Sex, excretions and animals: universal categories of insults
Sex, excretions and animals: universal categories of insults
In my last post, I discussed the cultural specificity of insults like ‘asshole’ and ‘wanker’. However, while such terms might be inflected with local values and meanings, there’s nothing culturally specific about using one’s anus and genitals—or the sexual and excretory acts we perform with them—as the basis for insulting people. Testicles, vaginas, penises, faeces, anuses, defecation, masturbation and sexual intercourse feature in insults the world over.
For instance, according to the linguist Ruth Vatvedt Fjeldchod and her colleagues, chod (चोद) in Hindi has much the same meaning as ‘fuck’ in English, and is used in similar contexts. Moreover, ‘fuck’ itself has travelled well beyond its native English environs. Fjeldchod and her colleagues observe that it is now thought to be the most globally recognised and used swearword the world over, although it tends to take on indigenised forms where it travels—such as føkk in Norwegian, fokka in Icelandic and fak in Russian.
Taken literally, ‘fuck off’ does seem an odd way to insult someone, as Bill Bryson observes in The Mother Tongue. In his words,
‘It is a strange and little-noted idiosyncrasy of our tongue that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to undertake an anatomical impossibility, or, stranger still, to engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than anything else. Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbable sentiment than “Get fucked!” We might as well snarl, “Make a lot of money!” or “Have a nice day!”’
Of course, ‘get fucked’ is not unique to English, and the whole point of the expression is that you’re not literally telling someone to have sex. As I noted in my last post, ‘fuck’ is a dysphemism, and it gets its power as an insult precisely because it’s not used literally. Still, it begs the question of why we are so wont to use such terms as insults.
The world over, swearwords—insults amongst them—tend to be centred on social and linguistic taboos, which are typically either religious or sexual in origin. This explains why swearing often takes the form of blasphemy or obscenity. But while the former is culturally specific in form, being based on highly variable beliefs and practices, the latter is based on the human body, and what the anthropologist Janet McIntosh describes as ‘the metaphysical peril associated with sex and excretion’. This is why obscenities like ‘fuck you’ travel better than blasphemies like ‘goddamn you’. It’s also why ‘asshole’ is immediately identifiable as an insult, even if we aren’t fully cognisant of the cultural nuances of the term (e.g., arrogant, entitled, etc.).
One of the more colourful examinations of obscenities in action can be found in the cultural and linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick’s work amongst the Gapun from the Sepik-Ramu region in Papua New Guinea. Cross-culturally, although men are more frequently associated with public displays of conflict than women, in the community where Kulick conducted fieldwork over a thirty-year period, the public airing of grievances, called kros, are the province primarily of women.
Kulick describes the kros as ‘heavily characterized by obscenity, sarcasm, threats, and insults, all of which are conveyed in shrill screams’. One kros he documented was performed by a woman named Sake. Widely known as ‘a woman perpetually ready to have a kros’, she was locally infamous for the frequency of her displays and the creativity of her insults. Indeed, in the 45 minutes that she railed primarily against her husband, Kulick counted a total of 119 obscenities. For instance, she declared her husband variously to be a ‘fucking mother fucker’, a ‘big fucking semen prick’, a ‘dog’s vomit face’ and a ‘big black shithole’ who should ‘crawl down into the toilet hole and sit in the shit, old toilet’.1
Kulick contends that the relentless use of obscenity in a kros is a means of impugning the social worth of the object of abuse by equating them with denigrated body parts and acts. Basically, the speaker is trying to convey the message that the object of the kros should not be listened to, and that any talk they produce is ‘shameful talk emanating from a shameful orifice. The talk, like the person who enunciates it, is disgusting and worthless’.
To use the language of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, if the margins of the body and its effluvia are seen as powerful and polluting ‘dirt’, then the words associated with those parts of the body—and their actions—themselves become similarly charged, especially when we use them figuratively rather than literally. Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that we call them ‘dirty’ words. Notably, even before children learn to master obscenities, they seem to be intuitively aware of the insulting possibilities of symbolically equating humans with bodily excretions—as terms like ‘poo-head’ and ‘booger brain’ attest.2
Interestingly, this recognition doesn’t seem to be an exclusively human attribute, as studies of efforts to teach nonhuman primates sign language show. Although the findings of these studies are controversial, one of the most successful experiments was with Washoe, a female chimpanzee trained by Allen and Beatrice Gardner in the late 1960s. According to their book Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees, Washoe had learned 130 signs by the age of five and soon started to combine them in unexpected but logical ways. For example, she labelled the refrigerator ‘open food drink’ and a swan was deemed a ‘water bird’.
‘Dirty’ was the sign Washoe used for faeces and soiled items; she also used the same term for urinating and defecating. This is presumably why she nicknamed her potty chair ‘dirty good’—a toilet being the right place for dirt. Notably, after she was toilet trained, Washoe started spontaneously using ‘dirty’ as an insult, saying things like ‘dirty Jack gimme drink’ when a trainer refused to obey her request and ‘dirty monkey’ when scared by an aggressive macaque. In effect, she employed ‘dirt’ in a symbolic rather than literal way, by effectively calling people and monkeys ‘shitheads’.
Interestingly, ‘dirty monkey’ is also recognisably insulting if a human uses the term, but for completely different reasons. This brings us to another universal type of insult: animal abuse. While we frequently insult people by referring to them as polluting body parts, we also malign them by metaphorically comparing them to other animals. Indeed, we sometimes combine the two, as terms like ‘pussy’, ‘cock’ and ‘cunt’ attest, although once this happens, the animal associations are typically downplayed.3
The first person to systematically analyse this phenomenon was the anthropologist Edmund Leach. In a now classic essay, he argued that this tendency was universal, whilst simultaneously observing that some animals feature more prominently in abuse than others. For instance, while we use ‘cow’, ‘bitch’ and ‘pig’ as insults,4 calling someone a ‘badger’, ‘lemur’ or a ‘raccoon’ carries little sting.
