Hear this episode and get more information about the cuntage therein at theallusionist.org/serving
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, frame language for all my crimes.
It’s Four Letter Word Season, last episode was about the F-word, this episode is about an even stronger one, so content note: there will be category A swears in abundance.
Related to this is the current Allusionist live show Souvenirs, part of which is about a man just going about his business more than 900 years ago and yet somehow causing profane technical glitches in the present - it’s some very educational swear-content. There’s also perhaps my best ever work, the story of some very heightened emotions in the last place you’d expect to find them: English men in the Edwardian era. And you can come to see this entertainment extravaganza imminently: shows are on in Toronto 1 June 2025 and Montréal on 9th June, tickets are linked at theallusionist.org/events. And if you’ve got a venue or festival and want the Allusionist live show in it, get in touch.
If you come to the live show and you’re a paying member of the Allusioverse, you get special perks at the merch table, where I’ll be selling, amongst other things, hand-drawn tea towels and pins. So sign up at theallusionist.org/donate and you will also get regular livestreams with relaxing readings from my collection of vintage reference books, you get written scoops about each episode and occasional essays from me when inspiration strikes plus membership of the Allusioverse Discord community, a kindly corner of the internet where, this month, members have been sharing mosaics they’ve been making, advice for public speaking, and pickle illustrations. Join us: theallusionist.org/donate.
Now, are you ready for some strong language? Because I’m all out of asterisks. On with the show.
HZ: Ten years ago, on the fourth ever episode of the Allusionist…
‘Cunt’ used to be in street names - many towns in Britain had a Gropecunt Lane. It was even in people’s names like John Fillecunt and Bele Wydecunthe. But by the 16th century it had become far too rude for that - what happened?
“Taboos change! Religious swears got less rude, sex and associated body parts got more rude.”
“But why is this the rudest swear of all? None of the penis or testicle words manage to be as rude. UNFAIR!”
“Even on the filthier British television, you need special permission to say it, but you can have as many cocks, dicks and balls as you like!”
“[hiss] The horror and stigma of a body part associated with female sexuality. Bleurghhhhh!!!”
TEN YEARS PASS.
In the last few weeks alone:
“Leslie Bibb is on the White Lotus press circuit, check out her cunty little bob!”
On the main stage of the Coachella festival, Welsh singer MARINA performs her new single ‘Cuntissimo’.
I just went into the stationery shop to get some fancy string and came out with two button badges that say ‘cunt’ on them!
Things have changed for a word that despite being around in written text for 900+ years, didn’t even get listed in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1972.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I never say this word.
HZ: No, I feel bad to force you.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: No, it's funny. Well, I'll say it on podcast, this is professional environment; but in my normal daily life, I can't imagine that I would personally say it. And this might just be like, I'm kind of a prude and I was raised kind of religious, but it does sort of seem like beyond the pale for me personally. I wonder if were 20 if I wouldn’t feel that way, but I spent so much of my life like judiciously avoiding very strong taboos. And this one, just my gut reaction is that it overwhelms. So when you asked me to do this, I was like, “Oh, no! I have to say that word!”
HZ: I'm sorry. We could probably skirt around it and then people can spend the whole episode trying to guess which word we're talking about.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: You know, I'm a grownup linguist, so.
HZ: Let's check in at the end and see how you feel about it after having had to talk about it for such a long time.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: It’s a growth opportunity.
HZ: Maybe. What if it's just like the worst experience of your life?
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: We'll see, we'll see.
HZ: Which is obviously what I want all of the guests on this podcast to have.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: My name is Nicole Holliday. I am acting associate professor of Linguistics at University of California Berkeley.
HZ: So what has been interesting to me: I covered this 10 years ago and because I was naive, I was fairly new to the world of international podcasting about language, I didn't realize that this word was a lot ruder in the USA than it was in the UK - where it is rude, but you also have affectionate use as well, where you might say to someone, "Ah, you old cunt!" But if you called someone a cunt, that would be really rude. Here, much more rude - until… I don't know, I'm thinking three-ish years ago, I started to see a bit of a change, quite a significant change, in seeing Americans use it very freely. Not all of them, obviously.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Not me, just other people.
