Elizabeth Preston reports for the NY Times (archived) on an important discovery in swearology:
“Holy motherforking shirtballs!” a character exclaimed on “The Good Place,” a television show that took place in a version of the afterlife where swearing is forbidden (as it is in this newspaper, most of the time). In a way, this celestial censorship was realistic.
A study published Tuesday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that curse words in several unrelated languages sound alike. They’re less likely than other words to include the consonant sounds L, R, W or Y. And more family-friendly versions of curses often have these sounds added, just like the R in “shirt” or “fork.” The finding suggests that some underlying rules may link the world’s languages, no matter how different they are.
“In English, some of the worst words seem to have common phonetic properties,” said Ryan McKay, a psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. They’re often short and punchy. They also tend to include the sounds P, T or K, “without giving any obvious examples,” Dr. McKay said. These sounds are called stop consonants because they interrupt the airflow when we’re speaking.
Dr. McKay teamed up with his colleague Shiri Lev-Ari to learn whether this familiar pattern went beyond English. They wondered whether it might even represent what’s called sound symbolism.
To look for patterns in swearing, the researchers asked fluent speakers of Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian to list the most vulgar words they could think of. Once they’d compiled a list of each language’s most frequently used epithets, the researchers compared these with neutral words from the same language.
In these languages, they didn’t find the harsh-sounding stop consonants that seem common in English swear words. “Instead, we found patterns that none of us expected,” Dr. Lev-Ari said. The vulgar words were defined by what they lacked: the consonant sounds L, R, W and Y. (In linguistics, these gentle sounds are called approximants.)
Next, the scientists looked for the same phenomenon using speakers of different languages: Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German and Spanish. The subjects listened to pairs of words in a language they didn’t speak, and guessed which word in each pair was offensive. In reality, all the words were invented. For example, the researchers started with the Albanian word “zog,” for “bird,” and created the pair of fake words “yog” and “tsog.” Subjects were more likely to guess that words without approximants, such as “tsog,” were curses.
Finally, the researchers combed through the dictionary for English swear words and their cleaned-up versions, also called minced oaths (“darn,” “frigging” and so on). Once again, the clean versions included more of the sounds L, R, W and Y.
“What this paper finds for the first time is that taboo words across languages, unrelated to each other, may pattern similarly,” said Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. […]
French is an exception, she noted — swear words in French have just as many of the gentler consonant sounds as other words. Yet when native French speakers heard pairs of foreign-sounding words, they were still less likely to guess that words with L, R, W and Y sounds were curses.
“This is really something fundamental,” Dr. Lev-Ari said. “There’s something about the sounds that inherently sounds non-sweary.”
Preston tweeted, charmingly, “You haven’t truly lived until you’ve forced the NYT standards desk to consider whether “shirtballs” is printable.” (The cited article, by Lev-Ari and McKay, is open access, which is nice.)
The first counterexample in English that comes to mind is “motherfucker,” but that’s obviously built up on ordinary morphological principles from an r-less taboo root. Then there’s “prick,” which of course has both a taboo/vulgar/sweary sense and a neutral sense that have somehow managed to co-exist for (sez one internet source) four or five centuries now.
One might note “d a r n” for “d a m n” (depicted thusly because r followed by n is hard to distinguish from m in this font) as a conventional mincing that adds an /r/.
A difficulty which strikes me is that “curse words” is not altogether a coherent category cross-culturally. Different cultures have different ways of being unforgiveably rude. And In English, at any rate, it has varied over time. (English soldiers were once “goddams”, rather than “fuckits.”)
I also imagine that words containing voiceless stops (in languages where they contrast with voiced stops) are perceptually more salient. So if you have told your experimental subjects to pick the obscener-sounding one of a pair they are more likely to pick the one with more voiceless stops even if the pattern in itself has no particularly “obscene” feeling, just because it’s more “marked.” You’d need a control group of people exposed to the same choices but asked to rate them for something else (like “pointiness.”)
We selected five typologically distant languages: Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian
I wouldn’t describe these as all “typologically distant.” In any case, what you want here, surely, is cultural distance. Moreover, Hungarian, Russian and Israeli Hebrew surely belong to an obscenity Sprachbund.
Quebec French has “tabarnac”, “criss”, “calisse”, “ciboire”, “sacrament”, “viarge”.
Oh, that’s funny. I read:
“They’re less likely than other words to include the consonant sounds L, R, W or Y. ”
Then tried пошёл ты нахуй, мудак грёбаный, then I discovered that /r/ occurs in грёбаный which replaces the obscene ёбаный.
And remembered that the second grade and third grades of obscenity in the row хуй-хер-хрен-фиг also contain р /r/ (хер is still rude).
