Tell Me More About This Australian Thing Called Rooting

The first question I have is – did you join in on the #fisting recently on Twitter? Secondly – do you know the guy in the photo that Scott Hurst photographed?

By the way – if the title isn’t a warning enough, yes, this post is the sort that will get me firmly registered on Cursebird.

Some people might not listen to the Geologic Podcast. That is a pity. It’s gone from ‘one of those podcasts I’d play late at night whilst driving home’ (kind of like chill-out music) to ‘podcast I play in the morning so friends can hear it in the car too’.

That’s actually a good third question in itself – what times of the day / circumstances are certain podcasts best suited?

My first introduction to George Hrab (guy in the photo and Geologic podcast) was via Skepticality – but I was more into his music and only fairly recently I became a regular listener of his podcast. Yesterday I recommended the show to a friend and fellow Australian blogger, and realised that they might download the 2008 Dragon*Con episode…

…an episode where I very loudly yell what ‘root’ means in Australian slang. You can even hear the efforts of a far more genteel and refined Richard Saunders, trying to give an alternative meaning!

What you may not know is that in the audience for this live recording of the podcast is Dr Karen Stollznow. What is probably not known at all is that when I yelled what I did, Dr Karen Stollznow joined in with defining the term at the same time. But she was on the other side of the room, and (erm), I’m kind of loud.

Dr Karen Stollznow would overall have been a far better candidate for such definitions – she has a doctorate in bad language. She also happens to be the head of Australian Skeptics – the CEO and the Editor for the Australian Skeptic magazine.

Filthy words. Naughty terms. Australian slang for bodily parts. Okay, she knows the dirt and is willing to spill it. I had plenty of questions about her fantastic qualifications when she mentioned it in passing at Dragon*Con and now we’ve all got a chance to learn more!

Why am I interested now? Because recently Twitter exploded into #fisting. Despite the rather graphic meaning, there was a fascinating eagerness for it. Er, for twittering #fisting. Or twatting #fisting. Tweeting? Twatting? Whatever.

Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting” by fellow Australian Stilgherrian (starting to notice a pattern here, people??) is a fantastic little investigation of what #fisting became, and the phenomenon that had people throwing aside their… delicate natures? … and happily #fisting away. Kind of like how George Hrab was happily ‘root root rooty root root root!’ on that Dragon*Con 2008 ep. Rooty root!

So, at 1948 on 28 February 2009 Australian Eastern Daylight Time (that’s 0848 UTC), I tweeted: “Yeah, why not? Official challenge! Let’s turn fisting into the trending topic of the hour. Retweet please.”

Well, retweet please you did…

Seconds later three friends with high numbers of Twitter followers had retweeted it. Others followed within minutes. Then more. And more.

An otherwise boring Saturday night, Australia’s larrikin sense of humour, the peer pressure of people competing to invent ever more amusing or inappropriate ways of using “fisting” in a sentence, the delicious naughtiness of using a “bad word”… It was the perfect storm!

…In less than an hour after it all started, “#fisting” was number 2 on the Twitter trending topics display — yes, people started using the hashtag — and by 2034 AEDT it hit the number one spot.

But it didn’t stop!

…finally, let me leave you with this chart from Twist, which shows that at its peak, “fisting” was being mentioned in almost 0.5% of tweets globally. Scary or what?

Stilgherrian raises some intriguing points in his final summation about the #fisting trend. So, who better to ask than Dr Karen Stollznow about it?

Podblack: Stilgherrian concludes with “Smut trumps “decency” every time, at least in terms of attracting attention.” Is that strictly true?

Dr Karen Stollznow: This depends on your interpretation of “smut” and “decency”! But if we construe “smut” specifically as taboo language with sexual connotations, and by default, “decency” as any word without immediate sexual connotation, then I’d have to agree.

