The following verses from World War I, which Graves quotes, illustrate nicely the imaginative meanness of tough talk.
THE AUSTRALIAN POEM
A sunburnt bloody stockman stood,
And in a dismal, bloody mood
Apostrophized his bloody cuddy:
‘This bloody moke’s no bloody good,
He doesn’t earn his bloody food,
Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!’
He leapt upon his bloody horse
And galloped off, of bloody course.
The road was wet and bloody muddy:
It led him to the bloody creek;
The bloody horse was bloody weak,
‘Bloody! Bloody! Bloody!’
He said, ‘This bloody steed must swim,
The same for me as bloody him!’
The creek was deep and bloody floody.
So ere they reached the bloody bank
The bloody steed beneath him sank—
The stockman’s face a bloody study
Ejaculating Bloody! bloody! bloody!
There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren’t nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they’re not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough.
Contrary to those romantic myths which glorify the speech of mountain men and working people, Irish elves and Phoenician sailors, the words which in our language are worst off are the ones which the worst-off use. Poverty and isolation produce impoverished and isolated minds, small vocabularies, a real but fickle passion for slang, most of which is like the stuff which Woolworths sells for ashtrays, words swung at random, wildly, as though one were clubbing rats, or words misused in an honest but hopeless attempt to make do, like attacking tins with toothpicks; there is a dominance of cliché and verbal stereotype, an abundance of expletives and stammer words: you know, man, like wow! neat, fabulous, far-out, sensaysh. I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues… allow them a language as lousy as their lives.
Thin in content, few in number, constantly abused: what chance do the unspeakables have? Change is resisted fiercely, additions are denied. I have introduced ‘squeer,’ ‘crott,’ ‘kotswinkling,’ and ‘papdapper,’ with no success. Sometimes obvious substitutes, like ‘socksucker,’ catch on, but not for long. What we need, of course, is a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine fuck from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one — a fack from a fick, a fick from a fock — but we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses, and our earthy words are all… well… ‘dirty.’ It says something dirty about us, no doubt, because in a society which had a mind for the body and other similarly vital things, there would be a word for coming down, or going up, words for nibbles on the bias, earlobe loving, and every variety of tongue track. After all, how many kinds of birds do we distinguish?
We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming. In fact our entire vocabulary for states of consciousness is critically impoverished.
The forbidden words may be forbidden, but we sneak them in. First we pretend to be using another word which happens to resemble the forbidden one exactly, as in this exchange between Romeo and Mercutio. Romeo begins:
Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,
Too rude, too boistrous, and it pricks like thorn...
To which Mercutio replies:
If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down...
Prick, cock, screw, balls, bust, bang, suck, lick… the list is endless, and endlessly uninteresting.
The raw rude word may appear submerged, as when an angry Hamlet asks Ophelia if he may lie in her lap, and she says:
No, my lord.
I mean, my head upon your lap.
Aye, my lord.
Do you think I meant country matters?
… a line in which ‘cunt’ is concealed by a tree.
I think nothing, my lord.
That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
What is, my lord?
Nothing.
There is the love inside of glove, the ass in brass, the dung in dungeon, and even the pee in perspective. It is necessary to rub the little-boy smirk off these words before they can be used with any success, and introducing them in these angular ways sometimes helps. Although rarely.
The fact is: they aren’t loved enough. Almost every English poet writes of love and fornication, enjoys describing women as if they were fields awaiting subdivision. Does not our Dr. Donne, himself, cry out: Oh, my America, my new-found-land? Indeed. But he keeps the language clean. When it comes to sexual directness and plain speech, Burns probably surpasses, but even he has the advantage of a dialect extraordinarily rich in sweet blue words like gamahuche* and
Then gie the lass her fairin’, lad,
O gie the lass her fairin’,
An’ she’ll gie you a hairy thing,
An’ of it be na sparin’;
But lay her o’er amang the creels,
An’ bar the door wi’ baith your heels,
The mair she gets, the mair she squeals,
An’ hey for houghmagandie.
… which may account for the fact that I could never take Mahatma Gandhi very seriously.
Walt Whitman, who was indeed daring in his day, was rarely convincing. In truth, America’s great maker of lists was usually sappy:
This is the female form.
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,