And then I read;
And more family-friendly versions of curses often have these sounds added, just like the R in “shirt” or “fork.”
Only câlisse counts; the r in the others is not an approximant but a trill. Click through to the paper.
As I commented on the LLog post, however, the sheer frequency of блядь surely outweighs all the world’s approximant-less swears put together…
Phonologically typologically diverse would be more to the point. Avar? Tongan?
Presumably non-rhotic English speakers are swearier than rhotic, as (for example) they actually have no /r/ in “motherforking shirtballs” at all. (I do, myself, but then I am famously genteel.)
I’m not sure how the well-known Finnish curse ravintolassa fits into this system.
Perkele
Kuradi raisk!
Kurwa!
As far as I can read Wikipedia charts, neither Estonian nor Polish phonology has /r/ as approximant. Neither has Russian, which has been included on the list.
And there are no plosives (though there is an approximant) in хуй, which I given to understand is not fully genteel in Russian.
The Mooré dictionary tells me that the unvoiced-plosive-free yẽbe is “coucher avec, avoir des rapports sexuels avec (vulgaire)”; this can be projected back to Proto-WOV *ɲɛbɪ (cf Talni nyɛb, Dagbani nyɛbi “id.”*)
* The Dagbani dictionary cites the evocative compound noun naɣinyɛbira “said of one who wants have things without effort, cheaply”; the second element is the agent noun of nyɛbi, the first is the combining form of nahu “cow.”
D.O, in “in linguistics X is called Y” X refers to something known to the reader, and Y is often imprecise.
I recommend to be sceintific in essence but not in appearance and call them “those gentle sounds”.
The Western Oti-Volta *ɲɛb(ɪ), I see, can be reconstructed even unto Proto-Oti-Volta itself: cf Moba nyáb́. The unbelievers among you may wonder if this might be a mere loanword from WOV, but the High tone is the regular correspondence for WOV Low tone, whereas loans typically agree in tone (the change of short *ɛ -> a is, of course, regular within Moba.) Nawdm has nyoow- “faire l’amour, baiser.”
My dream of reconstructing the Proto-Volta-Congo form remains as yet unrealised; cf Proto-Bantu *-tomb-. Might the fortition to /t/ reflect the well-known Universal Law of Obscenity? Further research is needed.
drasvi, but I was deprecating my own counterexamples. Because /r/ is not a “gentle sound” in either Estonian or Polish, their swear words can include as much rykanie as one wants. As well in Russian all those -r- insertions (as parts of prefixes and suffixes) don’t serve to diminish the strength of their root words, but to enhance it.
TFA is also mistaken, of course, in saying that “all varieties of r-sounds” are approximants unless they are trills. This is not even true of all English dialects, much less of languages in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_taps_and_flaps
I mean… Plausible, but /jebatʲ/, /xuj/ and /blʲadʲ/?.. They all have either /j/ or /l/.
> They’re less likely than other words to include the consonant sounds L, R, W or Y
Balls. Bollocks. Wanker. Twat.
Interesting that someone from the University of London didn’t notice some very common, very English counterexamples? Maybe they hang out with the wrong crowd ….
I’m reminded of the story, of which I have no idea of the origin…
When Americans get angry, they try to calm themselves down by thinking about beautiful images, like sun on the beach.
This looks like yet another of the proposed universals or near universals that have turned out to be no universals at all.
I would just like to remind everyone that “less likely than other words” is not a sweeping statement. If I say most cities have fewer than a million inhabitants, are you going to triumphantly start listing cities with over a million and tell me I’m full of crap? This is not a proposed universal, it’s an indication of an interesting phenomenon.
I’m not saying the study isn’t full of crap, of course; many such studies are. But to show it was full of crap you’d have to do a larger, better designed study that showed that approximants are just as likely to show up in swear words as other sounds.
I’m more interested in balance on the second claim, that you can reliably create euphemisms/mincings by introducing these non-taboo phonemes. I gave an example from English upthread that’s consistent with that, but on the other hand, I am not aware of “shirt” for “shit” outside of the fictional instance referred to in the original post. The most common mincings of “shit” I can think of are “shoot” and “shucks,” neither of which is consistent with the proposed generalization. To amplify my prior example, I guess you have “goldurn” for “goddam,” but you also have “goshdang” which works just as well, etc. I don’t know enough about mincing patterns in non-English languages to be able to offer either confirming or disconfirming evidence for the claimed tendency.
I’m more interested in balance on the second claim, that you can reliably create euphemisms/mincings by introducing these non-taboo phonemes.
