Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

When the obscenity trial of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover made headlines in the UK in 1960, the press dubbed it the ‘Lady C’ scandal. As Guy Cuthbertson says in his new book about the novel, also titled Lady C, the nickname “suggests the controversy regarding Lawrence’s use of ‘the c-word’”, and Cuthbertson’s first chapter is therefore titled The C-Word.

Cuthbertson’s book, subtitled The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, discusses the novel’s publication history, and gives an exhaustive account of its cultural impact. His source materials include newspaper coverage of the Lady C controversy from the 1950s onwards. He also describes the obscenity trial, or rather the trials, as Lady Chatterley was tried for obscenity in Japan and the US before the more famous Old Bailey trial.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Lady C’s acquittal, I wrote about the British court case, commenting that “the most notorious moment of the trial came at the beginning,” when prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones asked the jury: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” I also listed the “many outdated assumptions” inherent in that question, and pointed out the hypocrisy of Griffith-Jones telling the jury to avoid adopting a Victorian attitude when “his moral objections to the novel were themselves somewhat Victorian”.

Similarly, Cuthbertson writes: “The most remarkable and memorable moment of the trial came near the start,” and itemises the “various implied statements” in the Griffith-Jones question to the jury. He also highlights the prosecutor’s hypocrisy: “He had asked the jury that they should not act ‘in any priggish, high-minded, super-correct mid-Victorian manner’, but that was a manner that he himself seemed to have adopted.”

The Old Bailey trial was covered in more detail by C.H. Rolph in The Trial of Lady Chatterley, published only three months after the verdict was announced. Cuthbertson compares Rolph’s book to a “witty, well-crafted... courtroom crime novel.”

The Joyce of Everyday Life

At university, I wrote a dissertation on the cultural history of the c-word, which I later updated and published online. My work has been quoted by numerous other writers over the years, most recently by Vicki Mahaffey in The Joyce of Everyday Life, her prize-winning study of James Joyce.

In her book, Mahaffey cites me as a source: “Matthew Hunt argues that...” But, very strangely, she also writes: “Since Hunt’s death, the essay originally accessed has been taken down.”

This is really bizarre. Needless to say, I am still alive. I took my c-word research offline a few years ago, because it was being copied without authorisation, but I didn’t die. (I have now put my work on the c-word back online, and emailed Mahaffey to say that I’m not dead.)

Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture

Katie Beswick’s Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture, published last year, “offers a personal and cultural history of the word ‘slag’,” a misogynistic slang term that implies both promiscuity and worthlessness. Beswick discusses the representation of female characters in popular culture (such as the self-defined “total slag” Kat Slater in EastEnders) and female artists (such as Tracey Emin, whose tent installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With exposed her sexual history). The book’s cover illustration is from Kelly Green’s performance art production Slag.

Beswick briefly considers the reappropriation of ‘slag’, arguing that this is not yet possible: “We are not at the stage of reclaiming slag... or even being able to weaponise it effectively as resistance — and yet its complexities must be acknowledged in any reckoning with the term.” She conducted a survey of 169 people’s attitudes towards the word, and only two respondents “expressed a sense of reclamation”. A more common response was that “unlike other offensive sexist words, such as ‘slut’ and ‘cunt’, ‘slag’ was unable to be reclaimed, and therefore felt worse as an insult.”

Slags on Stage is one of a handful of recent feminist books whose titles refer to misogynistic insults. Other examples include Bitch by Karen Stollznow, Harpy by Caroline Magennis, Hags by Victoria Smith, In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet, Bimbo by Ashley James, and several books that tackle the word ‘slut’ (I Am Not a Slut, This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, Wordslut, and Sluts).

Cunt Is the Word

Anne Kernan’s Cunt Is the Word project began in 2021, when she designed a new image featuring the word ‘cunt’ every day, “using graphic design, photography, photo manipulation and craft.” In 2024, Kernan published 102 of those images as a photobook.

The book is beautifully packaged: wrapped in tissue paper and accompanied by five postcards. There are 100 copies, each of which is hand-numbered and signed by the artist.

Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words

Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words is a fascinating and authoritative study of the words used by and about women. The book’s closest equivalent is Womanwords, by Jane Mills, which was published more than thirty years previously.

The first and most interesting chapter covers female anatomical terms including, of course, the c-word. Nuttall writes: “It’s a slur beyond rehabilitation for some of us. For others, it can be reclaimed”. (She also notes that another insult, ‘witch’, “has undergone reclamation, becoming a self-appointed symbol for those of us who find ourselves labelled difficult or nasty women.”)

Discussing the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Nuttall argues that the character’s use of the Latin word ‘quoniam’ “puns on the French word conin meaning ‘rabbit’ which echoes the French con meaning ‘vagina’”. This, according to Nuttall, makes the bawdy Wife sound inappropriately “like some punning intellectual”, though an alternative explanation (put forward by John McWhorter) is that the Wife’s euphemisms have been over-analysed.

Serving...

Miriana Conte’s song Kant was selected as Malta’s entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, though the singer was forced to change the title and lyrics, as ‘kant’ (the Maltese word for ‘singing’) was deemed too phonetically close to ‘cunt’. The song was a pun on the c-word, with its chorus of “Serving kant” sounding almost exactly like ‘serving cunt’. For the Eurovision TV broadcast, its title was changed to Serving, and the word ‘kant’ was dropped from the lyrics.

The c-word is becoming increasingly common in contemporary pop lyrics, thanks to the influence of ballroom drag culture. RuPaul’s Drag Race popularised ballroom terms such as ‘serving’, and used ‘cunt’ as an acronym for ‘charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent’, to describe drag queen qualities. Drag artist Kevin Aviance’s single Cunty was sampled by Beyoncé on her song Pure/Honey in 2022, and this year Marina released her single Cuntissimo, a feminist anthem from her album Princess of Power.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

Amanda Montell’s aim in Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language is to encourage and empower women “to reclaim a language that for so long has been used against us.” Wordslut, published in 2019, is not the first book to show how gender-neutral terms have been transformed into sexist insults: Jane Mills did so in Womanwords thirty years previously. And the notion of reappropriating those pejoratives is older still: Germaine Greer attempted to reclaim the c-word, for example, in the early 1970s. Mills and Greer are not cited in Wordslut (and the book has no bibliography), though Montell did interview Deborah Cameron, author of Feminism and Linguistic Theory.

Montell begins her book by calling for “a language revolution”, though her ultimate conclusion is more measured. She argues that reappropriation of terms such as ‘slut’ is a gradual process: “A word doesn’t have to lose its negative meanings completely to be considered reclaimed. The path to reclamation is almost never that smooth... As long as the positive varieties of a word steadily become more common, more mainstream, by the time the next generation starts learning the language, they will pick up those meanings first.”

This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement

In 2011, the first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, launching a feminist campaign to assert female sexual autonomy and reclaim the epithet ‘slut’. In a Guardian op-ed published a few weeks later (9th May 2011), Gail Dines and Wendy J. Murphy argued that the SlutWalk movement was fighting a lost cause: “The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption. The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.” Leora Tanenbaum has also argued against reclaiming the word.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph (12th May 2011), Germaine Greer supported the SlutWalkers, though she cautioned that it is “difficult, probably impossible, to reclaim a word that has always been an insult.” (And she should know, having attempted a similar reappropriation of the c-word in the 1970s.) Greer pointed out that, although ‘slut’ has always been a pejorative, it also refers to slovenly women rather than promiscuous ones: “Yes, I am a slut. My house could be cleaner. My sheets could be whiter. I could be without sexual fantasies too — pure as the untrodden snow — but I’m not. I’m a slut and proud.” In Womanwords, Jane Mills shows that, like many misogynist terms, it was previously a unisex pejorative.

Katharine Whitehorn was the first feminist to confront slut-shaming and reappropriate ‘slut’ as a positive term. Writing sixty years ago in The Observer (29th December 1963), she self-identified as a slut in the word’s original sense: “Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?... Honest answers should tell you, once and for all, whether you are one of us: the miserable, optimistic, misunderstood race of sluts.”