HZ: But a significant tranche of other people were using 'serving cunt' and 'cunty'. And I thought, wow, that's a big shift.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Yeah. I think there something about the context, the 'serving cunt' and 'cunty' versus the word itself, which you mentioned calling someone a cunt in the UK is rude; that’s the worst possible iteration here as well. But in these sort of cutified settings or, you you know, high performance, I mean drag like as a generic term: that doesn't seem to have the same ‘negative indexicality’, we would say, as using it as slur. I was reading just on the internet, perusing, preparing for this -
HZ: With safe search on, obviously. When you are searching for cunt for linguistic purposes, you need safe search on.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Helen, you sent me like "there's 'cunt' Christmas ornaments now!"
HZ: I searched for 'cunty’ on Etsy and there's a lot of stuff. A lot of it is in that font, which is that like fake handwriting, e font that was over everything maybe eight to 12 years ago.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: The “live, laugh, love” font.
HZ: The pinnacle of the cunty ornaments that I found was a pink cowboy boot for the Christmas tree with 'cunty' written across it. And I thought, how far things have come in such a short time. It's become something that can be profitable.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Late capitalism will always do that, huh.
HZ: One of the many things I love about the TV show Somebody Somewhere is a story along these lines.
HZ: Now that I see 'serving cunt' and 'cunty' a lot, you've got adjectival use, and 'serving cunt' is indirect, but calling someone ‘a cunt’ would still have pejorative power. It wouldn't be a compliment, like 'serving cunt' and 'cunty' are.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: People have talked about whether or not this is slur. So the things that I think are absolutely the most offensive in American English are cunt and the N word. It's because the N word is very clearly a slur, but I don't think cunt's a slur -
HZ: No, I don't think so.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: - but it's still kind up there in what would consider offensiveness. And maybe for that reason, like in this high performance kind of context where you know that that's not the meaning, that's how it works: because it's so offensive, you can almost invert it when you're saying something like ‘serving cunt’ or ‘cunty’ and you have so much context that tells you that it's not slur-like or that offensive.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: I have such strong memories of this word being so bad because of my mother - my mother having this interaction with a friend where a friend called her that and she was just like so hurt and so angry. I like have this like really visceral memory of like her in the car, two hands on the steering wheel in the car, shaking, and being like, "You can never say that word to anyone. It's the worst possible thing," you know, and all this stuff. But it's actually funny now is since I've started doing this work, and last year I made like a big case for "'cunty' is the word of the year", mom and I had like this whole conversation about it and how it changed and what it means now, and all this stuff. And now the only person I use it with is my mom.
HZ: Aw! That’s kind of adorable. She's managed to reclaim it?
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Well, she at least like - it's always funny 'cause it's almost always whispered, we're like on the phone and she'll be like, "I was watching this or whatever. And so and so was in it and she looked -----”
HZ: She’s mouthing ‘cunty’.
HZ: Aww! Good for her. She's training.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: She is! She's great. She loves it. She loves the new words of it all. I am Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright. I am an assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And I am an experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer. So the lexicography part is that I put words in the dictionary.
HZ: Thank you!
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah, you're very welcome. Me and like 200 other living humans do that for the world's languages. It's a small, very nerdy, friendly community, and I love that work. And then the experimental sociolinguistics part is I work on understanding the creation and maintenance of language ideologies, both over time and in real time. What I am interested in is how we develop our opinions about appropriate language: so what a woman should say, what a man should say, what an older person should say, what someone from Leeds should sound like.
Maybe I can ask you: in British English you use it in this familiar way, but is it complimentary when you're like, "Hey, you old cunt, what's up?" Is that necessarily positive?
HZ: Well, we have quite an insult-based form of showing affection to people.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah, sure. We do that too.
HZ: But there isn't the kind of grandeur of it in how it came out in ballroom, or the fact that you are like very wowed by how someone is presenting - there is not that.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah. Okay.