But that’s not what they say! They say mincings contain (on average) more approximants than curse words. Sheesh. I know it’s fun to shoot down overblown claims, but let’s try to at least get the claims straight.
To hat’s other point, why should the default assumption be that the study is not full of crap until affirmatively shown to be, rather than the other way ’round? “More novel claims in scientific journal articles are crap than aren’t crap” strikes me as a perfectly sensible baseline assumption for the world of scientific publication in which we presently live.
Now, “it is culturally/socially desirable to engage seriously with [some subset of] novel claims in scientific journal articles even if they are ex ante <50% likely to pan out" is a defensible position, if you can figure out a good heuristic for identifying the "some subset."
Actual quote from actual article:
To hat’s other point, why should the default assumption be that the study is not full of crap until affirmatively shown to be, rather than the other way ’round?
Because that’s a big part of what’s wrong with the world today: the default assumption that everyone else is lying/wrong/crazy. It’s impossible to have genuine interactions that way.
Another big part of what’s wrong with the world today is academic journals routinely publishing crap, as a result of the interaction of (among other factors) publish-or-perish pressures, confirmation bias, and insufficient competence in statistical rigor among authors, editors, and peer reviewers.
I couldn’t agree more. But the fact that wife-beating is a genuine and horrible problem doesn’t make me assume that every married guy beats his wife.
@hat
I believe you have this wrong–the fact that a few men beat their wives allows the rest to hold this over their wives as a threat to ensure good behaviour. The more subtly and implicitly this threat is expressed, the more effective it is.
I have no idea how what you said is supposed to connect with what I said. I was not saying anything about men who beat their wives and/or men who threaten to beat their wives, I was saying that the fact that a bad thing happens does not justify assuming that everyone in a position to do that bad thing in fact does it. Again, sheesh.
To use another example, the fact that some people use the formula “I have a black friend…” to justify some bullshit they’re about to spout about race relations does not justify dismissing anything a white person says about a black friend as bullshit.
@D.O., aha, thanks, I misunderstood you. Bnd yes, they don’t count trrrrillls as approximants.
But that ruins a neat theory:
(1) ebat’ is a bad word because… Because someone was prudish. Otherwise it is a good indo-european word.
(2) traxat’ is a substitution for it (not as a swear word, though, just as a word for love-making) because it is based on a dictionary translation for ‘bang’. The /r/ here symbolises the gently thundering rumble.
Thus alongside with xren and xer we have xrych appearing in “old …” (where xren also is common).
My proposed working assumption is not that *some* novel claims in published academic journal articles will turn out to be inaccurate, it is that *the majority* of novel claims in published academic journal articles will turn out to be inaccurate. I could be wrong about the assumption, of course (and it seems likely that the bullshit quotient will vary among different sorts of research areas and disciplines and subdisciplines), but “a given X is likely but not certain to have the flaw characteristic of most X’s” is not at all the same as “a given X is probably likely to have the flaw that *some* other X’s do.”
I was struck by the en passant statement that “across languages, the sound m is statistically unlikely to appear in the word for ‘skin'”; enough to chase up the papers this claim comes from:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1605782113
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2019-0030/html
I can’t find this specific claim in the first paper. They seem to have trawled as many Swadesh-100 lists as they could, looking for any phonological correlations without deciding beforehand on any particular correlations. (In medical research, people have died as a result of conclusions drawn from this kind of of methodology.)
The second one uses Leipzig-Jakarta lists, picking “morphemes” from languages the author thinks are the largest in each family. The trawling-for-correlations technique is similar but less sophisticated. The pretty diagram there shows a negative association of “skin” with “nasals”, rather than “m” specifically.
As in English skin, Welsh croen, Kusaal (pl) gbana, Greek δέρμα …
I note (in passing) the author’s assertion that “Yoruba has no verbal morpheme (to my knowledge) that means ‘to laugh’” (the verb “laugh” is rẹrin); presumably this is because he thinks the noun ẹrin “laughter” is primary, and the verb derived from it. I can’t see any reason to believe this. He just assumes that he knows how to segment Yoruba words into morphemes correctly, and indeed, segment the words of all the other languages in his databases into morphemes correctly. I’m impressed by his grasp of the morphology of so many completely unrelated languages.
My proposed working assumption is not that *some* novel claims in published academic journal articles will turn out to be inaccurate, it is that *the majority* of novel claims in published academic journal articles will turn out to be inaccurate.
Even so. The majority of those in jail actually committed crimes; the majority of addicts will relapse after getting clean. That does not justify writing off the ideas of the Innocence Project or of staying clean. Every situation is different.
Again, I am not making any claims about the linked article, which does seem to have a large proportion of bullshit (the “word for ‘skin’” claim DE cites is a good example). I just don’t like rote rejection.