This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement, edited by Alyssa Teekah, Erika Jane Scholz, May Friedman, and Andrea O’Reilly, was published in 2015. The book’s standout chapter is Dirty Talk, a scholarly cultural history of ‘slut’ by Nancy Effinger Wilson, who seeks to “dismantle the misogynist ideology on which the word’s pejorative meaning is predicated.” (Taylor Swift reappropriated the word with her song Slut!, included on the rerecorded edition of her album 1989 released last year.)

Cunt

Feminist artist Janice Turner has published two books of her ‘cunt’ paintings: The Cunt Book in 2019, and the significantly expanded The Essential Cunt last year (which also includes an interview with the author). Turner cites Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues as the original inspiration for her quest to reclaim the c-word, and in The Essential Cunt she repeats the word in the same way that Ensler does: “Cunt, practice it cunt cunt cunt cunt love the word and love your CUNT”.

There are also other possible influences. Turner’s phrase “love your CUNT” evokes Germaine Greer’s pioneering essay Lady Love Your Cunt, and The Essential Cunt seems to paraphrase a monologue about the f-word from Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour. Madonna told her audience: “‘Fuck’ is not a bad word... If your mom and dad did not fuck, you would not be here”; Turner writes: “CUNT is not a dirty word!... If not for a CUNT, you would not be here!” Other artists who have painted the c-word include Marlene McCarty, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Alison Carmichael.

Nine Nasty Words —English in the Gutter:Then, Now, and Forever

How many swear words are still considered taboo? Any list of such terms should inevitably start with the seven words — including all the four-letter ones — that comedian George Carlin described on his album Occupation: Foole. That album was broadcast on 30th November 1973 by MBIA, a New York radio station, which ultimately led to a landmark Supreme Court verdict giving the Federal Communications Commission the authority to censor radio and network television.

In his book Nine Nasty Words — English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever, John McWhorter slightly expands the classic Carlin list: “I will zero in on not seven but nine of the bedrock swears of modern English, including what we more conventionally term slurs but which qualify as our newest profanity. Or, really, eleven if you count damn and hell.” He gives etymologies for each term, and his citations include literary references and early twentieth century popular culture.

McWhorter has interesting points to make about the c-word, refuting the common interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “queynte” as a euphemism: “Chaucer did not bedeck his Canterbury Tales with casual references to cunts, despite how this gets around among English majors. It is easy to suppose, because Middle English spelling looks so odd to us and was not yet regularized, that his queynte was an eccentric spelling of cunt. However, it was actually what it looked like: the word quaint”.

Rebecca Roache’s For F*ck’s Sake, Philip Gooden’s Bad Words and What They Say about Us, Peter Silverton’s Filthy English, Ruth Wajnryb’s Language Most Foul, and David Sosa’s Bad Words cover similar ground to McWhorter. Geoffrey Hughes wrote An Encyclopedia of Swearing, expanded from his earlier Swearing. Forbidden Words, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is the most authoritative book on linguistic taboos, and Allen also recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language.

For F*ck’s Sake:Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun

Rebecca Roache covers a lot of ground in For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun, her study of the power that swear words possess. The most interesting chapters are those that deal with an often overlooked aspect of swearing: the use of distancing devices such as quotation marks and asterisks to mitigate offence.

The book also discusses broader issues such as the regulation and reappropriation of swear words, including the destigmatisation of the c-word. Roache argues that reclaiming sexist language would not necessarily reduce misogynistic social attitudes: “If all we do is start using cunt in polite company, we’re going to achieve little more than upsetting people. Cunt alone can’t cure misogyny.”

Philip Gooden’s Bad Words and What They Say about Us, Peter Silverton’s Filthy English, Ruth Wajnryb’s Language Most Foul, and David Sosa’s Bad Words cover similar ground to Roache. Geoffrey Hughes wrote An Encyclopedia of Swearing, expanded from his earlier book Swearing. Forbidden Words, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is the most authoritative guide to linguistic taboos, and Allen also recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language.

