Fruity Language

Simon Schama alerted me to the importance of the Nina Simone song Mississippi Goddam in the history of the Civil Rights movement. It is about white supremacist outrages in various Jim Crow states, including a church bombing that killed four young girls, and the murder of Emmett Till. It is a scream of outrage against both race-based injustice and the gradualist approach of leaders like Martin Luther King, which she saw as inadequate in relation to the magnitude of the outrage

Of course the song was banned by many of the States she is referring to, but often on the spurious grounds of the so-called profanity in the title, repeated several times in the song itself

I've never grown a fig before; if this ripens, I'm going to have to work out what to do with it! I wondered what lies behind the idiom "I don't care a fig". My first thought was that it is probably just a substitution of a random f-word for the more common one. Not so; the phrase dates back to early modern English and appears in several forms in Shakespeare

Most likely it is imported from Italy and Spain, where its origin is a crude pun on the words higo/higa (Spanish) and fico/fica (Italian). One variant is fig, the other is a crude term for female genitals. The phrase is usually accompanied there by an obscene hand gesture: a clenched fist with the thumb protruding between the first two fingers. A reference either to the same body part or to sexual intercourse. So, by an indirect (albeit more interesting) route, my initial assumption was not so far out after all! 

Nina Simone also made a famous recording of the 1930s song that got Billie Holliday harrased by the FBI for most of her career: 'Strange Fruit' - a not-so-cryptic reference to the frequent, unpunished lynchings that left 'black bodies hanging from Southern trees'. It's a song that does not include a single profane word but is, nevertheless, a decription of obscenity from its first word to its last