A few years ago, during the six months in which my mother battled valiantly against death, I received a summons for what appeared to be her final hours. I leapt onto a train from London to Birmingham, where I was raised, and upon arrival joined the line for a cab.
While patiently waiting, I found myself queue-barged—cut in line—presumably by foreigners who did not understand the sacred role queuing holds in the British psyche. A clutch of my fellow line-mates began grumbling, another cherished British custom, at these miscreants. “Yes,” I agreed, with cut-glass precision. “They are complete cunts.”
There was a silence. Then, as one, the crowd parted, collectively ushering me into the next taxi. “That’s it, help the posh c-bomber into a cab,” decreed a fellow traveler. For, in dropping said munition, I had availed myself of the British citizen’s most ubiquitous, multi-functional rhetorical device: a clarion call for action, reverence, respect. My countrymen had recognized it and answered my cry.
I bring you this tale not to shock but in an attempt to be genuinely useful and informative to the wayfaring traveler. For we Brits are decidedly pro-cunt. Cunts “R” Us.
In the United States, the word for which the euphemism “See you next Tuesday” has been coined is considered a misogynist affront. Just look at the incredulity when the late senator John McCain allegedly said it to his wife back in 1992. Or in 2018, when comedian Samantha Bee used it to describe Ivanka Trump and was then forced to apologize. The c-word is considered incendiary, savage, taboo, in America. In Blighty, many of us could not live without it. Witness its peppering of governmental WhatsApp messages unearthed in the official inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic.
Brits are decidedly pro-cunt. Cunts “R” Us.
Linguistically speaking, “cunt” is an omnipresent term, with a functional ambiguity allowing it a range of meanings—negative, at times, but also neutral and hotly positive. Yes, it can be used as a derogative for those who, say, keep you from your mother’s deathbed. However, it can also be deployed similarly to “mate.” I think of it as akin to the phrase “me old china” (“china plate” being a substitute for “mate” in Cockney rhyming slang). “Cunt” often contains the same fondness.
Things have moved on from the obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in 1960, when D. H. Lawrence’s repeated use of the term made the novel something you’d want to keep away from your wife, or servant. Indeed, they’ve clearly moved on from 2006, when the feminist Germaine Greer argued that “‘cunt’ is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock.” For legions of us, “cunt” is now used constantly, ambiently, and without menace as a rhetorical condiment to bring out the best in our linguistic fare.
At a chichi, largely female Belgravia office I do business with, “cunt” and its variants are by far the most frequently deployed utterances. “Cunty” is the most passionate term of approval among droves of A-gays, fashion folk, and galleristas, while a Hampstead mother I know proudly notes that “cunt” was her daughter’s third word after “dog” and “Daddy.”
Dr. Jenni Nuttall, a professor of medieval literature at the University of Oxford and the author of Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, tells me she uses “cunt” with friends and her husband “in a fond/ironic/mock-angry way.” She adds that the word was not always obscene. “It definitely appears in medieval place names: 20 streets were once versions of ‘Grope-cunt Lane,’ often places where women sold sex.” It was, she tells me, also used to refer to places “where the landscape took the form of a cleft in a small hill or wooded valley.”
Nuttall traces the word’s history through medieval medical texts as well as dictionaries from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, although by 1786 it was being printed as “****” or “c**t.” At the end of the 18th century, Francis Grose, author of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, defined it as “a nasty name for a nasty thing,” and it was soon completely banished from reference books, not appearing in dictionaries again until the 1960s.
Still, it’s a word I would happily have on my tombstone. When I was a junior academic, using the term in a paper delivered at a Modern Languages Association shindig in Chicago, an Oxford professor informed me that I was to the c-word what Tarantino was to the f-word. Three decades on, I wear a cunt necklace with my pearls from the Brixton jeweler Hoops & Chains.
In this I am in excellent company. I was gratified to learn that King Charles III allegedly described Prince Harry as being “cunt-struck”—a stalwart 18th-century term—by Meghan Markle. This may or may not be true. However, if it is, His Majesty has demonstrated that he is at one with his nation, the people’s c-bomber.
Hannah Betts is a features writer and columnist for The Times of London and The Daily Telegraph