Bad Words and What They Say about Us

In Bad Words and What They Say about Us (published in 2019), Philip Gooden examines how tabooed language has shifted from religion to sex and bodily functions, and more recently to political correctness and identity politics. The book is bang up-to-date, exploring the linguistic legacies of Brexit and Donald Trump: Michael Gove’s cavalier dismissal of expert opinion during the Brexit referendum campaign (“the people of this country have had enough of experts”) prompts a wide-ranging discussion of ‘culture war’ issues, and Gooden draws a parallel — first noted in a blog post by Sonja Drimmer and Damian Fleming — between the Miller in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (“he caughte hire by the queynte”) and Trump’s Access Hollywood tape (“Grab ’em by the pussy”).

Bad Words includes quite thorough histories of the major four-letter words, each of which has its own chapter, though these sections are most notable for their debunking of the myths surrounding the words’ origins. These misconceptions are surprisingly persistent — upon learning that I wrote a thesis on the c-word, some people still tell me that the f-word is an acronym for ‘Fornicate Under Command of the King’ — and Gooden provides a useful service in his mission “to unpick this folk etymology.”

The book’s scope also extends to racist and homophobic pejoratives, though there is little discussion of sexist terms, and Gooden tends to favour more recent citations over historical examples. For instance, he quotes a British backbench MP using the n-word in 2017, though he doesn’t mention that John Major used it when he was Prime Minister in 1993. Similarly, Gooden cites comedian Chris Rock’s positive uses of the n-word, though Richard Pryor’s earlier and more groundbreaking reappropriation of the word isn’t covered.

Peter Silverton’s Filthy English and Ruth Wajnryb’s Language Most Foul both cover similar ground to Bad Words, as does another book with the same title, edited by David Sosa. Geoffrey Hughes wrote An Encyclopedia of Swearing (expanded from his earlier book Swearing), and Hugh Rawson’s Dictionary of Invective is equally comprehensive. Forbidden Words, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is the most authoritative guide to linguistic taboos, and Allen also recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language.

“A relentless barrage of highly personal attacks...”

The long-running BBC1 satirical panel show Have I Got News for You marked the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership with a special episode titled Have I Got News for Boris on 2nd September. The programme recounted Johnson’s numerous scandals (such as unlawfully proroguing parliament and breaking coronavirus pandemic restrictions), though two words in the script — “cosmic cunt” — led to tabloid outrage two days later. The Mail on Sunday’s front-page headline on 4th September was “BBC COMIC’S C-WORD JIBE AGAINST PM”.

The Mail accused presenter Jack Dee of insulting Johnson, though in fact the alliterative pejorative was a quote from The Times, which attributed it to an unnamed cabinet minister in an article published on 9th July. The Mail’s hyperbolic description of the show as “a relentless barrage of highly personal attacks” and “a torrent of ‘spiteful and crass insults’” is an indication of its anti-BBC bias. (The Kunts released a CD single in 2020 titled Boris Johnson Is a Fucking Cunt.)

There have been two previous front-page tabloid headlines about the c-word. On 4th February 2017, The Sun (“BECKS C-WORD FURY AT ‘SIR’ SNUB”) revealed a leaked email in which ex-footballer David Beckham had called the Honours Committee “unappreciative cunts”. (Beckham had obtained an injunction preventing The Sunday Times from publishing the email, though other papers were not bound by it.) On 15th May 2015, the Daily Star (“BEEB CALLS FARAGE C-WORD ON TELLY”) gleefully highlighted a slip of the tongue by journalist Norman Smith, who had referred to politician Nigel Farage as a “cunt” rather than a ‘cult’ during a live BBC News TV report.

Germaine Greer:Essays on a Feminist Figure

The chapters in Germaine Greer: Essays on a Feminist Figure first appeared in the journal Australian Feminist Studies in 2016, and were published as a book in 2020. Germaine Greer sold her archive to the University of Melbourne in 2013, and the archive’s curator notes in her essay how Greer not only preserved almost 500 boxes of documents, but also personally catalogued them.

