Political blowjobs, or The power of expletive-filled number plates

This is a guest post by Dr Philip Seargeant, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Open University. Philip has published extensively on linguistics in social media and politics, and helped create the acclaimed video series The History of English in Ten Minutes. He was last seen on Strong Language with an article on emoji swearing. He tweets at @philipseargeant.

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Blowjobs have played an occasional but important part in political history. The most notable recent example, of course, involved Bill Clinton. It was his equivocation over the nature of his relations with Monica Lewinsky that led to him being impeached on perjury charges. A century before Clinton, another president had an even more decisive oral-sex-related experience. Félix Faure, President of the French Republic between 1895 and 1899, was unlucky enough to die in office from a cerebral haemorrhage which he supposedly suffered while being fellated by his mistress.

The latest entry in the annals of political crises involving blowjobs doesn’t concern the act itself, however, but rather the word. Specifically, it concerns the use of the word as a political insult. And even more specifically, an insult expressed by means of car vanity plates.

How I Met Your Mother: The bitch chronicles, part 2 — You son of a beetch

Our last bitch chronicle ended by observing that son of a bitch is semantically poetic. The sounds of son of a bitch can be poetic, too. It takes stress at different points for different expressive purposes: son of a bitch is different from son of a bitch is different from son of a bitch. So, there’s value in the full and precise articulation of the phrase, but also pragmatic value in truncating the phrase, or extending it, or playing with it euphemistically.

How I Met Your Mother: The bitch chronicles, part 1 — Son of a bitch

The situation comedy How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), created by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, aired for nine seasons (2005–2014) on CBS. The show focuses on the complicated friendships among five twenty-/thirty-somethings: Ted Mosby (played by Josh Radnor) is an architect from Cleveland, Ohio; Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), a lawyer, hails from Minnesota; his girlfriend/fiancée/wife, Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan) is a kindergarten teacher and New York native. Ted, Marshall, and Lily met while students at Wesleyan University. They are joined by Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), a Canadian trying to make a career as a news reporter/anchor. Their antics are framed by Ted’s voice-over explanation to his children (the voice belongs to Bob Saget), in 2030, about how he met their mother, Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti), whose face we first see in Season 9. It’s not television for the impatient.

HIMYM was a prime time fixture on Monday evenings, when characters can’t drop f-bombs or other words proscribed by Standards and Practices, according to Federal Communications Commission rules. But since people of an age — coincidentally, the same age as the main characters in HIMYM — swear regularly, how can writers achieve something like tonal accuracy in dialogue without any bad language? Bitch is the answer, permissible on television, but not always in polite conversation. HIMYM’s writers deploy some form of bitch something like 117 times during the series — that’s what I extracted, and don’t ask me to re-watch the series anytime soon — about half as many bitches as the series’ 208 episodes. It’s frequent but not obsessive, effective and not especially offensive — though someone somewhere will be offended, of course — though some of the characters do use bitch offensively, subjects for later installments of the bitch chronicles.

Bitch isn’t as versatile as fuck, nor are bitch spawn as easily derived as fuck spawn, so HIMYM has little enough profanity to go on. There’s plenty of the bitch ‘best friend’ appropriated from African American speech, as well as mean, aggressive bitch. Once, by my count, in “Ted Mosby: Architect” (9 October 2006), someone bitches ‘complains’; there’s also a bitch-slap in “Slutty Pumpkin” (October 2005); and there’s a playful bitchin’ ‘awesome’ in “Bedtime Stories,” as well (25 November 2013). But son of a bitch is the most frequent among these basic bitch forms — I had to search out a bigger binder clip for the son of a bitch citations — and within son of a bitch, we discover, there’s considerable variety and opportunities for humor, welcome news for a situation comedy.

Son of a bitch is elegantly double-edged profanity. It manages to insult both its target and the target’s mother. Motherfucking is all down to the motherfucker, and the profane force of the whole motherfucking repertoire depends on the concept’s unnaturalness, the way it evokes something truly taboo. Son of a bitch relies instead on a calculated surplus of mean, which is designed to infuriate the good son — who can’t bear hearing his mother defamed — as well as the bad son — the misogynistic one — who won’t allow someone to degrade him just because he was born of a woman, who won’t accept that woman is antecedent to man.

Son of a bitch is old, at least as old as the phrase biche sone recorded in the metrical romance Arthur and Merlin, circa 1330. Early on, profaners preferred son of a whore to son of a bitch, I suppose because bitch condemns all women for just being women, whereas whore condemns only women of ill-repute. There’s a logic to that, even if it’s a misogynistic logic. The first recorded instance of son of a bitch is, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, for sons of bitches, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Coxcomb (1613). Seventeenth-century drama overflows with obsolete slang and profanity, but that son of a bitch pushed its way into everyday vocabulary and stuck for centuries, until it eased into the scripts of HIMYM.

