Allusionist 216. Four Letter Words: Terisk

Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/terisk

This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, hit language’s snooze button and language screams back, “I will not be snoozed!”

It’s the season finale of Four Letter Word Season, and I’m sad not to have covered every four-letter word in existence, but I’ve had a great time, beginning with the F-swear and going via dinosaurs, poisonous plants, the bain marie, a quiz, the scandal suffix -gate, to several local parks; and this episode returns to one of the strongest of the four-letter words we have covered, because there is still more to say about it.

Content note: this episode contains many category A swears, and some category B swears - it’s all educational though, not gratuitous or angry swearing, I promise. And sometimes I hear from listeners asking about the swear categories; you can hear all about them back in the early episode Detonating the C-Bomb, which also contains information that is related to this episode.

I’ll be performing at Nerd Nite at the Fox Cabaret in Vancouver on 10 September; I’ve linked to tickets at theallusionist.org/events and it’s a new piece about some mysterious Scandinavian translations of Dracula. I’ve been to Nerd Nite before and it was a very good evening of infotainment, I recommend. 

Now, as I said, brace yourself for swears.

On with the show. 

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HZ: In the Allusioverse Discord community, we sometimes watch films and TV together, and a little while ago we were watching Legally Blonde, the tale of rich young white woman Elle Woods overcoming the adversity of being too femme-presenting for people to believe she could possibly study law.

And as we were watching Legally Blonde, we noticed something happening repeatedly in the subtitles. Three letters kept being asterisked out. Lines like:

“Actually, I wasn’t aware we had an ***ignment”

“You will get to ***ist on actual cases”

Again and again and again!

“This is Emmett Richmond, another ***ociate”

“We already ***igned the outlines”

“Equitable division of ***ets”

Did you deduce the missing word here?

The words spoken aloud were not bleeped out or blanked out or censored at all, so measures had been taken just to protect people who read the subtitles from the word ‘ass’. Which is not good subtitling practice. For added perplexingness, while the Legally Blonde subtitles had censored words like ‘associate’ and ‘asset’, words left intact included some slurs, as well as ‘dumbass’, and ‘ass’.

I don’t understand these priorities! But I do understand that this is an example of what is known as the Scunthorpe Problem.

The Scunthorpe Problem is a technological problem whereby content gets blocked or censored because a string of letters, an innocent string of letters, contains what would be, in other contexts, a rude word.

The reason this happens is at some point, some human has compiled a blocklist of words that, in their whole form, might be a problem: slurs, swears, that kind of thing. But of course language isn’t that simple, or at least the English language isn’t, you can’t spell ‘Scunthorpe’ without ‘Shorpe’, and programmers can’t program for every possible context every word might appear in. And the programs themselves don’t know what words are rude and what’s not, and moreover they don’t care, they’re not sentient.

The Scunthorpe Problem occurs a lot. For example, in 2020 alone, Twitter blocked hashtags about the British political troll Dominic Cummings, and Facebook kept banning users for posting about spending time at the seafront park in the southern England town of Plymouth that is called the Hoe. Hoe just means ‘high ridge’! Leave Plymouth Hoe alone! And that same year, the year of online conferencing, an online conference platform banned the word ‘bone’...from a paleontology conference.

If you have a surname like Cockburn or Hancock or Wang or Lipshitz then you probably know the Scunthorpe Problem. In South London, the Horniman Museum doesn’t receive all its emails. The Canadian magazine The Beaver, founded in 1920, changed its name in 2010 to Canada’s History so its mailouts didn’t get sent straight to spam. Even the term ‘specialist’ frequently gets blocked for containing ‘cialis’. Cialis isn’t even a swear! It’s a brand! And good luck bragging about graduating cum laude. Or trying to run a website about shitake mushrooms.

