Clutter

During the movie "Vera Drake," which I screened over the weekend, there's a brief scene when a woman confesses to a friend that she has accidentally become pregnant. The friend responds with what sounded to me like "You clod." I chuckled because the word was so Mad Magazine. Granted, this was a Mike Leigh film, whose characters are forever mumbling in an incoherent working-class dialect that eschews consonants, so she could have been saying anything. My viewing companion opined that it sounded like "You clut," perhaps a local 1950's colloquial portmanteau mixing "clod" and "slut."

A subsequent search on Google has revealed two meanings for "clut": one is a table signifying colors on a palette, the other is an acronym for "Charitable Lead Unitrust." Nothing idiomatic from mid-century Soho. But I'm growing to like the word because it sounds so filthy. If not a combination of clod and slut (as in "Paris Hilton is a clut") , then a blend of "slut" and some other four-letter aspersion offensive to woman, such as "c*nt" or the slightly less odious "clit," which for some reason is rarely used as a distaff version of "prick" or the more pointed "dick head." You never do hear the word "clut" uttered, though you do hear extensions of it, like "klutz" and "cluttered," whose meanings come nowhere close.

My tongue is firmly embedded in my cheek as I consider the addition of another dirty word to our lexicon, but the issue is of far greater import to those arbiters of cultural standards for whom taking offense is a livelihood. I'm sure the reps of all those dreary "Family Council" organizations, the ones who last week solemnly alerted the media that Sponge Bob Squarepants is a threat to the moral fabric of America, would be equally appalled if the usage of "clut" became rife. I can just see the subcommittees being formed in every Red State capital to draft voter propositions to ban the word from the airwaves. I'm sure they can make a compelling argument to those who find the degradation of English just one more sign that we are slouching toward the End Time. Hey who's that riding behind the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War, Pestilence, Hunger and Death? Lo and behold, the steed Profanity!

As Hamlet said (mockingly) to Polonius, "Words, words, words." George Carlin made a career from his famous "Seven Words You Can't Use on TV" monologue, but all of them have pretty much crept through by now, certainly to HBO, and even to non-pay stations like FX, whose "Nip/Tuck" is well, really really salty. Michael Powell notwithstanding, we have come a long way since Lucy Ricardo could not say the word "pregnant" on her show, and had to make the announcement by nodding at Desi as he crooned "We're Having a Baby."

After "pregnant" edged its way into acceptability, and TV also broke other shocking taboos by allowing Uhura to kiss Kirk and Archie Bunker to flush a toilet, it took a while for the next great breakthrough. That came in 1988 when a pilot for the sitcom "Uncle Buck" had a little girl declaiming to her annoying older brother "You suck!" This was during a period when Osama Bin Laden was our friend, so we needed something else to get up-in-arms about. And this really did spawn a controversy, so heated that the offending moment was deleted from the program. I was writing on another sitcom at the same time, and was told by our censor that you can have a character say "You suck eggs" or "You suck gopher guts," but not the two-word version which, as we may have forgotten by now, refers to oral sex.

Ten years later, of course, there was Monica, who popularized oral sex, at least as a topic of discourse. But by this time "suck" had become the ubiquitous substitute for "stink" and Bart Simpson was using it in every other sentence, not to mention most other characters in TV and in every schoolyard in America. By 2008 I would expect it to pop up in the State of the Union. So the outrage of 1988 seems as amusingly quaint as the 1950s gag on "I Love Lucy," when an elocutionist trying to coach Lucy tells her "There are two words you should never use. One is 'swell' and the other is 'lousy'." To which Lucy eagerly replies "Great, what are they?"

In the 1990s there was a breakthrough in language as audiences became inured to cable talk. Free TV tried to catch up a bit. Det. Sipowicz got to say "Bullshit." "Son of a bitch," "bastard," "asshole" and "damn" (but not "Goddammit," which is still bothersome to theists), have seeped into network TV. "Shit" is awaiting general acceptance, though "South Park" aired a famous episode when the word was mentioned 168 times (tallied by a counter in the upper corner of the screen) "Fart," a funny and blunt term, was long banned but has become almost as frequently heard as "suck."

"Suck" has gained such acceptance because it is phonetically funny. Words that have the "hard c" or "hard k", as well as the "Uh" vowel sound, appeal for some ineffable reason, to our funny bones (try it yourself: what is a funnier word, "mire" or "muck"? What is a more amusing town name, "Springfield" or "Keokuk"?) The study of word usage and acceptance is one of constant flux and reevaluation and interesting only historically. "Lousy," really meant, originally, "full of lice," but if it's used at all today, that definition is obsolete. Except of course for the Language Police, who are trying to earn their way up to heaven at Rapture time. I'd love to think St. Peter would encounter them at the Gate with a jaunty, "And how the Fuck did you get here?"