part0011

My first article was published in 1959 and by 1972 I had sold over 2000 articles, stories and poems but had not yet managed to persuade anybody to publish me in book form. Then I got baptized and was reborn and learned what publishing is all about.

My first book published—which was not my first book written—was called PLAYBOY'S Book of Forbidden Words and was a discursive dictionary of obscenity and invective. It was written while Dell was meditating over my actual first book, llluminatus! (composed in collaboration with Robert Shea). Dell's meditations were prolonged and profound, to say the least of it—only after five years did they decide to publish the monstro-novel, and then they insisted that it should be cut by 500 pages and divided into three volumes. After five years of struggle, Shea and I capitulated.

Meanwhile, to try to get a book into print while Dell was still in the middle of its five-year meditations on Iluminatus!, I agreed to write PLAYBOY's Book of Forbidden Words, which turned into another disaster and again proved my naivete about the publishing industry. The book was not my idea, but that of an editor at Playboy Press, who asked me if I could write a history of foul language. I said, sure, I could, since I knew a lot about linguistic history and also knew how to do research; we signed a contract, and I went ahead— quickly producing a book of high erudition and (I think) some wit. It turned out that this was not what was wanted. The erudition and the linguistic history were excised, along with much of the wit, and in his hurry to turn my work into a more commercial production, the editor in many sections replaced correct grammar and syntax with the kind of pidgin English generally encountered only in TV advertisements.

I was horrified, but I was also flat broke at the time, and Dell still had not decided whether or not to publish llluminatus! Motivated entirely by cowardice and panic, I allowed Forbidden Words to go out, under my name, even though it was mostly at that point the editor's text, or the text he thought a moron audience could understand. The book failed miserably, and went out of print quickly. I have never mourned it, and I dread the day when scholars rediscover it and begin blaming me for all that is wrong with it.

Literally, a motherfucker is one who copulates with his mother, of course; but the word is seldom intended literally. Being the most insulting obscenity in American English, motherfucker has given birth to various timid, euphemistic or quasi-humorous variations, such as motherjumper, mother-ferrier, mo'fo', mammyjammer, futhermucker , the truncated adjective mothering (as in "Where the hell is that mothering wrench?") and the deaconic mother that has lately invaded middle-class speech—as when, in the Billy Wilder film. The Apartment. Jack Lemmon says to the bartender, referring to a martini, "Give me another of those little mothers."

Motherfucker is usually thought to be of black origin, but some linguists claim it appeared first among poor whites. It is used quite prominently in many classic pieces of black folklore—for instance, the ballad of Stackerlee or Stagolee, which has numerous variations and is known in almost every black community. This epic contains the unforgettable boast;

This is in the tradition of the boasts of the Homeric heroes, the Irish orations of Finn Mac Cool, and the brags of Davy Crockett (who once claimed to be "half horse and half alligator.") Stackerlee's second line above should be pronounced "baaaaaaad" with some glee in the voice; to be a baaaaaaad motherfucker , in ghetto speech, is not to be despised. The term is almost complimentary, and certainly respectful: it signifies the virtue which Mexicans call cojones (testicles and/or courage) or machismo (super-masculinity). A baaaaaaad motherfucker might be unethical by ordinary standards, but you would rather have him on your side than against you: he is as hard as a Fundamentalist's skull and would rather die than crawl. Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Seale. In his introduction to Seize the Time, Seale explains, "One of my son's names derives from the lumpen proletariat politically unaware brothers in the streets. Stagolee fought his brothers and sisters, and he shouldn't have. The Stagolee of today should take on the messages of Malcolm X, as Huey Newton did, to oppose the racist, capitalist oppression our people and other people are subjected to."

Another black epic gives further dimension to the motherfucker mystique. Shine, the cook on the Titanic, leaps overboard after the collision with the iceberg and starts swimming. The captain's daughter comes up on deck and pleads with him to save her. His answer is unsympathetic—

—and he swims on. A shark attempts to devour him, but Shine again refuses to be deflected from his purpose, saying:

Shine is standing on a corner in Harlem two hours before the news of the sinking of the Titanic reaches New York.

Shine may not be a baaaaaaad motherfucker in the full meaning of that title, but he is in the vicinity. He has the will power to postpone sexual gratification, can outswim a shark, and beats the wireless telegraph across the Atlantic. However, there is another kind of motherfucker who is distinctly less admirable (in the Latin meaning of that word), and he is usually known as a signifying motherfucker. Such a person has all the surface attributes of a baaaaaaad motherfucker, but caves in under attack: he is mostly bluff. (In black speech, signifying means using words without the will or intent to back them; most U.S. government promises are regarded as signifying in the ghetto.) The classic example is the Signifying Monkey in a legend so old that some folklorists think it goes all the way back to Africa, as the cast of characters suggests. It is worth recounting at length, I think.

The monkey decided to down the lion, but being only a signifier he does not attempt a frontal assault; instead, he uses the old let's-you-and-him-fight gambit, telling Lion that Brother Elephant has been "calling him out of his name," to wit:

This puts Brother Lion in a proper rage and he charges off to face the elephant down:

He ran through water, he ran through mud,
He came to a bar called the Bucket of Blood.
There sat Elephant, two whores upon his knee,
He was drinking boiler-makers and smoking tea.
Lion walk up and spit right in his eye,
Say, "Rise, motherfucker, you're gonna die!"

Elephant majestically delivers one powerful kick and Lion crawls away "more dead than alive." As he staggers weakly toward his den, he passes the signifying monkey who laughs and brutally tells him:

Alas, the monkey laughs too loud and loses his balance. Lion is on him with all four feet as soon as he hits the ground. This is where the monkey's real signifying comes into play. With "tears in his eyes" and great sincerity, he offers an apology and a ringing declaration that he will reform and mend his ways. The gullible lion spares him—whereat the signifying little bastard scrambles up the tree again and, laughing, declaims:

The monkey laughs so loud at this point that he again falls out of the tree. The legend ends as grimly as some of Aesop's fables:

The black meaning of motherfucker, then, is far from simple, and a baaaaaaad motherfucker is admirable or at least awe-inspiring whereas a signifying motherfucker is merely contemptible.

When motherfucker journeyed downtown and entered white speech, it lost this ambiguity and became merely the roughest insult around. At one time it was a sport in the armed forces to use it on new recruits from middle-class backgrounds and then duck: they almost always started throwing punches. As the word became better established, it gradually became less shocking and now is often used as casually and cordially as son of a bitch . In fact, like "son of a bitch," motherfucker can be recognized as cordial if it is proceeded by "old"—even over the phone where you can't see the friendly smile: "Is it you, Joe, you old motherfucker?" It can still get a rise out of those who have led sheltered lives, apparently including some policemen. In New Jersey a few years ago, a Black Panther organizer was arrested for saying to a white traffic cop, "Just a minute, motherfucker." The attorney for the defense argued, as I have here, that motherfucker is not always an insult or provocation in black speech, and may even be a compliment, but the judge decided it was unlikely to be friendly when coming from a Panther to a policeman. The accused was fined.

Inherent in the term motherfucker is the charge of mother-son incest, a taboo that is close to being universal, anthropologists say, and which, unlike other sexual restrictions, is almost universally obeyed, too. Kinsey and his associates found that father-daughter incest was much more common than anybody had thought before they did their surveys, but they never found a single real case of mother-son incest. The word motherfucker may have forced its way into our consciousness, but the deed itself is still unthinkable.