Leach argues that animals that feature in insults are more likely to be tabooed in some way—i.e., they are seen as either sacred or polluting. This taboo status, he suggests, stems from their anomalous qualities. For example, rats are wild animals that encroach into human terrain rather than staying in their own environs, and dogs are universally endowed with semi-human qualities—a topic I have discussed at length here.
Certainly, dogs are prominent in insults hurled around the world. For example, Leach notes that the strongest way to insult one’s enemies in Northern Thailand is to insinuate that a dog had sexual intercourse with their ancestors. Likewise, in Korean, gae-sae-kki (개새끼) is a widely used insult that literally means ‘baby of a dog’; its Mandarin equivalent is góu zaĭ zi (狗崽子). The insult also crops up in the Gapun kros I recounted earlier, when Sake calls her husband a ‘dog’s vomit face’—although her variant has the distinction of combining animal abuse with bodily excretions.5
Although the specifics of Leach’s analysis have been disputed, there’s little doubt that some animals lend themselves better to insults than others, although this probably has as much to do with their intrinsic attributes as any perceived anomalousness. Thus, it makes sense to compare someone crafty to a fox rather than a cow—unless, that is, you subscribe to the Gary Larson view of bovines.
Of course, there are plenty of insults that aren’t focused on sex, excretion or animal abuse. For example, Shakespeare’s ‘Were I like thee I’d throw away myself’ remains just as cutting today as it was 400 years ago. Still, dig a little deeper into Shakespeare’s repertoire of insults, and you’ll soon stumble across expressions like ‘loathsome as a toad’ and ‘rank shard-borne lout’—which isn’t terribly far removed from ‘big black shithole’, given that it basically means ‘rancid and born in dung’.
In the end, I guess you might say that while insults divide us, they also unite us. Because when we have reached the end of our tether, and anger with our fellow man (or woman) bubbles over, the words that usher forth are rarely clever, but they are definitely consistent, and have a better-than-average chance of involving dicks, dogs or dung.6
In my household, we have our own form of kros, which happens whenever I am cleaning and my husband is not. If I am feeling particularly aggrieved by this age-old injustice, the language I use is, quite frankly, not dissimilar from Sake’s, although I typically mutter it just loudly enough so that he knows he is the object of my abuse, but not loudly enough that he can actually hear what I’m saying. He knows that he is not allowed to challenge or interrupt these muttered character assassinations, because being the only one cleaning gives me a carte blanche to say whatever I want.
Although the actions and emissions themselves can be equally offensive when they are employed as an insult—such as intentionally exposing your arse or farting at someone, or, if you really want to get your point across, defecating on their property (see the first season of The White Lotus for an illustration). As I’ve discussed at length in my book Silent but Deadly, this is a language that crosses all linguistic barriers. For instance, during the colonial period, Polynesians on the Marquesan Islands would thrust out their arses and fart at missionaries to communicate precisely what they thought of the Christian message.
Somewhat confusingly, this varies between Anglophone countries. For example, in Australia, ‘pussy’ is not a widely used term for a vagina, which I learned the hard way when I was ten, living in the USA, and showed fellow students a picture of a ‘pretty pussy’ I had drawn. Conversely, in Australia, a ‘cock’ is always a penis, not a rooster. Thus, Australians travelling on the tube from Heathrow are identifiable by the way they snigger when the train for ‘Cockfosters’ is announced. (I’m not gonna lie; seven years after moving to the UK, I still find it funny, primarily because of the way it juxtaposes penises and beer.)
Observers frequently point out that many forms of animal abuse are gendered, and used only for women—‘bitch’ being the prototypical example. However, while there are certainly numerous animal-based insults aimed at women (e.g., ‘cow’, ‘vixen’ and ‘cougar’), the sexist dimension of animal abuse has probably been somewhat over-emphasised. For example, ‘cur’ and ‘hound dog’ are also canine-based slurs, but tend to be used primarily for men. Terms like ‘snake’ and ‘rat’ are similarly gendered. It’s also worth noting that animal-based terms are frequently used as endearments: ‘pet’, ‘duckling’, ‘duckie’, ‘lamb’, ‘bunny’, ‘dove’, etc., so animal abuse might be a feature of human language, but so is animal affection.
In case you were in any doubt of Sake’s mastery of insults, one satiric online advice guide on how to construct an animal-based insult advises that the secret to a successful burn is to combine animal-based insults with bodily functions—as in ‘pulsating cum-squid’, ‘turd-baboon’ and ‘shit-leopard’—although that one is declared less effective because ‘the leopard is simply too elegant and dangerous to be a viable insult’.
And what’s wrong with that? In all honesty, it’s entirely possible to overthink an insult, so my advice is always to stick with the classics. For example, when a friend and I used to walk home from high school together, there was a boy we used to occasionally pass on our way home. A foul-mouthed twelve-year-old, one day he told us to ‘Suck my cock till it turns green’ as he walked past. Shocked, neither of us were quick enough to respond while we were still within hearing range. The next time we saw him, we were determined to get our own back, but we both panicked and the best I could come up with was ‘We hate you’. The moral of this story? Don’t think too hard or reach too deep when you want to malign someone. ‘Dickhead’, ‘turd’ and ‘son of a bitch’ are all perfectly respectable insults, and infinitely preferable to what I came up with—the sheer lameness of which continues to haunt me 35 years later.