In general, taboo terms are emotionally-charged, evocative words that shock, offend, disgust, embarrass and arouse. As in the example in the link you provided above, fisting will pique our interest more than say, teapot, or even a phonologically similar word such as feasting (For more on this topic, please visit my recent Skepbitch blog post about taboo words and how they stigmatise semantically unrelated language).

Cognitively, taboo words light up in bright, flashing neon lights.

P: Are there really no new dirty words out there?

K: There will always be new ‘dirty’ words! Perhaps you’re referring to what seem to be the ‘staple’ core of established dirty terms in modern English, like motherfucker and ass/arse of George Carlin’s “Seven Words” infamy. The fact is, new dirty words appear all the time, but are mostly slang words. The very nature of slang is that it’s ephemeral, that is, slang words have a limited butterfly-like life span of days to weeks or years, if they’re lucky. Slang is also specific to region and social group. For example, coit (“anus” in Australian English) might make Australians laugh, but Americans might instead think of the noble Coit Tower monument in San Francisco. In fact, there’s a radio station in the Bay Area called KOIT FM, and I’d always laugh at their TV ads where a woman says sexily, “No one messes with my K.O.I.T.”!

Slang is also social and often restricted to groups based on shared age, background, etc. For example, I know what chode and snatch mean, but my mother wouldn’t have the faintest idea what these words mean (and would faint if she did!). A dirty word can diffuse across dialects and countries, but it can develop a slightly different meaning, such as US English fanny (as in “bottom”) versus Australian English fanny (the infinitely more taboo “vagina”).

P: Do dirty words appear similar across cultures?

K: The existence of dirty words, or more generally, taboo words, does appear to be universal, but specific taboo words themselves aren’t universal at all. One person’s “fisting” is another person’s “teapot”.

I would add though that the ‘dirty’ themes are often the same, but the ‘dirty’ words are different. The ‘dirty’ themes are the usual modern taboo topics – sex, sexual acts, body parts associated with sex, and bodily effluvia associated with sex. However, the perception of what is ‘dirty’ differs across countries and cultures. To us, breasts are ‘dirty’ in the sense of arousing and embarrassing, by way of their association with sex; although in other cultures, breasts are perceived as utilitarian. In our Western culture, reproductive (and excretory) organs and related body parts are ‘dirty’, whereas, in other cultures, non-reproductive body parts are often sexualised, such as the hands or feet.

If we look beyond “dirty” to “taboo” words in general, what is thought of as ‘dirty’ will differ again. Taboo language is much more broad than sexual-based taboos, and covers other tabooed themes, such as death, disease, forbidden foods, social code violations, etc. These are the topics we don’t want to talk about, or don’t think we should talk about, especially in public.

P: Yes, I’m thinking of the Red Dwarf TV show, for example, that created the swearword ‘Smeg’ to get their ‘meaning’ across as cursing even though they couldn’t curse due to the ratings for the show (although many seem to associate it with smegma).

K: “Smeg” is undoubtedly etymologically related to “smegma”. In linguistics we’d call it a backformation; where a new shorter word is created from an existing longer word. With smeg, it’s the phonological similarity to the parent word that raises a chuckle; it sounds like smegma and recalls that word to us. Dirty words are so titillating that the merest hint reminds us of them; like hearing organism might make you think of orgasm (again, see my post).

This also reminds me of a favourite “Fry and Laurie” sketch with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in which a fellow appears in court for using a series of invented words that sound ‘dirty’. These include “plimhole” (-hole is reminiscent of “ass/arsehole”), “kucking” (sounds like “fucking”), and “pimpslider” (makes us think of a prostitute’s “pimp”, while “slider” sounds vaguely penetrative). We immediately recognise the illicit morphemes (parts of words) even though these are faux-taboo words, or only partially taboo.

Using this formula, anyone can invent ‘dirty’ words!

