Cunted on Good Friday

A love letter to the most beautiful word in the English language

Photo by Євгенія Височина on Unsplash

Everything is quiet outside. There's no-one up. Everyone else is enjoying their rare opportunity for a lie-in. A long aimless Easter weekend stretches before us. And I am sat here, in the dark, hungover, thinking about the word cunt.

The beauty of it lies in its economy. It packs so much in. Using just four letters it can offend, upset, disrupt, outrage and silence. There is no word with a greater impact, nor one that establishes so many potential outcomes with such little effort. 

To get the obvious out the way: it's not sexist. I know many people think it is, but they are wrong - and I think tellingly so. Most swear words involving women's genitalia imply weakness. Look at how the word pussy translates: 'What a pussy'. 'Don't be a pussy'. 'He pussied-out.' All of them defined by harmlessness, weakness, cravenness, the absence of strength or power. That's sexist. Cunt is the precise opposite. It is powerful - more powerful, indeed, than any other swear word. It is aggressive. It is curt and sharp and ferocious. It's extremely revealing that the powerful word for female genitalia is the one that society has decided is the height of offensiveness, whereas the weak word for female genitalia is much more widely tolerated.

People often say that swearing involves a failure of imagination. They encourage you to deploy a wider range of vocabulary to express your thoughts. This is to misunderstand swearing at its most basic level. Its purpose is not designation, but effect. It is about psychology more than specificity. There is no other word for cunt, because no other word has the same impact.

Swear words operate at the level of taboo. That is their true meaning. They are an escalating form of taboo transgression. In all societies, certain words are considered forbidden. Some of them are very lightly forbidden, like damn. Some are very sternly forbidden, like cunt. Evidently they contribute to some kind of societal need, or reflect a certain type of human requirement.

No matter how used to swearing we are, the sound of these words triggers our sense of taboo. We know a transgression is taking place. A very modest one, sure, but a transgression nonetheless. Our social apparatus is very highly attuned to behavioural misdemeanour - the kinds of things which once have had you thrown out of the tribe. So it registers every time, spiking our attention. The taboo trigger is one of the most powerful forms of language, because it is not strictly operating at the level of intellect, but right down there in the amygdalian chimp mind.

Swearing is therefore an extremely effective form of political communication. It's picked up on the taboo radar, it causes the prickle on the skin that something unusual and potentially dangerous is taking place. It brings the language to life. So if the purpose of your writing is to engage people emotionally, the real question isn't 'why would you swear'. It's: why wouldn't you?

Just swearing is not enough. One must swear well. The critics of swearing are right about one thing: it is demeaning if it is overused. But they have misunderstood what is demeaned and what constitutes overuse. It is not the person that is demeaned, but the swear word itself. And the overuse is not the result of frequency, but of lack of clarity or thought as to its application. Sometimes the swear word is used almost by instinct in nearly every sentence. Sometimes it is used as a form of grammar, as a comma basically, to intersperse the rest of the words. In either case, the power of the word is diminished. You've done wrong by the swears. You've betrayed their dark magic.

The best swearing plays with the taboo trigger. It kinda flirts with it. It recognises the strength of the word and plays around - either by comparing or compounding it. 

The former is the most common. It takes the same structure as a joke - leading the listener one way then turning them another. The delight comes in the sense of surprise. So it's very pleasant and enjoyable to embed the harshest swearing in sentences which otherwise indicate serenity, safety and calm. We might therefore talk, for instance, about an organisation being 'a meadow of cunts', or someone being in a state of 'cunty frivolity' - any combination which conjoins innocence with the despicable.

Compounding taboo is less common. This is where you get joy from stacking offence on top of itself. Telling someone 'you fucked it' is unremarkable. But telling them that they 'fucking fucked it' is much more fun. Describing someone as 'fucking cunted in your eyesockets' is also charming, because you got both in and then docked them with some barren, fractured imagery. 

Does the word cunt really need the word fuck in front of it to secure its potential? Absolutely not. But it is enjoyable to stack them upon one another, to see how high you can make this tower of filth before it falls in on itself. But notice again that the real purpose is surprise. Placing an offensive word next to an offensive word is just as startling as placing it next to a gentle one. We assumed that whatever the swear word needed to accomplish was done, and therefore dropped our taboo guard, but then - bam - another one came along. So in this sense, meadows and fucks share the same function: they aim to confound. 

