eggcorn: "profound" (profane) words

[Charles Doyle]

Nicely put, Larry.

It's interesting that "pussy" seems to be fast loosing its taboo aspect; we hear the epithet now on prime-time TV, always directed at males, I believe.

Maybe not all dialects understand the term to be anatomical, a synecdoche? Back in grade school (in Texas), at least until I started reading dictionaries, it was the ONLY term I knew for the female sexual part (vaguely envisioned). I must have known the feline sense of the word too, but I didn't think of it as a metaphor in its anatomical application.

--Charlie
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>
>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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