Some sons of bitches are angry, even appropriately so. One of the many women Barney screws — in at least two senses — shouts after him, in the “World’s Greatest Couple” (16 October 2006): “You son of a bitch! I can’t believe I let you enter my sacred temple!” She uses the term with a differently flawed logic: how could a man be such an asshole if his mother wasn’t a bitch? Understandably, though, who wants a dog in her sacred temple? Barney faces such opprobrium on a regular basis. His date in “The Naked Man” (24 November 2009), echoes the refrain: “Get outta here right now, get out, you son of a bitch!” Famously, Ted steals a blue plastic French horn wall ornament from the restaurant where he had his first date with Robin. When they dare to return to the restaurant, in “Something Blue” (14 May 2007), the waiter cries, “You’re the son of a bitch who stole our blue French horn,” and truer words were never spoken.

Other conventional uses of son of a bitch and related forms abound. Robin can let fly with a casual, “Wait a minute, you sons of bitches,” in “The Three Days Rule” (27 April 2009). Ted’s stepfather, Clint (played by Harry Groener), abandoned on the roadside during “The Lighthouse” (4 November 2013) by Marshall and his road trip companion, Daphne (played by Sherri Shepherd), comes out of a meditative trance, realizes his predicament, and shouts, “Son of a bitch!” surprised son of a bitch being another time-honored use of the phrase. In “Architect of Destruction” (18 October 2010), Ted’s nemesis and eventual girlfriend, Zoey (played by Jennifer Morrison), taunts him while protesting outside his apartment, because Ted wants to demolish a historic building to make room for one of his own design: “Hey, Mosby. You’re gonna have to come out here at some point, you son of a bitch” — and truer words were never spoken.

My favorite HIMYM son of a bitch occurs in the episode “Miracles” (which aired on 19 May 2008). Ted and Stella (played by Sarah Chalke) — his girlfriend of the season — have had a fight, during which Ted believes he’s broken up with her, but he’s so vague that Stella doesn’t realize that’s what he thinks he’s doing. Stella visits him in the hospital — a cab he’s taken gets into an accident — and she discovers the truth there, and asks, “Did he think that was a breakup? Son of a bitch.” It’s such a great son of a bitch because it means several things at once: It’s an epiphany of a son of a bitch, as well as a frustrated son of a bitch, and, of course Stella also thinks Ted is a son of a bitch. It’s an example of how some profanity is like poetry.

And, watching HIMYM, that surprises us. Ted often attempts to quote poetry, but the others are having none of it — they’re not poetry people, and most of the show’s audience probably isn’t, either. HIMYM is funny and sentimental. It’s a cozy comedy, partly because its central characters live more plausibly than those on Friends. Lessons are learned. Wisdom is imparted. The dialogue is witty. There are surprisingly successful musical numbers, but in some scenes, it’s the son of a bitch that sings.

NB: Subsequent bitch chronicles can be found here, here, and here.

 

Oh, scrap — My son’s swearing with euphemisms!

At this writing, my son, Ollie, is seven-and-a-half years wise, so of course he’s begun to swear, albeit on mostly innocuous terms. Trust me, he hasn’t learned to swear from his mom or dad. We’re careful to set a good example around the kids. And we’re not big swearers ourselves. True, every time Jenny heard George W. Bush talk about the Iraq War on the radio she muttered, “Pig-fucker,” but that was before we had children, and given recent political events in America, she’s unexpectedly nostalgic, historically and linguistically revisionist.

Ollie has picked up profanity from friends, of course. He has no phone yet and doesn’t text, so OMG isn’t in his spoken lexicon. He can’t depend on initialism for euphemism. He started to interject Oh, my god in the usual places — frustration with his parents’ decisions, moments of surprise or wonder, frustration with intractable Legos or intermittent Netflix, well, mostly frustration, I guess. We sympathize and we know, too, that frustration often requires verbal expression and relief. Nevertheless, we discourage Oh, my god and recommend Oh, my gosh, instead.

The poetics of expletive clickbait

Expletive infixing is a much-loved mode of profanity. Is profanity good for you? Absofuckinglutely. Does infixing serve profanity as what James B. McMillan once called an “emotional stress amplifier”? I guarangoddamntee it. For most of us, infixings like these and interposings like shut the fuck up aren’t everyday speech, but nowadays, they’re hardly shocking. If you’re just not paying attention to your conversation, an infixing might take you by surprise, but the surprise will be mild, and the forms cleave so well to rules that they are obviously — gasp! — conventional. How does one draw attention to the unconventionality of one’s speech when infixing gets — yawn — a bit tired?

In fact, the rules of infixing are constantly under construction and repertoire of profanity thus constantly renewed. A March 2016 post at Celebslam, “Model at Midnight,” celebrated the Polish model Kate Sajur’s putatively “sweet rack.” It attracted the attention of Carmen Ribecca of The Superficial, an even better celebrity gossip site. Ribecca’s “good morning” post of April 1, 2016, included “Hell the fuck to the lo Kate Sajur” among several other enticing links. I’m less interested in the rack than I am in Ribecca’s novel twist on infixing. Like much other slang and profanity, Ribecca’s headline is poetic. Like many on-the-fly poets, Ribecca does what Ezra Pound exhorted poets to do when they could find nothing new under the sun: “Make it new.”