There’s also a subset of the Scunthorpe Problem, known as the Clbuttic Problem, where the word gets replaced by a more euphemistic one, resulting in messes like the Buttociated Press, the game Buttbuttin’s Creed, or clbuttical music, or the US consbreastution. That’s the Clbuttic Problem. Get it? 

British place names are an absolute banquet to the hungry obscenity filters; there are whole counties with names ending in -sex. The Scunthorpe Problem could have been named after other many towns similarly affected, like the South Yorkshire town of Penistone, and Clitheroe in Lancashire, or Lightwater in Surrey - and I looked at Lightwater for ages on the map and thought, “What’s wrong with Lightwater that would get it flagged for rudes?” but eventually twigged that it’s not the ligh or the er.

Wake up, Helen!

The Scunthorpe Problem is named in tribute to the third most populous conurbation in the county of Lincolnshire, the town of Scunthorpe. In case you haven’t already clocked why Scunthorpe was chosen as the town to represent this condition, it’s because of what I’ll euphemistically refer to as the cunt-word.

The Scunthorpe Problem was diagnosed in 1996, and made the front page of the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph, Tuesday 9 April 1996, final edition of the day.

It said:

The ban on Scunthorpe and that four-letter word was discovered by retired steelworks mill controller Doug Blackie of Cole Street when he applied to join AOL UK. 

Each time he typed in the address Scunthorpe on his application he was met with the stock reply: "Your account cannot be processed any further.

Doug Blackie said:

"So then I typed in my address as Frodingham and bingo the block was lifted."

AOL had only been going in the UK for three months at this time, maybe it hadn’t been faced with the profanisaurus of British placenames yet, and the company recommended people respell Scunthorpe as ‘Sconthorpe’ while they worked on fixing the problem. But this was merely the beginning of Scunthorpe’s online troubles: well into the 21st century, safesearch filters blocked the websites thisisscunthorpe.co.uk and scunthorpedistrictcatsprotection.co.uk, getting overprotective there.

Now, like Elle Woods, I have questions.

Why Scunthorpe? How did this happen? How did Scunthorpe get this name that makes it a punchline and a tech problem?

Scunthorpe is an old old place name: we know this because of the Domesday Book, which as a name sounds dramatic but the Domesday Book wasn’t actually apocalyptic, it was the record of a huge survey done in the year 1086, the king sent men out across most of England and Wales to record who held what land, and what the worth was of each piece of land and the work thereon, to make sure they paid taxes and land rents to the landowners and the king got his. Sometimes the taxes were paid in the form of what the land produced, like honey, oats, salmon, pigs, beer and eels. 

Whatever happened to eel-based economics, eh? Too slippery? At the time of the Domesday book, people using eels to pay taxes and land rents were collectively paying, per year, more than 500,000 eels.

WHAT ARE THE LANDLORDS DOING WITH ALL THOSE EELS? We must be told!! And this went on for another 500 years! Maybe that was the point at which the king realised that eel money is inconvenient. It keeps slithering out of my wallet.” Idea for keeping rents down: paying in eels. “Are you raising my rent this year?” Landlord: “NO! Pay me less rent, less rent! I’m drowning here!”

Anyway, the Domesday Book is this incredible record of 268,984 households all the way back in 1086 and a lot of place names that had originated from these people’s names are still in use today. One such place name being Scunthorpe. In the Domesday Book it was written as Escumetorp. The ‘e’ at the beginning was what is known in linguistics as a ‘prosthetic E’, didn’t change the meaning, just made a consonant cluster easier for people to say if the word was a foreign import to them and they were used to a bit more vowel, as the Normans would have been then.

The middle part of Escumetorp is Skuma, which was the name of the man who was the head of the household operating on that patch of land. ‘Torp’ or ‘thorpe’ was an Old Norse word meaning hamlet or homestead or estate, so Escumetorp meant ‘Skuma’s estate’, the Domesday book was documenting that Skuma owned that land. 

So the part of the word ‘Scunthorpe’ that caused all these problems 900 years later is Skuma’s name. And if Skuma was around now, I would love to ask him: “What do you make of all this?”