And maybe it’s useful (to follow up on some comments upthread) to figure out a threshold heuristic for determining if a particular publication has a high enough chance of being non-bullshit to consider in more detail.
When it comes to a claim that “pattern X is common cross-linguistically” one such threshold question is was the sample of languages the researchers looked at sufficiently large and varied to make that a reasonable inference. So in this instance, is “Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian” a sufficiently large and varied set to make the results of a comparison of them likely to be meaningful? How about “Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German and Spanish”? Should the use of different sample-language sets for different-yet-related claims about alleged cross-linguistic phenomena give rise to skepticism?
How likely does it seem that the editors of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review reached an intelligent and defensible conclusion about all three of these related screening questions before deciding to publish this article?
At least 3 out of five ‘main’ Russian mater* words have j/l. Russian is fully of j’s though. And they can be fricative.
The situation does not get better when you add jelda and manda, but maybe words for defecation-urination and arse (srat’, ssat’, zhopa) can improve stats.
Note, please that what renders a word unprintable is perceived obscenity. It is not that govno sounds more expressive than der’mo (zhopa does, compared to zadnitsa. жжжжжжопа).
* here I introduce the adjective матерный alongside with the noun мат.
I’m actually not ill-disposed to the basic idea behind these papers at all; I seem to remember that drasvi and I were agreeing against a hostile world not long ago, for example, that words for “tongue” are indeed more likely to contain /l/ than chance, which, lo and behold, is indeed one of the specific claims in TFA; and first-person pronouns surely are more likely than pure chance to contain nasals. And I’ve deliberately excluded words for e.g. “round” from Swadesh lists in comparing Oti-Volta languages on the grounds that they are clearly phonaesthetic/ideophones.
So the basic ideas are not stupid at all. But this sort of thing, trawling through WALS-like databases and then applying nice statistics to “prove” whatever you are interested in, seems to have become something of a plague. It seems to be a technique tailor-made for reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of linguistic literature.
As to the prison example, there are thousands of prisoners in the U.S. with stories about how they don’t deserve to be in prison, many of whom have at least some friends/advocates on the outside trying to tell their story via the internet. At least some of those stories are likely valid and many sound initially compelling (before you’ve fact-checked them or investigated what the government’s competing narrative about why they’re imprisoned may be). You could choose to spend all day every day investigating such stories, to the exclusion of thinking about newly-published claims about cross-linguistic tendencies or the World Cup or what have you. But everyone has limited time and attention and needs to make their own judgments about what they will devote their time and attention to, based on necessarily imperfect heuristics as well as inherently subjective preferences and interests.
FWIW, I personally am spending some of my time these days trying to understand the situation/saga of one particular young lady currently locked up in federal prison, solely because I was asked for advice/input by a (non-lawyer!) college classmate who for his own reasons has taken it upon himself to advocate for her. I have in turn recruited someone else I know (the only person I know personally who lives within a hundred miles of the relevant prison) to get involved in this project, but am not yet ready to say that any other reader of this thread should want to get interested in the details of this particular possible injustice rather than some other one.
Since we’re airing grievances in this thread, here’s one of mine: calling one-contact trills “taps” or even “flaps” just because they never seem to contrast with those.
Wow, that’s classic p-hacking. What next? Did they get involved in a land war in Asia? Did they go against a caecilian* when death was on the line?
* A few years ago it was discovered they’re venomous.
When Americans get angry, they try to calm themselves down by thinking about beautiful images, like sun on the beach.
How to Wreck a Nice Beach.
But everyone has limited time and attention and needs to make their own judgments about what they will devote their time and attention to, based on necessarily imperfect heuristics as well as inherently subjective preferences and interests.
Of course! Good lord, I’m not suggesting that everyone devote themselves to such things — I don’t do so myself — just that it’s not a good idea to assume everyone is guilty just because most are. (As a point of reference, I’ve read in various sources that many of the people swept up in Stalin’s Terror thought that their own innocence was some kind of bizarre error, and that everyone else had been correctly arrested.)
I don’t see that the study was trawling for correlations (“p-hacking”). Greenberg’s search for implicational universals was reasonably motivated and yielded some good results. Everett/Dediu’s purported correlations between climate or genetics and phonology are poorly motivated and yielded spurious results. Here, iconicity in language is a known phenomenon. Why not look for iconicity in swearwords? Of course, the research has to be done well, including using reliable data.
I was moaning about the two papers I linked to.
The number of things that potentially count as correlations is extremely high in these studies (in the second, not much different from the number of items being compared.) In these circumstances, you will find correlations. If you present any correlation, whether you were actually looking for it or not, or whether you foresaw it or not, as a discovery, your method is valueless, and no amount of statistical manipulation will result in actual significance. You haven’t discovered anything.
