Instead of a Tweet, #5
Rashida Tlaib called Donald Trump a motherfucker late last week. She said, “Impeach the motherfucker!” And she immediately got dealt some healthy backlash from the motherfuckers who think calling someone a motherfucker hurts the motherfucker in question. And that would have been the motherfucking end of it, a small news item not even worthy of a space in this little blog, had it not been for the motherfucking stupidest bullshit to ever grace this motherfucker’s eyeballs — at least in the last 47 minutes.
Now I want to be clear from the get go: the writer of this piece, a motherfucker named Michael Wear, did not use the word “slur” in the piece itself. That seems to be an addition by whichever motherfucker is in control of the Washington Post’s motherfucking social media feed. But the reaction to calling “motherfucker” a slur was motherfucking swift. And Wear did use “profanity” quite a bit, alongside familiar arguments that stooping to this motherfucking level was harming the discourse in some measurable fashion that the last two years of open White Nationalist organizing somehow haven’t. I guess if you’re a motherfucker who believes that words have more power than motherfucking actions, you’d be inclined to agree with Wear.
I motherfucking don’t. I was never going to get hired at the motherfucking Washington Post so this isn’t even a bridge-burning. Let’s get started on the etymology, motherfuckers.
First, something we should all motherfucking acknowledge. Tlaib’s use of “motherfucker” regarding Trump is ABSOLUTELY NOT the first time that motherfucker has ever been called a motherfucker. Donald Trump used to be a motherfucking slumlord in motherfucking New York City. The number of times he’s been called a motherfucker on any given day — any given hour! — probably dwarf the number of times I’ve used motherfucker or variations thereof thus far. This isn’t going to hurt Donald “Motherfucker Supreme” Trump anymore than some Olbermann wannabe calling him a “dirty knave and a cur!” would. (Full disclosure, I’m pretty motherfucking sure I stole that little bit from Twitter so that’s my b.)
So! Where does motherfucker come from, and why is it absomotherfuckinglutely not a slur? Well, luckily, I don’t have to do a lot of forensic linguistics, because a motherfucker at Slate already did it for us (link here). Earliest documents suggest that motherfucker was a pretty bad thing to be called, probably because it has, on its motherfucking face, some incestuous implications. However, as the good motherfucker Forrest Wickman wrote at that Slate article:
The earliest citation of the noun motherfucker (as opposed to motherfucking)tells of a man who faced a different kind of punishment for wielding the word: After a black soldier sent a defiant letter to his draft board in which he called them “low-down Mother Fuckers,” he was court-martialed and did ten years of hard labor.
The war said black soldier was telling motherfuckers to try him on was World War I, so we’re talking the early nineteen-teens. Interestingly, motherfucker quickly took on more neutral — and even positive — connotations by the time World War II rolled around and away, especially among black Americans. Wickman notes that around the 1950s and 1960s, motherfuck(ing/er/ed/-) became an intensifier in a sentence, as opposed to strictly a motherfucking pejorative. But probably the biggest motherfucking bombshell in Wickman’s entire article is this line. I’m going to put it in as a Giant Quote:
There’s no (motherfucking) evidence that the word (“motherfucker”) was ever meant to be taken (motherfucking) literally, as a reference to incest. (Motherfuck. All motherfucks by me, not Wickman.)
When I say Donald Trump is a dirty, lying, scheming, ass-backwards, shitflinging motherfucker, I am not implying that, among his myriad crimes and acts of moral degradation, he ever fucked Mary Anne MacLeod. He’s just a dirty, lying, scheming, ass-backwards, shitflinging motherfucker. Again, a name he’s probably used to by now.
Which brings me to my second point:
Motherfucker’s not a slur, dicklips!
(Had to use something else for a second; variety is the spice of life, after all.)
Slur occupies a weird place in English morphology. It can describe a few different things, like speech patterns, the glossing over of information, or, what’s important to us motherfuckers, damaging someone’s reputation. We also hear “slur” used frequently in the context of bigoted language. When we talk about slurs in the modern age, we’re talking about language specifically directed at black people, Latinx people, queer people, Jewish people, and so on. They’re used for the express purpose of intimidating and oppressing racial, religious and sexual minorities. Because of this, “slur” kind of begins to step apart from its brethren “libel” and “slander” and “defamat(ion/ory remarks)”. They are just as much explicit descriptors as words and phrases intended to harm their targets’ reputation.
How in the motherfucking world does “motherfucker” rise to that occasion? Given how neutral it is, given its primacy in popular culture — I dare any motherfucker to forget Samuel L. Jackson, the Keeper of the Word — and given how absolutely harmless it is to anyone’s reputation, by no definition can motherfucker or any of its derivations be considered a slur.
Fuck, I wish I would have had a prompt like this in college, I might have actually passed an English Comp class.