[Martin Austwick sings:]

I was just some guy, not an important man.
My name’s in the book ‘cause I owned a piece of land.
There’s a town there now, and the town is wreathed in shame,
But it did nothing wrong
Except it bears my name. 

It’s not my fault,
Who could predict this?
Nine hundred years, 
And I start causing glitches.

It’s not my fault,
I didn’t plan it.
It’s just a name, 
Like James or Jeff or Janet.
It’s just a name
Like James or Jeff or Janet.

HZ: In my non-scientific opinion, in British English, ‘ass’ is not a rude word. And we’d more likely say ‘arse’ anyway, spelled A R S E, and arse probably wouldn’t be asterisked or bleeped out - the words Arsenal and arsenic tend to survive intact. The word has a long history out in the open. In Old English, the medlar fruit was called openærs, as in ‘open arse’, because of what it looked like. Bowel movements were known as ‘arse-goings’. Medieval toilet paper was called ‘arse-wisp’.

Meanwhile, historically ‘ass’, A S S, had since ancient times referred to a donkey. In 15th century English, a donkey driver was called an ‘ass man’, how things change, there’s a little piece of information to file away for whenever you need evidence to contradict someone who insists language is set in stone. In the 16th century, ass gave us the word ‘easel’, because an ass bears loads.

‘Arse’ and ‘ass’ don’t share etymology, they’re both from unrelated ancient words that respectively meant bum and donkey, but the similar pronunciation brought them together in people’s brains, like how I now have to remind myself which one is right, home in or hone in. (It’s ‘home’.)

And 250ish years ago, polite speakers started calling the animal ‘donkey’ instead of ‘ass’, to be safe. A female donkey had been a she-ass, now rebranded as a jenny or jennet.

If you want an idea of changing mores around this sort of language, there’s a play from 1684, by the Earl of Rochester, called Sodom. You can probably tell from that title that it is an intentionally provocative and saucy play, and it was probably a satire on King Charles II’s religious policies. 

But in it, there are dozens of uncensored instances of the word ‘cunt’, and there are characters named Fuckadilla, Clytoris (with a Y), Bolloxinion, Cuntioratia, and Cunticula. Whereas the word they did blank out was ‘Almighty’. Because what is offensive changes a lot over time. 

Anyway, like Elle Woods, sharpest mind in the Delta Nu sorority, I have questions. Why Scunthorpe? Because none of this is related to Scunthorpe, there’s no reason for Scunthorpe to contain the cunt-word at all.

In the Domesday book, Skuma’s homestead was written as Escumetorp, and in the centuries thereafter while spellings were unfixed, there were several variations such as Scumpthorpe, with a P, Scumthorpe, Sconthorpe with an O, Scomthorpe with an O M, and Skunthorpe with a K.

Lots of better options! Although the scum ones would bring their own problems - however, plenty of choices that would be no trouble. 

Spam filters would have no quarrel with Scunthorpe if someone had just taken the AOL executive’s suggestion a few hundred years earlier to go with another spelling - Sconthorpe with an O, or if they really wanted the Scunthorpe sound without the inconvenience, spell it with a K. 

Which would be fitting, because Skuma was spelled with a K. Skuma didn’t have a rude word for a name. 

[Martin Austwick sings":]

It wasn’t rude
Way back in history.
Nobody had
To asterisk me 

It wasn’t rude,
No funny business.
It’s just a name
Like Fanny, Rod or Dick is.
It’s just a name
Like Fanny, Rod or Dick is.

HZ: Now, like Elle Woods, most astute law student interning on a murder trial, I have questions. Why Scunthorpe?

The town we now know as Scunthorpe grew out of five villages: Ashby, Brumby, Crosby, Frodingham and Scunthorpe. all of which were in the Domesday book, Brumby was the land of a man called Bruni. Frodingham was another guy, Frod. There’s also the neighbourhood of Yaddlethorpe, named after Eadwulf, a name that deserves to make a comeback.

