Your Humble Blogger recently recommended “The House on Turk Street” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” to an acquaintance, and then realized I haven’t re-read them for years. So, out came my copy of The Continental Op, and that was a good thing.
A couple of questions came up, though. First of all, in “Turk Street”, the Op makes a comment about Tai adhering to ‘racial form’. The Op predicts, correctly, that the Quarres were doomed, when they relaxed after taking one gun from Tai: “The Chinese are a thorough people; if one of them carries a gun at all, he usually carries two or three or more.” This struck me, of course, as racist, and I certainly think that Mr. Hammett and the Op are a bit racist. On the other hand, if the Op had referred to ‘cultural form’, and said something like ‘the Chinese culture encourages thoroughness, and if a product of that culture carries a gun at all, ta usually carries two or three or more’, I may have thought it silly, but not racist. And I think that’s what Mr. Hammett meant, here; he doesn’t distinguish between some pseudo-scientific idea of race and some pseudo-sociological idea of culture. He just says that the Chinese are thorough. So I don’t know. He also, by the way, clearly implies that the idea is true generally, but not always specifically. He’s willing to gamble on it, but he’s not altogether certain.
The second thing is that at the end of “The Girl with the Silver Eyes”, the Girl says “the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable”. Any guesses? The story was published in Black Mask in 1924, and I’d say, very likely, Mr. Hammett meant a word beginning with an f. These things change as the culture changes, of course; when I was a kid, in the 1970s, the vilest epithet began with a c, and later it was probably a compound beginning with an m. I have no idea what it is now. I’m inclined to take the cheap shot and say ‘Ashcroft’, of course. I rather like that the story ends on that somewhat ambiguous note, but on the other hand, it’s bugged me for years. I have no doubt about what the gunsel says in The Maltese Falcon, though. It’s fun to see Hammett work around and with the restrictions on speech and action; I suspect writing the Op stories without profanity was something like writing the novel without verbs.
Of course, being hard-boiled isn’t about cursing; it’s not about the fancy rhythms of the language, or the similes. It’s that most of us are three-minute eggs, and some are two-minute eggs; the slightest tap and we open up and spill out whatever’s inside, secrets and blood and love. The Op has spent a lot longer in hot water, and as a result he’s toughened up, and bruises more easily than he opens. He’s seen a lot of people die, and killed a lot of people, too. He’s aware that he’s lost a lot by it, and is even aware that he isn’t quite human, anymore, but that’s the way of his job. When it does get to him (towards the end of Red Harvest for example), it’s really scary.
Anyway, that’s why I like Dashiell Hammett’s stuff better than Raymond Chandler’s. For Mr. Chandler, the boiling never quite hardens the egg; he keeps saying that “dead men are heavier than broken hearts,” which is all poetic and stuff, but wouldn’t get much change out of the Op.
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-Vardibidian.
Was your vilest epithet from the seventies the four-letter-c-word, or the ten-letter-compound-c-word?
I think of the four-letter-c-word as still being one of the most offensive things; especially as other offensive words have been “reclaimed” by various groups and used more casually, that one hasn’t as far as I know.
Well, there are two four-letter c words. One of them is relatively inoffensive and not really used for swearing except as part of the compound you mentioned; the other is extremely offensive in the US (when used as an epithet, especially toward a woman—though entirely acceptable in narration in some kinds of pornography and erotica), but much less offensive in the UK. A British person I know once wrote: “Often used by men to refer to other men, the word frequently implies that the person so referred to has done something clearly and demonstrably wrong. … [I]t’s definitely considered unacceptable … as unacceptable as the F-word in fact.” In other words, a swear word but not nearly as totally unacceptable as it is in the US.
Did you catch the interesting segment on Fresssssshair yesterday in which the linguist was talking about the history of swearing? He said that in the 19th century (at least in the US), most swearing was literally profanity—taking words related to the sacred (God, damn, hell) and using them in profane ways—but at some point as we became a less religious society, profanity per se became less shocking, and people started using words that had previously been used mostly in private (“from the bedroom and the bathroom”) in public settings. Makes me wonder what modern strongly-religious cultures (such as places where Islam is the official religion) use for swear words.
Oh, I meant the shorter one. Second letter u. Ends in t.
Geoffrey Nunberg’s column is interesting, particularly the shift from ‘religious’ to ‘body’ swearing. Oh, the link there is to the unexpurgated version; the Fresh Air version is evidently more work-safe.
Fuckin’ boss.
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-V.
I wonder what’ll happen as we become a less private society, and bedroom/bathroom topics become more commonly discussed. Perhaps what we’re already seeing, where swearing becomes more acceptable in various contexts (TV, work, etc). Where will new cuss words come from in the future?
If the earliest profanity reflected the importance of religion and the consequent shock value of impiety, perhaps the next generation of profanity will reflect the importance of technology?
Oh, core dump!
I’ve already seen geeks using “grep” as an all-purpose swear word…
More seriously, while bedroom/bathroom topics are becoming more open, I’m not sure that means we’ll become a less private society — people seem to need something to keep to themselves. Maybe in a hundred years it will be impolite to talk about eating in public, or to talk about money, or some such, and profanity will reflect that.
This brings me to the fun SF swear words, where people say “Oh, Shards!” or “By the horns of G’R’Uptha!”
I’ve read more than one story where the word ‘mother’ is considered unfit for mixed company, but is used, you know, clinically. It isn’t a swear word, though, by Mr. Nunberg’s scheme.
Some of y’all read more sf than I do – is there any non-religious non-body swearing that really works in the world of the story? I’m thinking of, perhaps, a Waterworld thing where people say “oh, dirt!” and “that mudding hurts” or perhaps a zero-gee culture with “fall off!” and “you inertial bitch!” Anything?
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-V.
I know I’ve seen SF where there was made up swearing, and it worked in context, but I can’t remember any examples for the life of me.
Help out the half-geek: why would ‘grep’ be a swear-word? It’s a useful tool, no?
Dan — I think “grep” is only a swear-word because of the sound and mouth-feel of it, not the meaning. Similarly “fsck”, which I guess only really works in writing.
And Vardibidian — the sf swearing example that pops into my mind is Larry Niven’s _The Integral Trees_. The characters live in orbiting “trees” with a root-opening at the end. Garbage, corpses, sewage all are dumped into the tree-end. “Feed the tree” and “treefodder” are common swears.