HZ: Nicole Holliday:
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: One thing about ‘cunt’ and a lot of other English swear words they have these like nice Germanic shapes with a lot of plosives. It’s got almost like a sound symbolism with all of the K and the T - these are sharp to our ears. And I don't make too much of sound symbolism, but good swear words do have a punch. And I think that's part of the story of the reclamation 'cunt' too, it's just shaped so well to be an offensive word. Same thing with fuck, like that K, you can hold that K actually, like you can make the burst really big, you can pause way before it. By definition, you can't hold onto plosives, but you make that K so exaggerated, in both fuck and in cunt, that they literally feel a little like being punched. And that's of the success as well.
HZ: In the last episode I was admiring how the word ‘fuck’ can be so many different parts of speech - noun, verb, punctuation, interjection, a full sentence on its own, it’s so versatile; shit is too. Cunt, not quite as much - we have the noun ‘cunt’, the adjective ‘cunty’, and the adjective ‘cunting’, usually an angry word, might have been around since the 19th century. But cunt’s semantic expansion is one of the things that catches Kelly Elizabeth Wright’s linguistic interest.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: This is the kind of thing that we look for. Our dictionary is like very different than others. So like our criteria of inclusion: we are looking for like new words, but we're also looking for new senses, or like prominence. So a couple years ago, our word of the year was 'insurrection', which its meaning had not changed at all. It's just it got used a whole lot, in 2021, right? And so that, that's prominence, that's an effect of prominence, right? And sometimes we'll have words like for example, last year, the word ‘context’ was nominated in relation to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and a lot of people getting fired for trying to talk about the context in which all of this occurs in.
But it was really confined: the usage had ticked up, but it was really confined to these congressional hearings, like this really specific thing. That's not mainstream usage, you know, that's not like people actually using it, and the word itself hasn't changed and the meaning hasn't changed. So we're gonna talk about it, but we're not actually putting it in the dictionary or changing it or adding a sense or anything. But then when you see something like 'cunty' where it's like, “Oh, new part of speech! New part of speech!” - that’s a change. That's a change. That's a change that really only happens if a whole bunch of people are using it, if it's gaining new users, if it's diffusing in users; and so that kind of thing is always really exciting.
HZ: While the mainstreaming of 'serving cunt' and 'cunty' is relatively recent, we can trace these uses back at least three decades.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: It does sort of rise to prominence in the ball culture in New York City, which was mostly created by African Americans and Puerto Ricans, we're thinking like late 1980s, early 1990s - if people have seen the film Paris is Burning, this is what we're thinking of, or the show Pose, this is the culture. And there were a lot of dramatic linguistic things happening. Of course, there's African American English; of course, there's Puerto Rican English. A lot of times people think that African American English is just slang, or, even worse, profanity. It's not. But because people that were in this ball culture were coming largely from Black communities who spoke African American English, their language came with them, and then AAL became part of the foundation for the language of ball culture in some ways. And then people built on it, and Puerto Ricans brought in their own language, and then white folks brought in their own language, and then it became a queer community. But there's these threads of AAL through it.
There's a lot of sort of joking profanity that goes on in these cultures, because they are counterculture, because there are performances designed shock and push the envelope. Using words that are taboo in other contexts is like absolutely not an issue, right? There's also something about what drag itself is that I think makes ‘cunt’ very special: it's a compliment. So we talk about somebody being cunty or serving cunt in these modern contexts, it means that they're executing a really high level of feminine performance. So if you're a drag queen and you're trying to be a sort of persuasive drag queen - not necessarily realistic, but persuasive in doing extreme femininity - what could more extremely feminine than the most vulgar term for what we imagine as the most feminine-indexed body part? If you are a man performing as a woman, and everybody knows that you're a man performing as a woman, to receive the compliment that you are behaving like a person with female genitalia is highest praise.