For a long time, Scunthorpe was just part of the district of Frodingham, and all these villages were pretty small, until iron ore was discovered in the area in 1859, whereupon the population swelled with people coming to work in the mines, and the villages became a town. Scunthorpe had become the biggest village, so that name got applied to the whole town.

[Martin Austwick sings:]

The town could have taken someone else’s name.
Like my neighbour Frod, 
Or Bruní down the lane
Eadwulf - he was a lovely dude,
Use his name instead, then it’s not remotely rude.

I didn’t think that I’d go down in history,
My children died, grandchildren died, who’s there to miss me?
You can’t control how things will go 
when your life’s ended.
I didn’t know 
This is how I’d be remembered.
You never know
Just how you’ll be remembered.
You never know 
How you’ll be remembered.

HZ: All this was inspired by that Legally Blonde watchalong with the Allusioverse community, so if you fancy some of that serendipity like communally being wowed by examples of the Scunthorpe Problem - which I think have been fixed now when I went back to check - then join by donating as little as $2 a month via theallusionist.org/donate. In return you also get the company of your Allusionauts, regular livestreams where I read relaxingly from my collection of unusual dictionaries, inside scoops about the making of every episode, last month a bonus livestream with my other podcast Answer Me This, and most rewarding of all, you’re funding the making of this show, which makes you A Patron of the Arts and a Generous Benefactor, whichever you prefer. Pretty cool! To become such, go to theallusionist.org/donate.

Coming up on the show, it’s words with a different number of letters season.

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The subject matter of this episode does not feel super appropriate to chase with an in memoriam, but this week, a friend died, Jonathan Main. I’d known him for close to twenty years - in Crystal Palace, the London neighbourhood I lived in for a long time, he ran The Bookseller Crow, a great independent local bookshop that to me really epitomised a great local bookshop, the kind of place you’d go in without a plan and come out with a stack of books and probably some cards painted by local artists too. And the soundtrack was always excellent. I had to buy extra bookcases thanks to Jonathan’s recommendations. You can hear him on the show too, way back in the earlyish episode called Big Lit. And as well as being a keystone of the community - and invaluable source of local knowledge and gossip -  Jonathan was the link between comedians, musicians, poets, novelists, memoirists, writers of all genres, and readers of course. From behind the counter in a small shop in one suburb, his influence radiated far and wide and reached thousands of people. I hope he knew just how much he mattered. 

Bookseller Crow managed to survive evil landlords, COVID, awful times in local retail, scores of people browsing and then ordering what they found on the big online river-named store - “But buying from the big online river-named store is so convenient!” yeah you could stand to inconvenience yourself more, for the common good. And now Bookseller Crow has to figure out how to survive the loss of Jonathan. His copilots, his wife Justine Crow and the writer Karen McLeod, are selling books, and vouchers for books, in person or at booksellercrow.co.uk, if you want to help them out during this difficult time. And if you’re lucky enough to still have a local independent bookshop where you live, and you’re able to go to places, go in and shop there, order books from there, buy the socks and the mugs and the pencils, attend events there. There’s something about independent bookshops specifically, the communities that can grow in and around them, that is very precious and does not get recreated if or when they’re replaced by a vape shop or an estate agent with promotionally-branded minifridge, or by the big online river-named store with its malign intent.

Goodbye Jonathan, I’m one of the many many people who will miss you terribly, and I have several hundred books to remember you by, so thanks for those. And everything else.

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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…

hachures, plural noun: parallel lines used in hill shading on maps, their closeness indicating steepness of gradient.

Try using ‘hachures’ in an email today.

This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. The music and singing is by the singer and composer Martin Austwick; you can find his own songs at palebirdmusic.com. 

Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, so I can talk winningly and admiringly about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads. 