The original paper is admittedly a bit different, with a much narrower hypothesis less likely to be “confirmed” by pure chance (though it has enough other faults to be going on with, I reckon.) But citing “across languages, the sound m is statistically unlikely to appear in the word for ‘skin’” as an accepted fact strikes me as a danger sign all by itself. I’d be less aerated about this if I didn’t (as I say) think that there actually is some truth in the ideas that motivated the study. (Edward Sapir’s paper on this is a thing of beauty.)
trawling for correlations (“p-hacking”).
Wait, all that we do is trawling for correlations.
Trawling is the boo-word here.
Though it is indeed true, alas, that human beings are characteristically adept at finding correlations whether they are actually there to be found or not.
Anybody can catch a correlation. I’ve read that serious fishers don’t trawl for any old kind of fish. They decide in advance what kinds they expect (based on seasonal behavior) and go look for them.
Ahabs don’t p-hack.
They prefer to p-quod.
I don’t know. Humans say gibberish.
They produce NOICE.
But they imagine there are some structures in this noice: words, morphemes, meanings… A weird collective hallucination.
You can’t generalise from LH comments to all human language, drasvi!
Hey, don’t be so hasty!
the fact that a few men beat their wives allows the rest to hold this over their wives as a threat to ensure good behaviour. The more subtly and implicitly this threat is expressed, the more effective it is
Is this a thing you have observed?
Well, I am generally larger and more threatening than most females around me.
Possibly this does contribute in inter-gender relationships in some ways.
But how do you tell “large, threatening > masculine > attractive” (for those women who find larger and muscular men attractive) from “large, threatening > can beat me”?
Sorry, I don’t mean that it is not a serious topic. I just mean I don’t understand how you recognise what.
Fear felt by one partner can have many sources related or unrelated to the other partner. And of course a partner should work against and not for it. If he/she is capable of seeing it at all (which is often not the case).
And usually fights in family happen just because both are silly enough to direct their unspecific and idiotic irritation at family members.
@drasvi: I’m not talking about men being stronger than women on average, I asked Paddy about “the rest holding this (the fact that some men beat their wives) over their wives as a threat to ensure good behaviour”. I guess there are men who do that, but certainly not all the ones who don’t beat their wives. (I don’t, anyway, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?)
@Hans, I thought that PP does not mean actual threats but rather that that fact that other men do that plays some role. And yes, it may play some role in many ways.
But how in this situation you define “holding to ensure good behaviour”?
Maybe I misunderstood PP.
@hans
I have a somewhat cynical view of human relations, but not generally or in this case as a result of experience. I think in fact most men probably have a very strong inhibition towards using force after developing their full strength in their teenage years. The worst result of a fight between two 12 year olds is usually a bloody nose. This is no longer the case at 14 or 15.
Probably the whole range of responses occurred. I’ve read the opposite extreme: people treating the terror as a natural disaster that hit people at random and wasn’t anybody’s fault, and once it hit you, you had no recourse, you could only prepare to die.
Some seem to treat the current “partial” mobilization the same way… though the people who recently simply walked out of the base near Kazan give me hope. Stell dir vor, es ist Krieg, und keiner geht hin.
Prompted by the paper that Y linked to here
https://languagehat.com/no-fricatives-in-australia/#comment-4500296
… I remembered that I had previously seen the name of the first author of the first paper I linked to above:
https://languagehat.com/over-reliance-on-english-hinders-cognitive-science/
Blasi has form, as Y points out in that thread. He’s the humidity-leads-to-tone-languages man, and the agriculture-leads-to-fricatives man.
He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
I was a young boy in the 1970’s, which was a time of cultural transition. So on the one hand we were the first generation in the U.S. to be exposed from a very young age to the “traditional gender roles are total bullshit and should be disregarded” perspective, as exemplified by “Free to Be … You and Me,” which was unleashed on the world when I was 7 years old and young Joe Biden was getting elected to the Senate for the first time. But on the other hand my generation of American boys was also still somehow socialized (in a weirdly implicit way, as the official Authority Figures were getting ambiguous in their official public statements) into the borderline-archaic norm that “you should never hit a girl under any circumstances, regardless of purported provocation,” which necessarily presupposed by contrast that there were circumstances under which male/male fisticuffs were … understandable-to-legitimate.
