Feckless Bunt — The C-word at Home and Abroad

June 1, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was browsing the New Book shelf in our library yesterday and noticed The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy, about differences between US and British English

One of those differences is the word cunt, a word which, by coincidence was very much in the news that same day. Samantha Bee had called Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.”  Conservatives especially fell into an angry swoon. But Bee’s remark was the top story in news feeds across the political spectrum.

In the US, cunt is the worst thing you can call someone. If Bee had called Ivanka a “clueless asshole” or a “heartless fuck,” I doubt that the reaction would have been as swift and strong. As for bitch and pussy, we know that Trump supporters, thanks to “Access Hollywood,”  have long since made peace with those terms.

Bee’s comments would also not have drawn so much attention if she’d been speaking to a British audience. Cunt is different in the UK. As Murphy says (not in the book but on her blog), “The British can be amused by how much this word offends many Americans.”

Because cunt is less offensive in Britain, it can be used more casually and therefore more often. Even in the formal world of books, cunt appears more frequently in the UK, as Google n-grams shows (hat tip: Philip Cohen, who tweeted a similar graph).

The word is less offensive in the UK because it has a different meaning. In the US, only a woman can be a cunt. But in the UK, the term is applied to both genders, perhaps more often to males.  Murphy used a corpus of Internet sources (blogs, news, etc.) and found, “two unique instances of this phrase in the American data. Both refer to women. There are five in the British data and they refer to: a male athlete, a male friend, and fans of a certain football team or football magazine.”

It’s sort of like pussy – demeaning the man’s manhood.  “In the UK, the word is thrown around rather easily among men. It can be used among friends in a playful way, but more often (as far as I can tell) it is a term of abuse for men they don't like.”

In the US, if a woman is a cunt, she is a horrible person. But in the UK, the term can suggest just a general inefficacy or stupidity, not cruelty and evil. I don’t have the Internet corpus, but I do have the Monty Python Travel Agent sketch, which dates back to the 1960s.

Here’s a transcript.

Bounder: Anyway you’re interested in one of our adventure holidays? Tourist: Yes I saw your advert in the bolor supplement. Bounder: The what? Tourist: The bolor supplement. Bounder: The color supplement? Tourist: Yes I’m sorry I can’t say the letter ‘B’ Bounder: C? Tourist: Yes that’s right. It’s all due to a trauma I suffered when I was a sboolboy. I was attacked by a bat. Bounder: A cat? Tourist: No, a bat Bounder: Can you say the letter ‘K’? Tourist: Oh yes, Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Kings Bollege Bambridge. Bounder: Why don’t you say the letter 'K’ instead of the letter ‘C’? Tourist: what you mean.....spell bolor with a ‘K’? Bounder:Right. Tourist: Kolor. Oh that’s very good, I never thought of that. What a silly bunt.

No American man would refer to himself as a “silly cunt.” Or rather, a “silly kunt.”