And you can hear or read every episode, including all the other ones in Four Letter Word Season, get more information about the episode topics, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and find information about upcoming events such as next month’s book tour stop with that dreamboat Samin Nosrat, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.

Allusionist 4 Detonating the C-Bomb transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/c-bomb.

This is The Allusionist in which I, Helen Zaltzman, dive under the bonnet of language to tinker with the engine. Coming up in today's show there will be a lot - a lot - of profane language, so this is your opportunity to clear the area of young children, linguistically-fragile elders, anyone within earshot who will be offended by all the potty mouth business.

We'll limber up to the code red swearing with a little light swear word history. 2015 is the 100th anniversary of the first officially recorded instance of the word "bullshit". It was a century ago that T.S. Eliot submitted to Blast magazine his poem entitled "The Triumph of Bullshit". Now, the young T.S. probably didn't coin "bullshit" himself. Usually words have been floating around for some time before they're committed to print and thus considered official dictionary fodder. And the dictionary doesn't even cite him as its first written source. The poem was never published, but it was named in a letter that Blast's editor Wyndham Lewis wrote to Ezra Pound, explaining that while he enjoyed the "scholarly ribaldry" of "The Triumph of Bullshit", he wasn't going to print it, as he was determined to avoid words ending in "-uck", "-unt", and "-ugger". And presumably "-ullshit". So happy bullshit centenary, everyone.

OK, I wasn't kidding about the swearing in this episode, so if you want to avoid words ending in "-uck" and "-unt", this is your last chance. Ready? On with the fucking show.

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SWEAR CORRESPONDENT: I think the worst swear word is probably "cunt", which I don't like to say unless I'm really angry at a politician or something like that. 

Mine would be the word "twat", and I think that that's due to the physical connotations of the word in reference to female genitalia. 

EMMA BARNETT: It is "cunt". 

HZ: Why? 

EMMA BARNETT: Because it's one of those words, like when when you start swearing in front of your parents as you become an adult, which is quite a moment, they flinch. But I still couldn't say the word "cunt" to my mum. I just couldn't. I think the mum test is quite key.

I don't really care about bad swearwords. I don't... I mean, "cunt".

"Cocksucker". "Cunt". 

Probably "cunt". 

The worst swear word I can think of is "cunt". 

DAWN FOSTER Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. 

Yeah, it's gotta be "cunt", right? 

[Samples of the above clips are edited in tune to the crescendo of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", with the following lyrics: Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, fuck, pissflaps. Cunt, cunt, mothercuntfucker. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, shitcunt. Cunt, cunt, fuck, cunt, cunt, jizzchest. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cock, cunt, cunt, cunt, motherfucker. Cunt, cunt, fuck, twat, minge. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cocksucker. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. Cunt.]

JANE GARVEY: Let's put it this way, it's no coincidence this rudest word belongs to the female of the species and not the male. 

HZ: Jane Garvey, presenter of BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour. Opinions are Jane's own, and do not represent the BBC. 

HZ: However, "twat" means the same as "cunt", and "twat" is a much lower-level swear. Why the inconsistency? 

JANE GARVEY: I guess... 

HZ: Another four-letter word? 

JANE GARVEY: Yeah. I think "cunt", you know, it sounds a bit ruder. 

HZ: Do you think? 

JANE GARVEY: Does that make any sense? I honestly think it's that simple. 

HZ: Is that conditioning, though, or genuine cuntiness? 

JANE GARVEY: I think it is conditioning. My problem is that we have accepted for too long that that is the rudest word of all. We've let it have some special potency, which, and I simply... I mean, I actually, to be really - some people might think this is obscure - I think there's a connection to stuff like feminine hygiene. Another of my bugbears, when you go into the chemist there's this special aisle, "feminine hygiene". 

HZ: God help any man that wanders into that aisle. 

JANE GARVEY: Why not just call it "sanitary towels and tampons", or whatever you want to call it. 

HZ: "Cunt products". 