That norm has subsequently been replaced, in terms of Official School-Based Instruction, by a less sexist norm that gosh, you should really never hit anyone of any sex under any circumstances. Which may sound good, but is perhaps too perfectionist and unrealistic to be followed in practice. So I worry (not least on behalf of my daughters!) that when this new norm proves too brittle to be followed in practice by hotheaded males who have been provoked, the absence of the older (condescending? patronizing? or just realistic about average differences in brute physical strength?) norm with a sex-specific greater taboo against hitting females will not lead to anything good.
A necessary foreword. DeepL does an adequate job.
J.W. – I am your age, or slightly younger. “Never hit a girl” was certainly “explicit” in my part of the world (New Hampshire). Also fist fights between boys/young men were still an accepted way of settling differences, at least among peers. (Wasn’t there even a Brady Bunch episode where the lesson was “punch a bully hard and he’ll leave you alone”?) Not sure what the authorities thought. In the late 1970s/early 1980s the concept of “authority figures” was somewhat abstract to us anyway. We governed ourselves to an extent younger generations would probably find shocking.
I agree with you that the replacement of the old moral order is not unambiguously safer for young women. Austria currently seems to be suffering an epidemic of male violence towards women, probably not directly related but all of this is hard to untangle.
Wife-beating and rape happened in the “good old days”, too – my take is rather that the group of boys who internalized “never hit girls” and the group who were ready to beat their wives and rape don’t necessarily overlap.
And, of course, there’s also the point that for many traditional males there is no contradiction between the principles “females stay outside fighting” and “males are allowed to discipline their mates using violence”.
It worked fairly well in my experience in the end-80s and 90s. There was much less violence than was consistently portrayed in all those books-for-boys from the early 20th century that I read at the time. And… the girls had no problem hitting back.
I think they did. “Never hit a girl” is a golden-cage thing. It puts the female of the species on a pedestal and makes sure to keep her there. If she didn’t stay on her pedestal, the males sometimes just lost it and flew into a violent rage.
There’s even a late Asterix scene where Asterix – a flawless hero up to that point – punches a woman who kept annoying him for pages with her newfangled behavior and then, in the next panel, is all “what have I done”.
In Soveit caricutures women threaten men with rolling pins to enforce good behaviour… (Misbehaving women are mostly absent)
Not merely Soviet:
https://i0.wp.com/arnoldzwicky.s3.amazonaws.com/AndyFlo.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Capp
Flo’s violence toward her husband, though (of course) reprehensible, is entirely understandable; nor is she the sole aggressor.
However, Andy and Flo now attend marriage counselling.
As acknowledged in the Wikipedia article for “Rolling pin”, that’s the standard symbol for domestic violence by women played for laughs (because it implies a weak man, and that’s inherently funny in a patriarchy).
A possible feminist objection is that Andy seems more interesting.
—
No one is interesting in Soviet cartoons, but I think readers are supposed to evaluate the man who did something stupid.
I really would love to know how it feels for female readers, when most of characters you can identify with are men. I am not ready to adgree or disagree with the idea that it is bad: to say that something is good or bad, I must understand it. But I’d love to understand it.
You know, there are decades of discussions of these things by feminists; you don’t have to wonder.
Andy Capp is presented as having few redeeming features at all, and Flo’s complaints about him as being eminently justified, but you are (I think) supposed to regard him as relatable (or something.) I don’t think interesting is quite the word for him.
Most of the complaints about the strip have been not so much on feminist as on class and regional lines, viz that he sums up all the stereotypes about the northern working-class English being feckless, idle, ignorant and drunk.* Actual northern working-class English do not seem to be particularly offended, though. Vicarious offence-taking is a tricky thing to bring off.
* This is currently government orthodoxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_Unchained
I do wish the Tories would stop talking Britain down …
Somehow Andy Capp came up recently in a social-media thread among some American guys my age remembering comic strips we read as kids in the ’70’s. None of us had picked up back then on the pun in his name on “handicap.” Not sure we even knew the relevant sense (which I take to be the “betting-on-horse-races” one, not the “disability” one) of “handicap” back then.
“as on class and regional lines”
What? It was not the royal family in those pictures!?!?!?!? I thought it is as like here (video – the main source of English for the generation of kids who grewp up in 90s… and actually 00s because parents often showed it to their children)
I’m kidding, of course:)
Yes, the class component is noticeable, but with my Soviet background I treat the working (and ruling:)) class as the default class for cartoons. The reader is in this class.
The cartoonists, of course don’t work on factories.
@LH, I know. But my concern is specifically understanding how it affects people. I can’t discuss gender relations without understanding what growing up as a man – and a woman – feels like. Individual women or men in particular.
Feminists are usually female – they know what it feels like. I know that they noticed the phenomenon (which most men and women don’t even discuss).
