Pauvre con

Have you noticed how much I tend to use the word “cunt” here? It’s not something I’m really proud of, but it’s a thing I do… I first heard it when we went to Scotland in 1981, I was 6, and we were visiting the rest of the family over there, and I recall one of my cousins saying it about someone else. I didn’t know what it meant—I thought maybe it was just a Scottish word people didn’t use here in Australia (wasn’t I wrong!)—but I had a feeling it was a Very Bad Word and I decided against letting anyone know I’d picked it up.

Anyway, it’s still a Very Bad Word but Malcolm Knox here reckons it’s becoming a lot less so, maybe not in the eyes of the law (don’t call a policeman one, even when he’s being one) but it’s certainly cropping up a lot more than it once did (my own earliest memory of it being used on TV was the legendary Blue Murder back in 1995). He is, however, wrong about one thing:

The French, epic lovers of obscenity, had normalised their word for c— to such a degree that when used by Serge Gainsbourg in Je t’aime Moi Non Plus, his 1968 duet with the late Jane Birkin, it sounds a little sexy.

I mean, maybe it would if it did in fact appear in the song, but it doesn’t, unless Malcolm has heard a different version to me. On the other hand, Serge Gainsbourg did write a song called “Requiem pour un con”… maybe that’s what Malcolm was thinking of and the recent passing of Jane Birkin made hm confuse them? Then again, “Je t’aime” is a lot more (in)famous, so maybe not? I don’t know. In any case, I also don’t know about the word being “normalised” as such…

…that being the record sleeve for the single release of “Requiem” in 1968; the record company might’ve tolerated the word in the song but not on the record sleeve, apparently. And “con” can actually be used much more mildly as “jerk” or “idiot” as well, indeed when I ran the French lyrics through Google Translate those were the words it gave me… but given that the record sleeve mutes the word “con”, that suggests Gainsbourg intended the Bad Meaning.

Talking of what Serge may or may not have meant: the recent passing of Jane Birkin put me in mind in a roundabout way of this one time on Celluloid Dreams, the film show on 2SER I used to be part of (let’s not discuss, I’m still a bit angry about that too), when we were interviewing a French lady called Catherine Chauchat… the latter had made a short documentary on the history of the vibrator that must’ve been showing somewhere in Sydney, and she stuck around with us for drinks after the show. So I decided to take the oppprtunity to ask a native French speaker (my own French was no longer good enough for me by then to confirm or deny) if something I’d read online was true, namely that a certain line in the chorus of “Je t’taime” (“Je vais et je viens/entre tes reins”) meant “I come and go between your kidneys”. Which she thought was HILARIOUS; apparently that is what it literally means, but in practice it’s more of a slang idiom pour le bumsex. I still hope Gainsbourg meant it literally…