A lot is dependent on accent too, especially the production of vowels. Think of the endless mirth derived from the surname in the “Meet the Fockers” movies. Once, an American friend laughed when he pointed out the name “Harry Ball” to me. This didn’t mean anything to me until I repeated it in US English, where “Harry” sounds like “hairy”. (Incidentally, an old friend named “Richard Hairs” finally just changed his last name to “Harris”…)

Actually, I also remember a Monty Python sketch where Eric Idle has a problem where he pronounced the letter/sound “c” as “b”, and admonishes himself for being a “silly bunt”.

P: What really does constitute obscene or the ‘palest of the pale’?

K: Dirty language is in the ear of the behearer. My Mum flinches at “sugar!” as an interjection, merely a euphemism for “shit!” Which raises a point.

Slang ‘dirty’ words are generally euphemistic, that is, they are intended to be socially preferred ways of talking about taboo topics. While the words snatch, cunt and birth canal have the same denotation, in the sense of vagina, they are not equal terms because of their connotations. To go really rude, we have to look at dysphemistic words; these are words that are intended to be “dispreferred” ways of talking about taboo topics. For example, saying bitch instead of woman. Unlike slang words, the really obscene words need to be shared words, and known to many as deeply offensive.

I’ve actually written about hierarchies in offensiveness. All offensive words are offensive, but some are more offensive than others. Today, in English, the very ‘worst’ words would be the two I’m almost hesitant to type, or say. One is cunt, and the other is nigger. Both words have underlying taboo themes, the former comes under a sexual taboo, and the latter comes under the taboo of ethnicity (ethnic-based taboos are probably the newest and most virulent taboos today).

To a lesser extent, we could add fuck to this list. But many people seem to find cunt and nigger worse than fuck, maybe because there is personal investment in the words; in these cases, either gender, or ethnicity. These are the three words that are censored in publication with asterisks, hyphens and omissions, and censored as the f-word, the c-word, and the n-word.

However, I can easily think of situations where these words would not only be acceptable, but would have covert prestige. Among friends in Australia, I casually refer to a contemptuous person as a “cunt”, or dismissive someone as a “silly cunt”, or refer to someone fondly as, “you old cunt”. I can also easily think of situations where “nigger” is an in-group word that displays positive connotations of solidarity (mainly in non-standard US English).

Just because cunt and nigger do funny things to our tummies, don’t think that these words, or their glosses in other languages, are equally offensive. We’re products of our own time, and culture. If we look beyond our culture, blasphemy (religious-based profanity) is more offensive in some parts of the world. In others languages, Dutch as an example, disease-based words are used as insults, such as cancer and syphilis. This phenomenon used to be more common in English if you think of curse phrases such as, “a pox on your house!”

Obscenity is whatever you’re socialised into perceiving as “obscene”.

P: Finally – what IS the correct term? Dirty words? Swearwords? Smut? Filth? Is there a dedicated field for studying the phenomena (if it is a phenomena)?

K: That “dedicated field” is me, and a few fellow linguists, especially Keith Allen and Kate Burridge (see their amazing book Forbidden Words which I had the pleasure of reviewing for Cambridge University Press). Outside of academia, there is the Maledicta journal and pop books that treat various aspects of ‘bad language’.

Academically, taboo language is studied within the subsets of linguistics known as semantics (loosely, “meaning”) and pragmatics (very loosely, “usage”). There is no single “correct term” because there are many different kinds of semantic phenomena at work here. Linguistically, we have opprobrious and derogatory language such as profanity, blasphemy, expletives and abusive epithets; and semantic concepts such as pejoration and dysphemism. Popularly, this is “bad language”; it’s seen as dirty, as you illustrate with your choice of the word. These are swear words, cuss words and insults that are perceived as crude, rude, vulgar, offensive and impolite.

If they’re words that make you blush, laugh, frown or fight, they’re taboo words.

In conclusion – enjoy a little more Fry and Laurie on lingustics!

Select Research used:
Stollznow, K. (2009). Keith Allan & Kate Burridge, Forbidden words: Taboo and the censoring of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 303. Hb $75.00, Pb $29.99. Language in Society, 38 (01) DOI: 10.1017/S0047404508090234

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