Separately, note starting at about 1:43 in this clip, by the IMHO best all-female musical ensemble that the UK possessed that was actively working as of 1981, the approximated rolling-pin prop in the hand of the “mean uptight mother who doesn’t want her teenage daughter to be out late having a good time” character, played in drag by Philthy Animal Taylor (1954-2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YJ7FWLE3pU
all-female … in drag
Shurely shome mishtake [W. Deeds]
A much better female musical ensemble that the UK possessed (dating back to nearly that time) is Fascinating Aïda. Technical note: it’s much more effective to slide in astute social commentary when, like, you can sing in tune.
Dilly Keane and rolling pins
the default assumption that everyone else is lying/wrong/crazy
Don’t forget “corrupt”. For example, it’s very difficult to figure out whether to buy a particular product on line if you assume that all the good reviews were added by people paid by the manufacturer to do so and all the bad reviews by people paid by their competitors. I was doing some comparison shopping today and encountered both these claims, though admittedly not in the same place. (Note that such reviews aren’t lies, as the corrupt reviewers are indifferent to the truth of the matter.)
The majority of those in jail actually committed crimes
I doubt it, at least for U.S. prisons. The best way to stay out of prison if you are accused of committing a crime is to offer to testify against someone else against whom there is insufficient evidence. Those who wind up in prison, therefore, are those who have no one (left) to testify against, and a likely reason for that is that they are innocent and therefore ignorant.
punches a woman who kept annoying him for pages with her newfangled behavior
I am ashamed to say that after Gale had been needling me verbally for a long time I once placed my hand over her mouth forcibly. Naturally I immediately fell over myself apologizing. I have never forgotten this, but she apparently has, and as far as I know it did not function as a measure of control against her later behavior.
Feminists are usually female – they know what it feels like.
Despite this reprehensible lapse, I still claim to be a feminist by birth.
They’re often short and punchy. They also tend to include the sounds P, T or K
I like this as an explanation for why “up shit creek” caught on, instead of the seemingly more logical “in shit river”, as well as why the bowdlerized “up the creek” still feels expressive, even when it’s forgotten that it originally had a bad word in it.
The Andy Capp cartoonist, Reg Smythe, deliberately stopped depicting both smoking and marital violence. Give him credit for addressing people’s complaints about his subject matter.
People can be persuaded to change.
Umm? Bowdlerized? Is it? That is: do you have evidence the bad-word version came first? (I can’t find an answer to that in sources to hand.) Perhaps a word with t was inserted later, precisely to chime with the P, T, K.
It has echoes of “Up the duff” to my English ears; whereas “Up shit duff” makes no sense.
@AntC
It would be difficult to go up a shit pole. Much easier to slide down.
Those who wind up in prison, therefore, are those who have no one (left) to testify against, and a likely reason for that is that they are innocent and therefore ignorant.
Wow. That’s certainly a take, and you’re welcome to it, but it sounds to me like you’ve somewhere absorbed some equivalent of a conspiracy theory. I dislike prisons in general and the metastasized and brutal US system in particular, I can go on quite a rant about how the system railroads people and the plea-bargain system is a disgrace, and a good friend of mine used to be a Legal Aid lawyer who explained a lot of those problems to me, but even he knew perfectly well that most of the people he defended were probably guilty, like a substantial majority of those behind bars. Whether the things they were convicted of deserved to be crimes is another matter (I’m thinking, of course, of drug charges), but they did the crime and now they’re doing the time. The idea that most prisoners are actually innocent seems pretty bizarre to me, and I’d love to know how you came by it.
The U.S. criminal justice system certainly does routinely offer discounts to defendants willing to implicate others that prosecutors might otherwise have some difficulty building a slam-dunk case against, but comparatively rarely offers a discount so deep (for a crime of non-trivial magnitude) as to get the “helpful” defendant’s sentence down to zero. In a multi-defendant case, this means it is often best to be the first one to cooperate (when you are likely to know the most the gov’t hasn’t already learned from someone else), and bad to hold out until everyone else has already done their own deal such that you can no longer be of any real help even if you do know inculpatory stuff about others.
I once represented a guy (some years after his conviction) where it’s plausible to think he was charged at least in part in the hope of pressuring him to identify/implicate guys further “upstream” in the distribution network for contraband (both crack and firearms being informally resold outside the authorized network of federally-licensed dealers), but the feds didn’t get anything from him so he didn’t get any such discount. He had no real defense to guilt (his “buddy” with whom he was transacting turned out to be a federal informant wired for sound), but I don’t know whether he (a) genuinely didn’t know enough about his suppliers to help; (b) refused to rat them out out of a sense of honor and/or fear; or (c) by bad luck only knew stuff about those suppliers that the prosecutors had independently just managed to learn from another source such that they didn’t need his help. Could have been any of the three or some combination.
