim about vagina ? as Germaine Greer once pointed out, it refers only to an internal section of the female anatomy, without the "fun bits". And anyway, it means "sword sheath" in Latin. Pussy's too porn; clacker ? well, anything that makes 51 % of the population sound like locomotives should perhaps be abandoned.

But to find an alternative is to blame the victim. Poor little c--t used to be a perfectly acceptable anatomical word until its criminal femaleness cast it into the seventh circle of hell. Church records dating back to the 11th century reveal English surnames that incorporate the word, including Bele Wydecunte and Robert Clevecunt; Gropecunte Lane was in London's red light district around 1230. Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, written around 1390, used the quaint "queynte", possibly as a cheeky way of circumventing its growing naughtiness. Shakespeare, ever the fan of the bawdy play on words, did something similar in Hamlet, and Twelfth Night.

But its use as an insult was a distinctly 20th century development. And is it really happenstance that c--t rather than cock became the nuclear bomb of profanities? Or is it somehow related to the fact that while most people are familiar with the concept of misogyny, its male equivalent ? misandry ? is in danger of dropping out of the lexicon through underuse?

Some third-wave feminists are fighting back with reclaiming the word, much like nigger among some African-Americans and queer among gays. Greer, who once published an essay titled Lady, Love Your C--t, changed her tune several years ago on erasing its shock value by using it as the standard term for vagina. "I tried to get people to say it, I tried to take the malice out of it. It didn't work and now in a way I'm perversely pleased because it meant that it kept the power."

Greer, however, is preternaturally fearless.

The Vagina Monologues celebrates its 10th birthday this year and its premise remains as relevant as ever: that even vagina remains a word polite women don't like to say in public. That's why the writer, Eve Ensler, gets her audience to scream "c--t" at a pivotal moment in each performance.

The artist at the centre of last week's City of Melbourne censorship escapade, Greg Taylor, who maintains that his art works based on female genitalia were meant to empower women (rather than generate free publicity for the show), said: "The word itself isn't offensive. It was once such a noble word and it's just been turned around into the most insulting thing on this planet."

And would that protector of public morals, Deputy Lord Mayor Gary Singer, who primly assured his constituents, "I didn't look closely at the images", have got his ceremonial robes all in a twist over Puppetry of the Penis, or a book such as Dick for a Day?

Perhaps the time isn't right to slap the word c--t up on billboards in a bid to desensitise the general public, but a little more thought ought to go into the reflexive "ugh" it seems to engender. Because some times, even rude words need to fight for equal opportunity.

Larissa Dubecki is a staff writer.