The C-Word Isn't a We-word
It's a That-thing word
Word is: what got Tucker Carlson fired by Fox was his tendency to insult female co-workers, orally and in e-mails, by use of the c-word. When Fox's lawyers informed him that they had managed to get his cunt’s redacted, for legal purposes, he said no, no, no, he was proud to have those slurs on his record.
What a putz. There are impolite words, and then there are ugly words; and cunt is intrinsically ugly, especially as a term for, excuse me, lady parts.
What is it about the throne of Venus, whence most of us emerge into the world, that would suggest a hard c opener and a rhyme with grunt (too pointy and dull to represent moans, too soft to represent labor), brunt and punt?1 A good word for a tent-peg, maybe, but not for what the Dutch call (according to etymonline.com) liedesgrot, literally "cave of love," and "vleesroos, rose of flesh."
Here are some rougher synonyms, assembled by John S. Farmer in Slang and its Analogues Past and Present, 1890, and cited by etymonline:
Botany Bay, chum, coffee-shop, cookie, End of the Sentimental Journey, fancy bit, Fumbler's Hall, funniment, goatmilker, heaven, hell, Itching Jenny, Low Countries, nature's tufted treasure, penwiper, prick-skinner, seminary, tickle-toby, undeniable, wonderful lamp.
Even most of these are disqualified by being from a male point of view. I cannot speak for any woman here or anywhere else, heaven knows, but I can see that toby is a boy’s name; pen (except in a literary sense) is a boy’s part; I wouldn’t want to get into a discussion, public or private, of whether any woman would regard the vagina as the end of a sentimental journey; and I daresay wonderful lamp alludes to Aladdin's. At any rate, there are plenty of alternatives to the c-word: the clinical vagina is much celebrated by by women. Vulva, though it doesn’t sound nifty and isn’t sufficiently comprehensive, does sound suitably involving. Not to mention sultry. Va-jay-jay strikes me as a bit twee, but so far as I know it has never put anybody decisively off.
Cunt says "Get that thing away from me." Latin conno, French con and Italian conno sound less invidious. "The presence of the t in the Germanic [which would include English] has long puzzled etymologists," says Geoffrey Hughes in Swearing. Wherever it came from, it renders the word too abrupt, too curt, too much like smut. In England it is applicable without regard to gender, but has traditionally been so obscene as to be called “the Monosyllable,” or rendered, in cockney slang, "Berkshire Hunt.”
It may be said that D. H. Lawrence, in Lady Chatterly's Lover, goes a great way toward establishing the c-word as an endearment — something closer to nookie, which women, I hazard to guess, are not offended by because it can mean not only a part, or a holy grail, but a joint activity:
"Th 'art good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha'rt willin'!'"
"What is cunt?" she said.
"An' doesn't ter know? Cunt! It's thee down theer, an' what I get when I'm i'side thee, it's a' as it is, all on't."
"All on't," she teased. 'Cunt! It's like fuck then."
"Nay nay! Fuck's only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot besides an animal, aren't ter -- even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!”
Then there's the famous quote from the Paris Review interview of Henry Green, regarding the source of one of his exquisite novels:
“I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: "Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers."
The spirit of these usages, though the former be deemed particularly impertinent man-splaining (from what I have read about Lawrence’s love life, he was more the one needing to be brought along), is far, far from Carlson's potty-mouth bile.
Incidentally, the first known reference to the c-word in English, according to etymonline, is in the Oxford street name Gropecuntland, cited from 1230, “presumably a haunt of prostitutes." Would it have made Donald Trump's "locker-room talk" less palatable to Maga Nation if he'd said, "When you're a star, you can grab 'em by the cunt"?
You’d think it would have. But as Bruce Handy wrote in Time magazine in 2009, which was back before Donald Trump became important: "In the years since Long Dong Silver became a household name . . . one thing has become clear: the word nadir no longer has any meaning in public life."
And, yes, Blount. That’s a little too close to home.