Swearing has another meaning too, which feels counter-intuitive. It is a form of intimacy.

People try to avoid social taboos. So even the most congenital swearer avoids doing it at church or children's parties. Instead we restrict it to our friends. Generally speaking, the stronger the friendship the worse the language. That's the case in school, when you use it in the playground but know that you can't in the classroom, and it remains the case in adulthood.

I only really know I'm friends with someone once they've called me a cunt. It is, in this country at least, an expression of love: a formal declaration of affection. This fact probably indicates something quite messed up about us - a pathological aversion to sincerity - but that’s a subject for another day.

Given this intimacy function, swearing in journalism therefore has a kind of egalitarian impulse in it, an active attempt to undermine the top-down style of newspaper opinion writing and bring it back to a more level footing.

This was one of the most striking impacts when blogs first emerged. Until then, newspaper columnists had their words printed and sent out to the world. There was no back-and-forth with the audience, except for the letters page, which was itself judiciously curated by an editor. Blogs changed all that. Suddenly the relationship between writer and reader became much more equal. People could comment underneath and eventually direct their views to the author on social media. It encouraged a more relaxed conversational style, a kind of levelling, a to-and-fro.

My career started in digital journalism. I much prefer the equal footing it offers to the print pulpit. Even now, when people ask what I do, I tell them I'm a blogger. I believe in the form.

Newsletters feel like the natural continuation of that. And in that space, you find yourself using swear words quite naturally, because you are replicating, in a journalistic way, the expression of kinship with the audience - the designation of the informal group. You’re basically saying: It's alright, we're away from the teachers.

My single favourite moment of swearing comes at the end of The Angel's Share, Ken Loach's Scottish whisky heist film. Everyone's having a rough old time of it, because it's a Loach film, and one of them - a woman called Mo - is basically a kleptomaniac. The film ends with the lead character saying goodbye to her. He embraces her, smiles, and says: "I’ll check my pockets you wee cunt." And that's it. The great moment of warmth and resolution which the film culminates in. There's no other way it could have been put. A moment of genuine intimacy and friendship, expressed in the only way it could be, or that it would be. 

The BBFC restricted the filmmakers to seven 'cunts' for a 15 certificate, only two of which could be 'aggressive cunts'. It’s like watching an ant try to understand Picasso.

Odds and sods

How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't, my latest book, came out in paperback yesterday. It's my attempt to get out from under the bullshit of our political debate and look at how the country really works: Stripping down every part of the system and seeing how it operates.

We read so much political coverage, but it's mostly without any kind of structural underpinning. Nadine Dorries said this. Lee Anderson said that. Now this other politician is criticising them for it. Will they apologise? Will the prime minister stand by them? God help us all. Then the carousel swings, the spotlight moves. Some other row erupts. The press move on, a ferocious pack hunt, roaming widely, suddenly sticking their noses in the air once they catch a scent, then moving on quickly once it's gone. All noise, all the time, but no underlying sense of how anything actually functions or why it’s falling apart.

The book is meant to fix that. It looks at everything in turn, from candidate selection to ministerial life, the Commons backbenches to halls of Downing Street. It lays out exactly how things work in practice. How do we select candidates? Why do we ignore two-thirds of the votes? What is a special adviser? How are backbench MPs silenced during the passage of legislation? How does the whips office work? What is it like to be a minister? Why are civil servants often even more ignorant of the policy area they work in than the politicians they serve? How does the Treasury bully other departments into compliance? Why has British political journalism gone into terminal decline? And why do the two main parties have more that unites than divides them?

This should be the only book you'll ever need to understand Westminster. An antidote to bullshit. A guide to the concealed reality of the system we live within. If you buy it, my life will marginally improve. Links below, along with a video of me being really very serious indeed.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-westminster-works-and-why-it-doesnt/ian-dunt/9781399602747

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/How-Westminster-Works-and-Why-It-Doesnt-by-Ian-Dunt/9781399602747