HZ: Whereas elsewhere, perceived feminity - or perceived failure to perform masculinity - has been stigmatised, punished, within the ballroom scene it is appreciated and admired with the complimentary use of the cunt-word. Kelly Elizabeth Wright:
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: I think in a lot of ways when your daily life requires like asks you to censor, in a lot of ways, in any way - how I describe myself, how I dress, who I love, none of that is like okay to show like out in the world - when you all get together and you have your safe space, you get to this point where you're like, I'll make my own language. If I'm gonna be silent out there, I'm gonna be as loud as I possibly can in here.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I would be remiss I study African American English - if I didn’t say that this meaning is something that's facilitated by Black and brown creators that bring it into the mainstream.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: There's obviously like a group of users sustaining that term in that time period where it wasn't reaching all of us. So it migrated out of ballroom spaces into other spaces, before it reaches mainstream media. I think RuPaul's Drag Race becoming like one of the more successful television shows of our time -
HZ: The international popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and the content it spawned across the social internet, brought terms from queer subcultures to a lot of new users outside: gagging and sickening as compliments, werk with an E, slay, throwing shade, what’s the T, realness, reading to filth, mother, to name just a few. And the Drag Race adage “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent” was in 2017 turned into a song of the same name by RuPaul. (It’s an acronym, see?)
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: And of course, by the time that RuPaulis spreading this to the mainstream on Drag Race, it's been happening in culture forever and ever. In 1995, the queen Kevin Aviance from the House of Aviance had a song called ‘Cunty (The Feeling)’, which Beyoncé then sampled later in ‘Pure/Honey’.
HZ: That’s the moment when I really registered this new mainstream cuntage: when I went to see Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, and this sample of Kevin Aviance’s ‘Cunty (The Feeling)’ plays and the word ‘CUNT’ flashes in huge capital letters on the screen behind Beyoncé. She even had a set for a fake TV news channel called KNTY. I thought, okay, if the cunt word is not considered to be detrimental to Beyoncé's economics, and could even be a brand asset, then it must have arrived to a certain extent.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yes. And that's part of what, when we put 'cunty' in the dictionary last year, we attributed that. We attributed the Beyoncé song and the tour and the album and the movie, for like this permission. It's like if one of the most visible women in the world isn't bothered by this, then it gives other women this chance to use it and not be bothered by it.
HZ: Since we’re mentioning Kevin Aviance, the earliest written citation of ‘serving cunt’ that I could track down is a YouTube video, a clip of Kevin Aviance on stage performing ‘Cunty (The Feeling)’ - a song which contains ‘cunty’ and ‘cunt’ more than 200 times. The video is titled “Black Queen Serving Cunt” - it’s from 2011.
And the phrase ‘serving cunt’ became a bit more widespread during that decade, but really started to proliferate online from 2021. But important to reiterate: these complimentary cunt-uses weren’t born at this point. They had been in use since the mid-1990s at least.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: We see this from Black and brown creators as early 30 years ago, and then being brought into the mainstream and sort of something that becomes available for non-ball participants, for white, for cis people, for the mainstream sort of consume and appropriate.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: I think TikTok has a lot to do with it. Not to give too much weight to any one type of media, but I think that people literally sitting and discussing what the word means in streams is something that - not only this word, many words - has helped move their usage along. Because a lot of times, we're kind of out here in the dark saying stuff and trying to figure out if other people understand what we mean. And so now that we've got TikTok to be like, “Here's what this word means, and I actually am writing it on the screen while I'm describing it to you, and this, that, and the other thing” - that's powerful. It's a very powerful medium.
HZ: And landing with new audience, a word can take on a new life.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: As especially younger people encounter this word, and in their own lives maybe have never actually been called this or labelled this in a bad way - and then also, they're not using it with each other in this bad way either - so it's like we're encountering it in a positive sense maybe for the first time, or being told like, "This is what this means,” it's different, you know? So I think that the younger users have like permission in a way to produce it freely, are more freely. And so I would say, yeah, like queer-aligned spaces, younger spaces, younger users, the chronically online are probably the people who are using it the most, and participating in its very rapid uptake. Which is cool.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: And so there's this lane in which I think not offensive at all, because everyone understands that it's a compliment about authenticity and solidarity as opposed to a misogynistic insult - which is actually really beautiful.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: And a lot of what we see happening with these words, like ‘clocked’ or ‘give life’ or ‘mother’, which mean something else out in the wider world, come to mean something new in our spaces, it is in a lot of ways like: “I'm gonna take what you have allowed me to have and imbue it with this special meaning.” And so I love that we see Black culture, we see, you know, Latinx culture, drag and ballroom culture. and then just the youth, like youth in general: a lot of these groups are under-voiced, are under-represented in modern day, mainstream, standardized professional life. Like, young people don't get to vote, they don't have a voice. And so it's kind of in this way of when they're in their moment and they are starting to craft identity with self-determination, it generates a lot of new language because it's like, “I'm gonna pick up everything that you gave me and I'm gonna turn it into something new.”
