Chapter 1 Bastards and Buggers

Chapter 1 | 3 Chapter 1 BASTARDS AND buGGERS HISTORICAL SNAPSHOTS OF AuSTRALIAN ENGLISH SWEARING PATTERNS Simon Musgrave and Kate Burridge Monash University The vernacular has always had a special place in Australian English history and remains an important feature today. But just how uniquely Antipodean are the swearing patterns that we can observe in Australian English? At first blush, there is much that is common to the Northern Hemisphere and Antipodean expressions used. We need more studies and more detailed accounts of individual expressions, and certainly more comparisons with the slang, swearing and terms of insult used in other varieties of English, especially British and American English. This paper is an attempt to describe two key expressions in the Australian English vernacular: bastard and bugger. It takes an historical perspective, examining corpus data from the Australian National Corpus to explore the developing usage, meanings and cultural significance of these expressions. 1. Introduction – Swearing in Australian English1 Which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?2 The Australian love affair with the vernacular goes back to the earliest English speaking settlements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During those crucial years of dialect formation, among the main ingredients in the linguistic melting pot were the slang and dialect vocabularies of London and the industrial Midlands, Ireland and Scotland – the cant (or 1 We are grateful to Pam Peters and Réka Benczes for their helpful comments; these have assisted us greatly. 2 Allegedly uttered by Australian cricket captain Bill Woodfull during the Bodyline series of 1932–3 in response to the English captain Douglas Jardine’s complaint that one of the Australian players had called him a bastard. 4 | Wrestling with Words and Meanings ‘flash’) of convicts, the slang of sailors, whalers and gold-diggers mingled with features of the emerging ‘standard’ language (cf. Ramson 1966: 49– 50) to produce the new ‘colonial parlance’. Fuelled by anti-authoritarian sentiment, the colloquial part of the language was expanded to become the feature that best distinguished the established citizen from the ‘stranger’ (or ‘old chum’ versus ‘new chum’), and numerous eyewitness accounts point to the flourishing of ‘bad’ language during those early rough and macho years. Young Australia makes a specialty of swearing. High and low, rich and poor, indulge themselves in bad language luxuriantly; but it is amongst the rising generation that it reaches its acme. The lower-class colonial swears as naturally as he talks. He doesn’t mean anything by it in particular; nor is it really an evil outward and visible sign of the spiritual grace within him. On the prevalence of larrikinism I wrote at length in a former epistle. (Twopenny 1883: 224–5) The base language of English thieves is becoming the established language of the colony. Terms of slang and flash are used, as a matter of course, everywhere, from the gaols to the Viceroy’s palace, not excepting the Bar and the Bench. No doubt they will be reckoned quite parliamentary, as soon as we obtain a parliament. […] Hence, bearing in mind that our lowest class brought with it a peculiar language, and is constantly supplied with fresh corruption, you will understand why pure English is not, and is not likely to become, the language of the colony. (Wakefield 1829: 106–7) It is altogether frightful to what extent cursing and blaspheming are car ried on and have increased among the people in the bush. People are apt to fancy that this is one of the chief and most striking vices of sailors, who are but too prone to give vent to their feelings in this man- ner. But sailors are surpassed by the ‘old hands’ in the bush: indeed, no com parison can be made between the two. Almost every word they speak, even the most indifferent, is accompanied by an oath, which is but a friendly and well meaning locution among them. (Gerstäcker 1857: 9–10)3 3 Many thanks to Brian Taylor (1994–5) for pointing out the joys of Frederick Gerstäcker. Chapter 1 | 5 Notwithstanding their possibly over-keen noses for linguistic impurity, com- mentators such as these appeared in agreement that an informal culture and colloquial style of discourse were emerging as the ‘mark of the An tipodean’.4 The current climate of growing informality has seen an increasing colloqui alization of English usage worldwide; yet, as Peters and Burridge (2012) conclude, Australian (and New Zealand) English goes go well beyond the kinds of vernacular and informal grammar and lexis noted for varieties else where. Moreover, in the modern world of global interconnection, the positioning of English as a worldwide lingua franca has seen non-standard and vernacular features become