Nicholson Baker - The Size of Thoughts - Essays and Other Lumber

chicken-fucker

n. a depraved or disgusting fellow. — usu. constr. with

baldheaded

.—usu. considered vulgar.

1953

in Legman

Rationale

20: Suddenly two bald-headed men enter, and the parrot says, “You two chicken-fuckers come out in the henhouse with me.”

1976–79

Duncan & Moore

Green Side Out

276 [ref. to

ca

1960]: All right ya baldheaded chicken-fuckers, I want this area policed the fuck up.

1967–80

McAleer & Dickson

Unit Pride

287 [ref. to Korean War]: Heave in the first shovelful … and run like a baldheaded chicken-fucker.

Of course, nice, gentle people invent slang, too, once in a while. And nice, gentle people can take private satisfaction in slang that they would never more than mutter. In the trance of linguistic close scrutiny that this book induces, terms which would simply be tiresome or embarrassing if actually employed in speech — if used by a winking wall-to-wall-carpeting salesman or an obnoxious dinner guest, say — may without warning deviate your septum here. That we manage to see them as harmless and even possibly charming is entirely to Lighter’s credit; the trick seems to hinge, curiously enough, on the repeated use of a single abbreviated versicle: “usu. considered vulgar.”

A donkey dick , for example, meaning “a frankfurter, salami, or bologna,” is “usu. considered vulgar.” Few observers would disagree. A fartsack , defined as “a sleeping bag, bedroll, bunk, cot, or bed; SACK” is, again justifiably, “usu. considered vulgar.” The morning request to “Drop your cocks and grab your socks!” is “usu. considered vulgar.” To have a bug up (one’s) ass [and vars.] (meaning to “have an unreasonable, esp. obsessive or persistent, idea”) is “usu. considered vulgar.” A come-pad (“mattress”) is “usu. considered vulgar.” Cunt-breath and dicknose are “usu. considered vulgar.” This phrase is probably the one most frequently used in the dictionary, with “usu. considered offensive” a distant second; the introductory material explains that usu . actually means “almost always, though not inevitably,” since “ ‘mainstream standards’ are flexible and are primarily based on situation and speaker-to-speaker relationships.” But the exoticizing Urdic or Swahilian symmetry of “usu.” gives it comic authority, as well: it serves up each livid slangwad neatly displayed on a decorative philological doily.

What is not “usu. considered vulgar” is of some interest, too. The word grumper (buttocks) is not considered vulgar, perhaps because it is relatively rare. (The citation, from 1972, reads: “Some chicks lead with the boobs.… This chick leads with the grumper.”) A Knight of the golden grummet , listed under grommet and meaning, according to a 1935 definition quoted by Lighter, “a male sexual pervert whose complex is boys,” does not rate the “usu.” phrase. To deep-throat is not vulgar. A dingleberry (cross-referenced with the earlier dillberry and fartleberry ), painstakingly defined in a 1938 citation as “Tiny globular pieces of solidified excreta which cling to the hirsute region about the anal passage”—or, if you prefer a pithier 1966 definition, as a “piece of crap hanging on a hair”—is not flagged as vulgar, although eagle shit (“the gold ornamentation on the visor of a senior officer’s cap”) is, and dingleberry cluster , meaning a military decoration, does receive a “used derisively.” The English, who sometimes become confused about such things, used dingle-berries to mean “Female breasts: low and raffish,” according to Partridge, a sense that doesn’t, on Lighter’s evidence, seem to have reached these shores — although other unvulgar American meanings Lighter does record (and which illustrate slang’s resourceful opportunism, its indifference to anatomical inconsistency) are “a doltish or contemptible person,” “the testicles,” “the clitoris or vagina,” and “splattered molten particles around a metallic weld on a pipe or vessel.”

Not only is Lighter choosy (a chooser , incidentally, is a neglected vaudevillism meaning “plagiarist”) about what words are truly vulgar, he is also interestingly selective about what words he includes in the book at all. Butt plug only appears by virtue of its derisive sense, meaning a “stupid or contemptible person. — usu. considered vulgar,” where it is followed by a corroborative quotation from Beavis and Butthead . (“Nice try,… butt plug.”) The primary, artifactual usage of butt plug does not appear, apparently because it is (to quote the press release that accompanied review copies of the dictionary) “a descriptive term that cannot be said [i.e., expressed] with any other word.” In Lighter’s system, a word, however informal, that has no convenient synonyms probably isn’t slang— butt plug is jargon, perhaps, a “term of art” in some advanced circles. Slang is by definition gratuitous; slang words most commonly travel in loose packs of unnecessary cognates or rhymes. (Viz., breadhooks, cornstealers, daddles, flappers, flippers, grabbers , and grabhooks for “hands”; or, for “sanatorium,” booby hatch, brain college, bughouse, cackle factory, cracker factory, fool farm, foolish factory, funny factory, funny farm, giggle academy , and so on, all chronicled by Lighter; the bucolic “farm” variants are generally predated by the “factory” variants — idiomatic insanity in America seems to begin as an industrial symptom.) Even stand-alone units like cookie-duster (mustache), crotch rocket (motorcycle), dusty butt (short person), drum snuffer (safe-cracker), blow blood (have a nosebleed), flannel-buzzards (lice), or boom bucket (an aircraft’s ejection seat) are slang by virtue of their appreciable emotional distance from, and yet complete referential synonymy with, a unit of Standard English. Only when our culture evolves at least one other word for a butt plug will the term — if I understand Lighter— merit his definitional attention.

The truth is, though, that I probably don’t understand Lighter and I’m probably not doing justice to the complex algorithms that allow him to discriminate between slang and other kinds of verbal festivity. Why is butt plug out and French tickler in? If a lack of standard English synonyms is one of the tests for exclusion, why is an admittedly fine term like gig-line (meaning “a straight alignment of the buttons of a shirt and jacket, the belt buckle, and the fly of the trousers”) included? Is there really a standard English equivalent for such a disposition of one’s wardrobe? And why is bong , in the sense of a water-filtered pot-smoking mechanism, not to be found, while the related but more recent bong meaning a “device consisting of a funnel attached to a tube for drinking beer quickly” is? Lighter includes fluff (“the usu. passive partner in a lesbian relationship”) and sister words femme and fuckee , and even bender (“a male homosexual who habitually assumes the passive role in anal copulation”—also known as an ankle grabber ), but not the related S/M sense of bottom. Fender-bender , in the automotive sense, is in, as is cluster-fuck, fuckhead , and even fenderhead , but gender-bender and genderfuck are out — hardly surprising or scandalous omissions, although both are interesting meldings, part of the steady slanging down of the High Church word gender , which only a few years ago was esteemed by language reformers for its lack of connotative raciness, and which is now quietly de-euphemizing, thanks to the work of gender-fuck pioneers like Kate ( née Albert) Bornstein, lesbian trans-sexual author of a play called Hidden: A Gender . In the area of lit-crit and genre studies, fuck-book is here (along with dick-book and cunt book ), but friction-fiction is possibly too recent or too technical.