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: The utility of ‘cunt’ in particular is that it's always talking who are marginalized - and the way in which there's maybe some gender essentialism at play, reducing women to their body parts, that's the criticism and that's why people say it's offensive - but if you can turn that on its head and use it to compliment who don't have those body parts: that's a really interesting explanation for the sort of way it got reclaimed. There is something about which words considered the most taboo cross-linguistically. Taboo words always almost always refer to something the culture is not comfortable talking about, so they're about death, or sex, or bodies in general, excrement; there's these things that are always the subject of taboo language. The ones that to people's mothers are always really, really offensive, so we have ‘motherfucker’: very offensive. But the ones that refer to female parts are also typically very high there. And this is true kind of cross-linguistically. What is the reason this pattern? Well yeah: patriarchy - we don't have to search far to have this as an explanation. Invoking the female body, or the idea of the female body, has been considered so vulgar: these were very, very taboo subjects. Even acknowledging the existence of women having bodies was taboo many times throughout history.
HZ: Above the neck only.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Right! And we we still have a of euphemisms for this, so we’re not really linguistically or culturally that far from that tradition - and especially when you think about the Christo-fascist takeover.
HZ: Yayyyy.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: This is exactly the kind of thing that those folks are clutching their pearls at the most: the acknowledgement of female power, the acknowledgement of female bodies - they spend so much of their day trying to police women's bodies, we live rent free in their head. This is their number one crusade. So it is actually interesting that we see the rise of cunt paralleling all of this sort of anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman discourse. I think that those things do happen in tandem. In 2023, the Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, when he was fired from Fox News, one of the justifications is that he was using this word as slur to women: “This girl is such a cunt”, like in the worst possible way, and that was part of the grounds for dismissal. So people do know that there's a very offensive way to say this here. People are really aware of when they're being insulted. So he could have called the women in the texts ‘bitches’, and it still would've been offensive, even though ‘bitch’ is further along on reclamation journey, because we know when it's being used as something to target a marginalized group as opposed to something being reclaimed by a marginalized group.
HZ: A lot of people are very good at making words that don't have pejorative power like ‘ladies’ sound very insulting. ‘Girls’.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Yeah, it's true. So it's not just the word itself, it's also - I studied intonation and prosody, so it's the tone, it's the context, it's everything that happened before that helps us figure whether we should be offended or not.
HZ: There really is too much going on. It's a wonder our minds can handle language without just completely fusing. It's just overwhelming.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: It's the most amazing thing about humans, I think. But I'm a little biased.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah, it's fascinating. I think that there's a lot of space for people to examine their own usage and think about how the words that we use commonly every day represent our own identities in that way. And it should be celebrated, because it's really fascinating. Look at all these different things that language can do; look at the power it contains.
HZ: I'm irritated that a lot of people will attribute things as internet slang when they are so much older than that.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Yeah. You know, I teach about African American English and I get this all the time. The conflation of the way that Black people in America talk as just some commercial plaything that just exists on internet is really upsetting, because people will take words, take 'slay' and they'll take 'tea' and say like, "I speak AAE!" And I've given grammar tests about AAE to white freshmen for years and years, and they fail every single time. You know five words. It’s like being like "I can say ‘domo arigato’, I speak Japanese" - absolutely not! But we understand that as offensive. African American English when it's Black people here people feel like our language is just theirs to take and reframe and reformat and it's a joke or that it's all slang or that it's all profanity, there's nothing deeper there. The first thing we teach when teach about AAE is that it is a complex rule-governed system like other language and that exists on this planet and part of the commercialism like this is not Beyoncé's fault know when we see Beyoncé come out talking slay talking about cunt you know these things it of makes it seem like it's just performance, it's not a real way that people talk in their homes. And that’s where I feel the disconnect.