even more meaningful signals of cultural iden tity and the expression of the local. Many Australians see their col- lo qui alisms, nicknames, diminutives, swearing and insults as important indi ca tors of their Australianness, and linguistic expressions of cherished ideals such as friendliness, nonchalance, mateship, egalitarianism and anti- authori tarianism (Lalor and Rendle-Short 2007; Seal 1999; Stollznow 2004; Wierzbicka 1992). This paper takes an historical perspective, using corpus data to examine the developing usage, meanings and cultural significance of two key expressions in the Australian English vernacular: bastard and bugger. Since the usual linguistic corpora (especially written) are not always fruitful when it comes to yielding illustrations of ‘bad’ language, examples in this paper draw largely on language from a range of sources (including creative writing, spontaneous public speech and private conversation) from various collect ions in the Australian National Corpus (AusNC). For the historical data, we use the Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE, specifically texts written in Australia between 1788 and 1900) and also AustLit, a corpus which provides access to select samples of out of copyright poetry, fiction and criticism ranging from 1795 to the 1930s. For the modern data, we use the Australian Corpus of English (ACE, written texts collected from the 1980s); the Australian Radio Talkback Corpus (ART, collected 2004– 6 from Australia-wide ABC and commercial radio stations); informal Australian speech from the International Corpus of English, (ICE-AUS Corpus, Australian spoken English collected 1991–5); the Monash Corpus of Australian English (MCE, conversations of Melbourne school children recorded in 1997); and the Griffith Corpus of Spoken English (GCSAusE, collected 1990 to 1998). 4 This is a phrase Gordon and Deverson (1985:19) use to describe the early Australian and New Zealand accent. 6 | Wrestling with Words and Meanings 1.1. Changes in swearing patterns Foul language changes across time and from place to place, and in order to understand the position of bastard and bugger in Australia’s swearing history, we need to consider what makes something a swearword in the first place. There are still no laboratory or neuroimaging studies that have conclusively identified the exact neuroanatomical sites where ‘dirty’ words are stored, or that have evaluated specifically the neurological processing of obscenities, but the evidence seems overwhelming: ‘bad’ language is rooted deeply in human neural anatomy. What actually goes to clothe the expression is then the socio-cultural setting, in particular the taboos of the time – those things that go bump in the night (see Allan and Burridge 2006: Ch. 10; Pinker 2007: Ch. 7). These taboos will furnish the language with its swearwords and, because taboo is dynamic, there will always be shifts of idiom employing terms of opprobrium. As Hughes (1991) nicely outlines, the history of foul language in English has seen the sweeping transition from the religious to the secular in its patterns of swearing. When blasphemous and religiously profane language was no longer considered offensive (at least by a majority of speakers), what stepped in to fill the gap were the more physically and sexually based modes of expression. As we will later discuss, the terms bastard and bugger were the first of these to be pressed into maledictory service – risqué body parts and bodily functions were not generally used as swearwords until into the twentieth century. This transition is evident in imprecatives such as Bugger you! This syntactically incongruous expression has its model in earlier phrases such as God damn X (where God is invoked as the agent of the malefaction). The abbreviated forms such as Damn X (euphemized in order to avoid explicit blasphemy) now provide the model for more sexually based modern imprecatives such as Shit on X, Fuck X, Bugger X, Screw X etc (see Dong 1992 [1971]). It is in these forms that religious profanity (blasphemy) remains a source for dysphemism (albeit indirect), despite the on-going secularization of English speaking communities. Changes in social attitudes mean that sex and bodily functions no longer provide the powerful swearwords they once did. In most varieties of English, bastard and bugger have weakened considerably in strength and wounding capacity, and bans placed on this kind of profanity have eased. Far more potent expressions are now the racial and ethnic slurs, so that the swearwords today include expressions such as faggot, dike, queer, dago, kike, kaffir, nigger, mick, wog, boong, abo and so on. New taboos have meant that sexist, racist, ageist, religionist, etc. language (or –ist language, as Keith Chapter

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