Probably NSFW -- A Fascinating History of the Word "C***" [View all]

How a word meant to signify female pleasure was turned against women and into something evil, fearful, unspoken.

August 14, 2012 |

Late in 2011, a song from a virtually unknown 20-year-old rapper from Harlem knocked the Internet on its ass. Azealia Banks’s “212” was a wildly original debut single that found the rapper dribbling a steady stream of elastic wordplay and oh-no-she-didn’t raunch over a skronky beat from producer Lazy Jay. And then there was the song’s hook, a repeated provocation to a male rival for the affections of another woman: “I guess that c*** gettin’ eaten.”

“212” was voted Pitchfork’s no. 9 track of 2011, propelling Banks to the top spot on NME’s 2011 “Cool List” and earning her a coveted endorsement from Kanye West—all before she even landed a record deal. But some listeners just couldn’t get past that C-word. In a December 2011 cover story for self-titled magazine, the interviewer asked Banks a question that no one would have asked, say, Lil Wayne, who was three years younger than Banks when his debut album dropped: “Is it weird to play these songs for your mother?” When she responded in the negative, he pushed on: “It’s jarring hearing a young girl say ‘c***’ so often.” Banks brushed him off with pointed flippancy. “Sex is fucking sex,” she said. “We wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for sex.”

In a time when few formerly naughty words still pack a potent punch, “c***” holds a unique position—everyone from Germaine Greer (who has said that the C-word is “one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock”) to anonymous Urban Dictionary scribes can agree on that. As Liz Lemon explains in a classic episode of 30 Rock , the word demonstrates a frustrating lingual gender imbalance. “There’s nothing you can call a guy to come back. There is no male equivalent to this word.” (She then tries out “fungdark” on a male colleague. He doesn’t flinch.)

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http://www.alternet.org/fascinating-history-word-c***

Replace the *** in link with the proper letters.

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This is an extremely interesting and fascinating article. I "cleaned up" the language for DU, but the word is spelled out in the article at the link.