Say It Out Loud!
Rheum at the Top
“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.” Tell me he (or she or they) was taking the mickey.1 Thus a quote in London’s Financial Times this week, and no, despite many hopes, not remotely satirical. So do America’s boardrooms gulp gratefully at the refreshing resurgence, thanks to the world’s most powerful felon, of a vocabulary that has, in recent years been, let us speak in freedom’s tones, pussy-whipped by, and again let us resist all ameliorative synonyms, the woke mind-set.2 But gags are off, gobs run free again and one wonders, breath bated, what else will be bursting forth.
But wait one. Has anyone who really yearned to enfoul their mouth ever drawn back from such a term. Slapped hand across errant mouth to suppress what conscience (and cancellation) declared a sin? Please. Does sufficient soap exist to scour these putrid potty-mouths. The knuckle-dragging thug (CEO? janitor?) who called up the judge in one of the Felon’s cases and threatened her ‘Hey you stupid slave n[****]r[.] If Trump doesn't get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly b[***]h’ didn’t use asterisks. They were only inserted by Jack Smith’s team when drawing up the report into the Felon’s attempt to lie and cheat and insurrect his way out of his 2020 defeat.
Lenny Bruce, the great antagonist of such taboos, was wrong. Use does not lead to invisibility. If the world intoned the racist/nationalist terminology long and loudly enough, he claimed, then the words would lose their edge, grow blunt and, useless, finally reach the trash. If, by now, anyone was still bothering to use nigger and its peers, it would have long ago become defused of all its power. Its only sin anachronism. Uncool. Thus he believed, thus he preached but he was surely frustrated. For the aggression the racist/nationalist slurs carry to have faded, like once-bright patterns on a stained and fraying carpet, was to ask for an unreal, even naive optimism. Not his usual schtick. Anyway, the terms were sculpted not sewn and they would not wear away. But woke would have hated him as much as the authorities who hunted him down.3 These are words, and there are many more, that have passed beyond the pale.
Slang has a problem with all this and I would not for a second deny that I have one too. If I may pass the buck, let me quote.
As my old friend the social commentator, critic and novelist Jonathan Meades put it back in 2010, ‘Slang is a depiction of the actual, of what we think rather than what we are enjoined to think.’ It is what is, as simple as that. Not what any brand of true believer declares what should be. I have never used asterisks unless the text from which I quote has already done so. It is not because I court some kind of transgressive thrill in using these forbidden terms, nor that I have grasped a figurative stars and bars or swastika, brandishing it for bonus effect as I run through the lexis of hate. It is because no-one, at least in the insult-dense context I am citing, has said n****r. Or for that matter ‘the [word]-word’, a formation, whether the missing word be n-, f- , c- , s- , p - or any other. Nor the [word]-bomb either. What they say is nigger and however loathsome and opprobrious and deliberately antagonistic it undoubtedly is, that is just what its users intend and we cannot blank our way out of that.
In any case, what else is disguise in such contexts other than emphasis. The early 18th century satirist Tom Brown (or as his enemy Jonathan Swift called him T—m B—n), who seems to have invented the whole blank thing, when he substituted dashes for the internal letters of his targets’ names, knew that his readers, let alone his subjects, would have known exactly at whom his quill was pointing. What mattered was that he might thus avoid Britain’s notoriously prosecution-friendly libel laws, the only ones in which, still, there is no presumption of the defendant’s innocence and, as the legal maxim has it, ‘the greater the truth the greater the libel.’ Did (or do) those same blanks, inserted into what the fearful condemn as ‘bad’ language, ever guard one’s infant eyes from the literally unspeakable. At least once we knew what we were seeing. (For me that was at ten, I imagine it is much younger now). One might mention ‘bad’ people, but forget the adjective.4
My point: that denial is inded that river in Egypt and shoving your fingers in your ears and shrieking solves no problems. Does a working day, which for me means every day, pass without my seeing proof that all these words, branded as vile and rebarbative as they may be, are and always have been brandished across the social board. I am essentially anglophone, but I have no doubt that where there’s a slang, and that is everywhere, there’s a slur. That is how we work. In the racial/nationalist context, the other must be excluded and before exclusion stands demonization, exclusion from the ranks of ‘us’. Slang is tasked with lexical end of the job and performs as required.
My job is to catalogue a vocabulary, a lexis and offer that catalogue for use. Since the lexis is slang, and slang’s obsessions are what they are, it is nearer the gutter than the stars.5 To me that makes it human, as human as is possible. Dare I suggest, deliberately or otherwise, honest and revelatory too. If mirrors had ears this is what they would record. And while the OED has a substantial entry (revised in 2009) for human, I see no congratulatory definitions, though def. 2 offers ‘mundane, worldly [i.e. not spiritual]; imperfect, fallible.’
This is a comment, not a story and the informative bits are in the footnotes. But while we must, I suppose, feel happy for all those newly liberated masters and mistresses of the universe, it is necessary to call bullshit. The Felon, while he promises and may expedite multiple imprisonments, will free nothing, merely legitimise it, the worse the better. He and his constituency are human too and act accordingly. Maybe that’s my point, I have spent a life in the cynical corner. Too late to change it now.
Spurred by my throwaway use, I started looking to see if anything new might be found for ‘take the mick(ey)’ and its predecessor take a/the mike. In the case of ‘the mike’, this digs up some predates from 1895/1911. As for the canonical ‘mickey’, hitherto 1948, I can now offer 1923. All good, but these discoveries play hell with the assumed etymology whereby the piss stands for the daylights or essence, even if there is no record, too often the case with the form, of the origin of Mr Bliss, if such origin even exists (if it did, should we be thinking well-known, if long-lost Cockney sparrer?). No matter, since if we accept, and so the found citations make clear, mike predates mickey, and unless proof emerges, what seemed an abbreviation is in fact first in line. This offers another possible origin, and not one I have ever seen: that we again see rhyming slang, in this case on chi-ike, teasing, criticism. If nothing else the earliest users do seem to have come from London.
Had they consulted GDoS, and I speak at a risk of boasting, they might have found 2,300 variations on retard (noun/adjective) and 1,450 on pussy. But no. Narrow is all.
Bruce’s use of racist terms would have appalled contemporary liberals, but what condemned him in the 1960s was sex. No hassle for the libs here but while it’s unlikely that city hall and the station house worried much about minorities, cocksucker, come, fress, stuff like that maintained sufficient power to have him stalked by policemen at every gig he played, and, as intended, for those gigs gradually to dry up. The right can cancel too, and half a century avant la lettre. In his case it was terminal though the heroin doubtless played a practical role.
Blank, often in multiples, and its derivative blanky can be found in GDoS (here and here.) So too can blankety and blankety-blank. Brown contributed greatly to the paradoxical joy of bowdlerization. The earliest recorded ‘bad’ blank is from Dickens, voicing a prize-fighting fan in 1857: ‘Enter a closely shaven, bullet-headed fellow in an ecstasy of excitement [...] “So help me,” he cries delightedly, “if he ain’t a blank picter with the weins in his face down ’ere and ’ere, a showin’ out just as if a blank hartist ’ad painted him. Tell yer, he’s beautiful, fine as a blank greyhound, with a blank heavy air with him that looks blank like winnin.” ’
Bankers are wankers who only talk like that in front of people who won't punch them in the mouth.
This is a breath of fresh air.