new rude word

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM
Tue Nov 16 13:19:12 UTC 2010


Thanks for telling us this, Eoin. You came to the right place. We're among
the few people outside of the cyberfiltration business who can appreciate
the weirdness of both word and situation.

JL

2010/11/16 Eoin C. Bairéad <ebairead at gmail.com>

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       =?UTF-8?Q?Eoin_C=2E_Bair=C3=A9ad?= <ebairead at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      new rude word
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Hi
>
> part of my job is to maintain the list of unacceptable language for
> our eMail system. They're accountants, and such words are
> inappropriate (although for how long more I don't know!) in messages.
>
> I recently added a new rude word. It's "clunge", and is a noun exactly
> synonymous with the "top of the list" word beginning with c, ending
> with t, and with nu in reverse order in the middle. A word which, if I
> spell it, gets kicked out by about 80% of mail filters.
>
> Its genesis is interesting. British TV, fast succeeding in its efforts
> to scale the cultural heights already achieved in the US, has come up
> with the formula of a comedy series based on obnoxious young people in
> a specific location in the UK, for example Essex, or Sheffield, or
> London. It is clear that local dialect is still strong in England, and
> the slang of the area chosen - in this case the area of West Sussex
> centered on the town of Littlehampton, is used extensively.
>
> And their local term for the vagina is, apparently, the aforesaid "clunge".
>
> Just to avoid misunderstanding, those who know the word can find it as
> deeply offensive as any of its synonyms, and, used aggressively to
> young women, it can be most hurtful - it is a 100% real obscenity.
>
> What, of course, is interesting, is that none of the rude word censors
> I have come across actually list it. I think I'm the first. And most
> people over about 25 don't understand it.
>
> So how can a word be really rude if only a small percentage of the
> population know it's really rude?
>
> Dunno?
>
> Eoin
>
> --
> --
> Eoin C. Bairéad
> Dublin, Ireland
> Áth Cliath, Éire
>
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