JANE GARVEY: Well, that's what they are. 

HZ: Yeah.  

JANE GARVEY: Because apparently we're smelly down there. Now I mean, listen, I'm no woman of the world, but I put it to people that men's genitalia can whiff a bit as well. 

HZ: Where's the men's hygiene aisle? 

JANE GARVEY: I'm going to invent them. "Cock wipes". That's what the world needs. Well, why not? 

HZ: "Knob sponge". 

JANE GARVEY: You said "knob sponge", I said "cock wipe". 

HZ: And so what swear would you rather see at the top of the swearing tree? 

JANE GARVEY: Well, no, if I'm angry with someone I call them a "knob". 

HZ: Quite a jolly one. 

JANE GARVEY: I say they get off lightly. No, I just think if we want to use "cunt", we should say "cunt". 

HZ: Reclaim "cunt".

Of course, cunt has been reclaimed by many before us, perhaps most famously by Eve Ensler in The Vagina Monologues. 

CLIP FROM THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES: I call it "cunt". I've reclaimed it. "Cunt". I really like it. "Cunt". Just listen to it, listen to it. "Cunt".

HZ: But reclaimed from what exactly? A couple of centuries in word purgatory, before which it seems to have been, yes, vulgar, but not particularly obscene. In fact, in the Middle Ages, many of Britain's major towns contained a street called "Gropecunt Lane". That's right. "Cunt" was sufficiently un-rude that it could be a street name, albeit the name for the street where cunt-groping took place, as back then streets were typically named after the activities that took place thereon, and "Gropecunt" was the street where sex workers ply their trade. However, since the mid-16th century, they've all been renamed "Grope Lane" or "Grape Lane" or something else more sanitised, Though I did stumble upon an e-petition to the British government calling for the reinstating of "all former Gropecunt Lanes". It had one signature. 

I'm fine with not having words like "cunt" on street signs, but I am an equal opportunity swearer, and I don't see why the word "cunt" should be kept in solitary when its gentlemanly equivalents like "dick" or "bellend" are allowed to roam fairly freely. I don't imagine, historically, someone decided on a league table for swearwords. Their differing levels of rudeness probably would've been established gradually and largely unconsciously, reflecting the preoccupations and social structures of the time. But there are recent examples of the swearing hierarchy being officially codified. I got hold of one in the form of the manual issued by ITV to television programme makers, in which swearwords and other offensive terms are sorted into Category A, or Category B, and then, within each category, according to several strata of strength. 

LEON WILSON: They are funny, the swearwords. It's just funny, and the different tiers of it. 

HZ: This is Leon Wilson, managing director of Talkback Television and executive producer of Celebrity Juice, one of the sweariest shows on British television. 

LEON WILSON: Someone's had to spend a lot time and money sitting down and categorising all these different words. 

HZ: Which is worst, "bloody", or "knobhead"? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah, I think it probably "bloody", but is it, if it's talking about... Yeah, well, I was going to say something really rude there. "Cunt"s the worst. 

HZ: OK. 

LEON WILSON: Generally that's sort of seen - and it has, you're allowed two per show. Special dispensation, we were allowed four once. 

HZ: Why do you think that there are different rules for "cunt" than for "twat", which is considered a lower-tier swear, but means the same thing? 

LEON WILSON: Because it's not about meaning of what something is. It's about... There's no real logic to it, in a sense. 

HZ: No, why is "cunt" worse than "twat"? 

LEON WILSON: It just is. 

HZ: Why? 

LEON WILSON: I think I would argue that the word "cunt" has got a particularly aggressive sound to it. 

HZ: Do you? 

LEON WILSON: "-unt", the "-unt" is quite a, "-unt" is fairly... Whereas "twat" feels more playful. 

HZ: But to me, "cunt" is quite a playful word as well. It sounds to me like the sound a squash ball makes when it's hitting against a wall. 