HZ: Kelly Elizabeth Wright:
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: I get asked a lot about like, is this cultural appropriation? More often than not, my answer is no, when people are asking me about this, about specific terms or actions, because all language changes through contact. So all variation is part of like this continuous and ongoing like usage of these linguistic systems that happens in individuals and collectively all the time. And so we're never going to be able to keep language that's only ours ever, no matter what our identities or communities are. And even if we were a language isolate, a group of people who lived in the middle of the jungle or on an island, with no wifi, or people who grew up on the moon, or something: it would still change. It would change internally. So there's nowhere to like tie this horse up and let it stay there. We can't hold it.
HZ: Can't hold that cunty little horse.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Can't hold that cunty little horse. So part of my perspective is: this is going to happen. It's going to happen. We can't own it in this way, or put it on a shelf. Maybe we could try and keep all the change internal to our community, but at the same time, but it's still going to change and things are still going to mean different stuff. And then also, a lot of times, when people are asking, like, “This new teen slang word that everyone's using all the time, like 'mother' or something, but it actually came from these like oppressed communities and what does that mean that like teens are out here, appropriating Black language?” And I'm like, they're not. Because we have to allow them to meet the language where they are - it's not their fault, they're 12. I guarantee that you use a lot of words whose history you don't know. You could use language just fine without knowing how these words evolved.
HZ: Yep. People do it all the time!
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: People literally do it all the time, all day long, every day! We can't expect like 12-year-olds to…
HZ: Be etymologists.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Right, be carrying around knowledge that none of the rest of us are. So there's that. But then also the appropriation thing I think really only happens when you get a piece of language or something specific that the group itself, these people, these speakers, really can't use that language in their daily life as a professional, without getting into some sort of trouble, or risking people thinking I'm an idiot, or not trusting me, or this, that and the other.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: When you are just seeing like these wonderful dancers and drag and whatever and you want to be part of that community so you adopt using certain words: you've missed that that's not a costume for lots of people. You can choose it, and then you can go speak mainstream American English, and your teachers will never police you for the way that you talk. But we talk this way in our homes and in our communities all the time; it's not a costume to put on. And so when you think that that's something fun to as a hobby without respecting that there's this long history of oppression that gave birth to the words that you think are so fun: now that's the problem.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: One example is like Chet Hanks. Chet Hanks a few years ago did the Patois, the Jamaican Patois.
HZ: Chet Hanks, also known as Chet Haze, the not-Jamaican sometime rapper and actor son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: People who speak Patois have a really hard time navigating their social environment because their language is very different from standard English or other languages of their islands or communities, right?
HZ: Well, that's their fault for not having the foresight to be born the son of Tom Hanks.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Right, yeah, for suresies. Yeah. So it's that kind of thing of, he isn't experiencing any of that and never will when he's using this language. That's appropriation, because you're able to pick something up that's actually really difficult for the actual users themselves to produce, and you're producing it free and clear. That's not the case with like 'mother' and 'slay' and, you know, 'boots the house down' and all these other phrases that come out of this ballroom culture, because the people who are still part of that representative culture use that language all the time. I'm not saying that it is without stigma; I'm not saying that they are not engaging in self-censorship at times; but it's not life-threatening for them to produce those kinds of words. So when other people are picking them up and using them: yeah, sure, they are not participating in the same cultural experience, not always; but, to me, it doesn't feel like harm in the same… that's what I mean, most of the time my answer is ‘no’, because it's not Chet Hanks. He's always gonna be my example. I will drag him forever, and I hope that someday the Hanks people reach out.
HZ: They come for you. They're like, "Stop using him as your bench-Hanks!"
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah, never. …“Bench-Hanks”, heh heh heh.
HZ: The other son launched his own line of handkerchiefs. That's fine.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Oh, the guy who was in Dexter?
HZ: Colin Hanks, yes.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah. Okay. Hank-kerchief. Get it? Get it?
HZ: Sorry to report that Colin Hanks’s handkerchief line, Hanks Kerchiefs, ceased trading a couple of years ago.
Anyway, I don’t think the message to take from this is: “As long as I don’t reach the bench-Hanks, I can use whatever words I want.” Really I do not want to provide any tools to help out the kind of people who complain that “I can’t even call someone a [repugnant term from an early 20th century children’s adventure novel] without you telling me that’s ‘racist’” - those people don’t need our help at all. They are doing just fine at the moment.