In the book’s most interesting article, Resurrecting Germaine’s Theory of Cuntpower, Megan Le Masurier reassesses two essays Greer wrote for the underground press in the early 1970s: Lady Love Your Cunt (in Suck), and The Politics of Female Sexuality (in Greer’s guest-edited ‘female energy’ issue of Oz, ‘female energy’ being a euphemism for cuntpower). Le Masurier argues that “cuntpower had an afterlife, in attitude if not in name.”

C+nto and Othered Poems

Joelle Taylor’s poetry collection, C+nto and Othered Poems, was published last week. Cunto is an inflection of the Italian verb cuntare, meaning ‘narrate’. As the title of Taylor’s seven-part poem, it may also be a pun on ‘canto’ (and, of course, ‘cunt’). For publication, the title is printed as C+unto, and in her poetry Taylor sidesteps the c-word in favour of its etymological origin, the Latin cunnus.

Cunts

Cunts, the Los Angeles punk band who began playing live in 2018, released their self-titled debut album, Cunts, in 2019. The album is available on vinyl and CD. Cunts are by no means the first band to use the c-word in their name: there is also a band called The Cunts, and others include Anal Cunt, Selfish Cunt, Rotten Cunt, Cuntsaw, Märy’s Cünt, Cunt Grinder, Filthy Maggoty Cunt, and Prosthetic Cunt.

How to Swear:An Illustrated Guide

How to Swear: An Illustrated Guide, by Stephen Wildish, features etymologies and derivations of seven swear words in infographic form. (The chosen words differ from George Carlin’s famous septet, with more emphasis on British slang.) Chapter seven is devoted to the c-word, which Wildish calls “the most offensive word in the English language and one of the last words that still has the power to shock.”

A Curious History of Sex

A Curious History of Sex, published last month, is a fascinating guide to sexual attitudes and rituals. As author Kate Lister explains in her introduction, the book is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of sex, offering instead “a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless.” Lister provides potted histories of a wide range of often-overlooked sex-related topics, including a chapter on the c-word that’s the most detailed study of the word in print. A Curious History of Sex is impressively scholarly (with eighty pages of notes and references), and has plenty of extraordinary historical illustrations.

Bad Words

Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs (edited by David Sosa), was published in 2018 as part of a series titled Engaging Philosophy. The final chapter, Nice Words for Nasty Things by Laurence R. Horn, takes its title from an infamous definition by lexicographer Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: Grose defined the c-word as “a nasty name for a nasty thing”. In his essay, Horn discusses the euphemisms devised to avoid not only tabooed words themselves but also their otherwise-unrelated homophones: “taboo avoidance occurs more broadly, even in the absence of phonological identity between the taboo and innocent items, the latter of which may suffer a kind of contagion or guilt by association”.

Horn cites an interesting French example, que l’on (‘that one’), which is regarded as more polite than the contraction qu’on due to the latter’s homonymy with con (‘cunt’). He also identifies what is surely the earliest instance of the practice, a comment by Cicero in his treatise on rhetoric, Orator. Cicero writes that the Latin cum nobis (‘with us’) should be rendered as nobiscum, to avoid an obscene juxtaposition (“obscænius concurrerent litterae”). The unspoken reference is to cunno bis (‘into the cunt twice’), which supports the (increasingly contested) etymological connection between cunnus (‘vulva’) and ‘cunt’.

War and Piss

The adult comic Viz published its first Profanisaurus as a cover-mounted booklet in 1997, and the title was later expanded to Roger's Profanisaurus. Various updated editions followed, including Profanisaurus Rex, The Magna Farta, and Das Krapital. The latest edition, War and Piss, features more than 20,000 swear words and sexual slang terms, including more than 60 variants of the c-word.

Entries are submitted by Viz readers, and the book was edited by Simon Thorp and Graham Dury. Green's Dictionary of Slang is the definitive slang dictionary, whereas the Profanisaurus has more in common with the online Urban Dictionary, though its neologisms and definitions are funny and inventive.