AntC: You have Green’s Dictionary to hand, but the conclusion turns out to be not as definite as I thought. Green (and the OED, s.v. shit, revised 2011) consider “up shit creek” to be the original based on an attestation from 1868, “Our men put old Lincoln up Shit creek, and we’ll put old Dill up”, which is much earlier than the first known attestation of “up a/the creek” with unspecified creek (1925). Green also gives citations for “up Salt Creek” from 1907 and 1911, implied to be a euphemism, sharing the letters s--t. Given the difficulty of finding “shit” in writing before the early 20th century, that would seem to be strong evidence … but …
… I’m surprised that Green (and the OED) don’t draw a connection with the older and once-common up Salt River. “To row someone up Salt River” was to defeat overwhelmingly, punish, expel; it was especially common in political contexts in the mid to late 19th century, for example:
Many variants can be found, including “send (someone) up salt creek” (sometimes uncapitalized). There is a Salt River in Kentucky, a tributary of the Ohio River, and one of the explanations offered is that up Salt River was the backwoods, middle of nowhere; there are other Salt Rivers and Salt Creeks, but given that the earliest references to rowing someone up Salt River are from Kentucky and Ohio, if it refers to any real watercourse, it’s most likely the Kentucky one. (You’d think somebody would suggest it’s simply a river of tears, but I haven’t seen that as an explanation.)
So it seems very likely that “up a/the creek” derives from an older “up s--t river or creek”, for some value of “s--t”. (Green’s even has an “up Snot River”!) Maybe the 1868 “put old Lincoln up Shit creek” was an intensification of the then-common catchphrase, or maybe the catchphrase started out as a euphemism whose original escaped print. In any case, all forms contain at least two words ending with p/t/k!
The only version I had seen is “up shit creek without a paddle”.
The paddle seems to be a later elaboration, not (yet) found before the 20th century.
Green’s date for “up the creek” (with unspecified creek) can be antedated by a letter from Harry S. Truman, serving in the army in France, to his wife-to-be:
Both Green and the OED (phrase entered in 1972 Supplement, not yet updated) seem to have limited their search to “up the creek” and missed “up a creek”. 1918 is still long after “up s--t river or creek” was established, but early enough that it was still remembered.
I haven’t seen all of Schitt’s Creek, but no one in the town and no member of the eponymous family appears to notice that there’s anything funny about the name.
Catherine O’Hara’s accent in the show is a masterpiece of awfulness, like a piece of clothing which is somehow ill-fitting everywhere.
There is a Salt River in Kentucky, a tributary of the Ohio River, and one of the explanations offered is that up Salt River was the backwoods, middle of nowhere; there are other Salt Rivers and Salt Creeks, …
There’s several ‘Saltwater Creek’s in NZ; also in Australia. The one just north of where I live is a semi-tidal muddy/oozy sludge, fed mainly by runoff from heavily-fertiliser-poisoned farmland. To call it ‘middle of nowhere’ would be being generous to ‘nowhere’. (I know it only because the State Highway crosses it.)
There is perhaps more relevantly a ‘Ship Creek’, and I can imagine that would be a common name in the colonies. Google gives plenty of hits in USA and Aus. The NZ one is named for a wrecked ship found there, very much up the creek.
Strong Language on NPR’s tortured attempt to review “Schitt’s Creek”.
One click away: long s in English handwriting in 1844. And an important discovery in lexicography.
Yes, that’s a great find. Good description of the diaries (with images) here.
There is perhaps more relevantly a ‘Ship Creek’, and I can imagine that would be a common name in the colonies. Google gives plenty of hits in USA and Aus.
Google gives plenty of hits in USA almost all referring to the Ship Creek in Alaska (at Anchorage), which wasn’t even named that until the 20th century. There are a few other little-known ones in the US, none in Kentucky or Ohio.
In the 170+ years that “up (some kind of) River/Creek” has been in dictionaries, no one has found or even speculated any connection to a Ship Creek. The phrase “up Ship Creek” gets no hits at all in Google Books or Hathitrust in the 19th century, and only about 30 in the 20th century, almost all of which are literal references to the Ship Creek in Alaska. Two are obvious puns — a headline on a financial crisis in the shipbuilding industry and an “Up Ship’s Creek Award” to Senator Ted Stevens (Alaska) — and one is in Punch with insufficient context shown to tell if it’s a pun or what.
“Up Ship Creek” has appeared much more in punny titles and headlines in the 21st century, e.g. about the ship stuck in the Suez Canal. Probably it would’ve been too close for comfort a generation or two ago.