Trying to be decent human beings with our language usage comes with a high cognitive overhead, because there’s no blanket rule; I think it’s still case by case, by word, and by person using the word, and by person or people with or at whom they are using it. Repurposing a word that has been harmfully used before is not a party for one.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: And that's the nature of language and language change. It's really fundamentally democratic in a way that I think we're uncomfortable with. The community decides what usage and what word is appropriate in what context. I get this a lot with people asking if they're allowed to use AAE online. People ask about 'slay' all the time on my TikTok, "Can I say ‘slay’ or is that appropriation?" Look, I'm not in the room with you. You belong to a community of people you talk to. You have to read the room for what's appropriate. Because can I tell you that if you said it to me in that context, I wouldn't be offended? Sure. But this a group decision.
HZ: How do you feel when people write to you asking for permission? You’re busy. Do you even have time to adjudicate? Could you say, "Okay, if you pay me my consultation fee, then I will deliver a verdict"?
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I genuinely should start charging for this service. It's - it's very annoying to me, for the reason that I can't answer it for you because I'm not in your life, in your community, in your interactions - but also are you looking for absolution from the one Black linguist that you've ever encountered in the wild? That I’m a person of authority, but also Black, and so if I say that you're allowed to say ‘slay’, it's your slay out of jail free card? I can't do that for you - but also it shouldn't be my job.
HZ: Yeah, I get people writing to me asking for permission to do things, and I do feel like you framing this question ought to be the answer for you that it's still a ‘no’.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Right? Yeah. If you have to ask, maybe tread lightly.
HZ: Maybe you're not ready. Maybe you need to do some research on your own, and observe for several years, and then -
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Yeah. But I understand the frustration, because these things are a moving target. So you could do a whole investigation today and survey your 100 closest friends, and they say, “Yeah, I’m not offended if you use this,” then in a month, the cuntpocalypse happens and we've got a problem, the rules have changed. Right?
HZ: Maybe that's why people are bothering you with these queries, that they don't want to mess up. They are sensitive that they don't want to cause upset, and they are language-curious.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: This is actually a good thing, right? But I'm a professional linguist and I take language very seriously, but I don't take individual words seriously. It's language! It's how we communicate with the world. It's also social and playful and fun. So I do think that in the panic about never getting anything wrong doesn't really serve us. If you are expressing positive ideas in faith to people that you have a relationship with, if you choose the quote unquote "wrong" word once in a while, shouldn't destroy your community standing. It won't destroy your community standing. It could be a little cringe for you to say ‘slay’ or ‘cunt’ or ‘rizz’, depending on your identity. But if you're not using a slur, if you're not being appropriative, then you're probably fine. And hopefully you've surrounded yourself with people you have good enough relationships with where they can tell you if you've done something that strikes them the wrong way.
Everybody thinks that they are entitled to whatever quote unquote ‘hip’ words are. Sometimes it just doesn't look good on you. Like, yes, you could say it, but for what reason? The example I gave to my students about language change over time was like, imagine you go home for the holidays and your grandma says, "Oh, that Glen Powell, he's got so much rizz." And this is funny, because if your 80-year-old grandma says it, it’s hilarious. TikTok is full of videos of old people using youth slang. But if your 35-year-old aunt does it, it's not charming, it’s cringe.
HZ: And if you suspect something's a slur, go with that feeling and don't use it.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Yeah! There are lots of words. You don't have pick that one if you feel on the line about it.
HZ: It's such an interesting dynamic when a word with a lot of negative power also becomes a compliment, or like ‘queer’, becomes reclaimed and really really useful for a lot of people.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah, it's fascinating, but it’s not - it isn't necessarily rare, linguistically rare; this kind of thing happens all the time, like “You're the shit.”
HZ: Or 'killed it'. That could be very negative.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Right. Killed, crushed, slayed - all that stuff is, yeah, very negative, but also quite good.
HZ:Even like ‘awesome’ and ‘tremendous’. That's a similar, just older, switch.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Or like ‘eat’, ‘devour’, all that. It's something to do wit, semantic intensity that we want to share how much we love something, like “I don't just love it, I adore it” - it's taking something that already has this like intensity built into it and moving it to the other end of the sentiment spectrum to be like, “I REALLY like it.”
