eggcorn: "profound" (profane) words

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:45 PM -0300 7/31/07, David A. Daniel wrote:
>  >I've discussed this many times with various friends over the years and
>>nearly every woman has said that, of the usual offensive words, "cunt" is
>>the worst thing you can call a woman, especially from a man, I believe. If
>>I
>>remember right, "bitch" sounds worse coming from another woman. Of course,
>>this is merely anecdotal.
>
>>Scot
>
>I ran into this over 20 (probably more like 25) years ago. A very, very good
>female friend, lots of banter, all cool. She said something - I don't
>remember what - and I said, "Cunt!". Her eyes got wide, corners of mouth
>turned down, veins showing in the neck, teeth bared, major stress evident
>here. Then she seemed to get a grip - sort of - and simply said, "WHAT did
>you say?" rather than starting the WMD attack that had seemed imminent. I
>could see my good friend was upset and even through the alcohol-induced fog
>I was able to discern the reason. So I said, "Wait a minute. Why is calling
>you a cunt not the same as calling a guy a prick? I mean, it would be kind
>of silly for me to call you a prick." She dropped her gaze to the lower
>left, a posture of thoughtfulness, and said, "Oh. Hmmmmmm." And things went
>on from there very normally, as before. So I repeat the question to the
>world today, 25 years or so hence. She got it, but only after I had
>encouraged her to think about it.

This has been discussed in feminist linguistic treatises for a while.
My take is that while a woman can be put down purely by reference to
the fact that she *is* a woman (whence the synecdoche of "cunt" and
to a lesser extent "broad", along with metonymies or stereotyped
traits in earlier usage--cf. "skirt", "frail", etc.), a man cannot be
similarly insulted, or at least not without some difficulty.  To call
a man a prick is to insult him for *stereotypical* male behavior
exhibited by *some* men--and some women in positions of power or
authority; to call a woman (or indeed a man, as in the military) a
cunt is to insult her for *being* a woman (or to insult a man by
assimilating him to the set of women).  If you can call your female
boss a prick, you're not insulting her by pretending she's a man,
you're objecting to her behavior, but if you call your male
underlings (in a military, prison, or athletic context) cunts (or to
a lesser extent pussies), you are doing precisely that--mutatis
mutandis.*  (You're pretending he's a woman and insulting her qua
woman.)  It's a subtle difference--I've seen the sentiments expressed
that all women are cunts (Henry Miller, perhaps?) and that all men
are pricks--but the insults don't work quite the same way.  Of
course, there's the more general point that there are a lot more
metonymic expressions for demeaning, objectifying, or insulting women
by reference to body parts and physical attributes than there are for
men, although the asymmetry is perhaps less dramatic than in the
early 70s when some of these discrepancies were first systematically
observed.

LH

*Similarly, your male or female boss can be "a real bastard", but
only your female boss can be "a real bitch", unless you're
deliberately transferring the sex-marked feature [+ female] to a man,
along with the obnoxious behavior.



>
>Now, here is something interesting (at least to me): Only in fairly recent
>years have Brits begun referring to one another regularly - on the street,
>so to speak - as "assholes" or, for the more linguistically conservative,
>"arseholes". There was a time, not long ago, when "asshole" was considered a
>total Americanism, and British men referred to one another, in this context,
>after a few pints down t'pub, as "cunts". This practice does continue to
>this day though it is losing ground to the Americanism. So, I would be
>extremely interested to know what American females would think - in the name
>of political correctness - of British males referring to each other (male to
>male) as "cunts". I was going to make this multiple choice but there were
>too many permutations to make it viable.
>DAD
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