HZ: Then what happens when something being ‘cunty’ has been used enough that it has lost its power? Then where do we go?
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: So that's a good question. There's definitely two camps of linguists in this: does increased use weaken a word’s rhetorical force, or does it strengthen it? Or maybe have no effect? I honestly think that kind of weakening effect is more determined by the context in which the word occurs in than any count. There's not some threshold of like, “Oh! It's been used 80 billion times and now it has no rhetorical force left, it's empty.” It really has a lot to do with like where it appears and to whom we refer.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I do think it's becoming less offensive, but it's got a really long history of being like most offensive word. And so until the people who were raised to have it as the most offensive word are all gone, I don't that it's going to really lose that. Give it forty years, and then maybe it will weaken sufficiently where we hear it the way we do like ‘vagina’ on TV.
'Vagina' is way less taboo than it used to be as a word, even though that's our technical term. I can't imagine a 1990s sitcom, somebody saying “vagina” more than once and it being uncensored. Now? Yeah! Totally reasonable on any show.
HZ: Biology.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Biology, right, and just the idea that we can talk about biology.
HZ: How are you feeling now? Because we've been talking for a little bit and you've had to use it, many times. How are you doing?
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I'm alright. I'm feeling okay about it.
HZ: We've been talking specifically about ‘serving cunt’ and ‘cunty’, which haven't been like the only reclamations of cunt. There have been many different phases and sources of reclamations, going back decades: second-wave feminists in the 1970s, like Germaine Greer; Judy Chicago, and other artists of the Cunt-Art movement, and then later Tracey Emin; The Vagina Monologues hitting big in the mid-1990s; Inga Muscio’s 1998 book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence and the Cuntfest events that followed it… I was wondering if there are any other interesting developments with ‘cunt’ that you've noticed?
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Those reclamation efforts, especially when we look at punk music - Bikini Kill, Kathleen Hanna writing ‘slut’ on her belly - and lots of like movements in art in the early 2000s where people were like writing harmful words on themselves or like putting them in art: those are like all interesting points on this timeline because that didn't maybe have quite the same effect, reclamation-type effect; it’s is like, no, that word was still bad. People were saying like, "I'm gonna call myself this before you have a chance to, I'm gonna take the air out of it for you." That's different than what we see happening now, which is like, "I'm gonna celebrate all of these aspects of what maybe somebody at some point in time might have called cunty." But then also maybe it's like a different word. Like, I don't wanna say that they aren't related, but the Venn diagram barely overlaps when we're talking about like a difficult person you don't want to be around versus someone who hangs the moon and is flawless in all aspects of life. It doesn't have the same function as punk bands or people out there like calling themselves cunts or whatever. It's like, no, but you're still using it in the same way.
But there is something in the middle maybe of these two things. The Vagina Monologues, I think one of those is “learn to love your cunt.” But it's not naming a person, it's naming an organ. And so maybe it works a little differently in that way, but I think a lot of women don't refer to that organ on their own body in this way, or don't love it if someone else does. So this idea of like "learn to love your cunt" is maybe like a stepping stone in this pond between the old version that's always pejorative and this new version that is like very celebratory.
HZ: When people are actually referring to the bodily organ with the cunt word, it's often men being quite porny.
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Very porny. I would rather somebody call me a cunt with anger than call this part of my body that in lust. I'd be like, “Ew, no thank you.”
HZ: What about if someone called you a cunt in the British affectionate way?
KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: That would be great.
HZ: Kelly Elizabeth Wright is assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, an experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer. And Nicole Holliday is acting associate professor of Linguistics at University of California Berkeley. She is MixedLinguist on TikTok. Both she and Kelly Elizabeth Wright do a ton of interesting work that you should check out, and I’ll link to them both, plus other resources about today’s topic, at theallusionist.org/serving.
Next up in Four Letter Word season? Something a little less strong. Your string of clutching-pearls can take a break. Probably.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
coulisse, noun: a flat piece of scenery at the side of the stage in a theatre. (the coulisses) the wings.
Try using ‘coulisse’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, with original music by the singer and composer Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
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