LEON WILSON: There was once the lawyer that asked us to bleep "twats", and he argued for it, like you, he said, "Up north, 'twat' means 'cunt', it's the same, so we should bleep it." We argued that we shouldn't, and we actually, it went really quite close to the wire. It was a new lawyer and we had to refer it up, and these things usually get referred up and eventually they came back and said didn't have to bleep "twat". 

HZ: It was good that law time was spent on this. 

LEON WILSON: Oh, a lot of time. The amount of conversations, a lot of conversations we've had, "cunt"s always had to be bleeped. And sometimes we can keep the "cu-" at the beginning, and sometimes they, it's depending on the nature of the "cunt", it's quite interesting. So there are different types of "cunt"s. So there's an aggressive "cunt", for want of a better phrase, where, [aggressively] "You fucking cunt," you know, that's a very aggressive way of doing it, but we'd have to bleep the whole word then. But if it's more of a sort of a playful "cunt" - [playfully] "Bit of a cunt, aren't you?" - that kind of way, then we're allowed a bit of the "cu-" at the beginning, because it's not seen... It's often about the way it's expressed, whether it's aggressive. And generally I would never, very, very rarely, would I ever allow an aggressive "cunt" to stay in the show, because it's very rarely justified. Most television, entertaintment television, shouldn't really have that kind of stuff in it. 

HZ: In the manual, "cunt" is right at the top of Category A, kept company only by "motherfucker". 

LEON WILSON: Originally we were only allowed, we weren't allowed to have any "motherfucker"s in the show. 

HZ: Is "motherfucker" worse than "cunt", then? 

LEON WILSON: "Motherfucker"s used to have to be bleeped as well, but they have now relented on that. They've sort of given up. 

HZ: Ah, so "motherfucker"s alright? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah, but they allow us generally four "motherfucker"s per show. But again, the way "motherfucker"s said is very important, because, weirdly, doing it in an American accent somehow makes it less rude and less offensive. 

HZ: Does that work with "cunt" as well? 

LEON WILSON: Well, I think doing "cunt" in a Cockney accent makes it less. [With accent] "You cunt." 

HZ: [With accent] "You cunt."

LEON WILSON: [With accent] "You fucking cunt." 

HZ: Yeah. 

LEON WILSON: Like, it feels more playful, in the same way, [In American accent] "You motherfucker," feels silly. Whereas if you do, [angrily] "You motherfucker," it feels much more aggressive. And actually aggression is the key part of it, in something not feeling aggressive, is the most important thing that we look at when we look at whether we should keep swear words in show. 

HZ: So British people swearing sounds more aggressive than Americans? 

LEON WILSON: I think so, yeah. 

HZ: But we've got a lot of lower-tier swears that don't really get used in America. So we've got "bollocks", "tossport", "wanker". 

LEON WILSON: Yeah. 

HZ: Is that just because we can't be trusted with the hard swears?

LEON WILSON: I think maybe we've developed a whole other layer to be able to swear in a more conversational everyday sense, to not appear rude. Yeah, I think probably. I mean, there does seem to be an awful lot of British words about, yeah, "bollocks", the testicles basically. 

HZ: Testicles itself isn't on the list, but "bollocks" is fairly low down in category B. You can include it in shows before the watershed, as long as they're not children's shows. "Balls" is considered a little stronger, appearing slightly higher in Category B on the same level as other male genital words like "knob", "prick", and "dick". Though, oddly, "cock" is in the ruder Category A, in the same classification as its female counterparts "twat", "pussy", and "gash". 

Right to the bottom of the chart are the religious swears. I know it wasn't always the case, but I find it a bit odd that religious terms are generally considerably less offensive than bodily and sexual ones. Bodies are mundane, we all have one. Personally, I don't have religion, but if I did, I think I'd be more offended by people bandying around sacred words than slang terms for something as ordinary as genitalia. 

LEON WILSON: "Oh my god" now is seen to be not offensive. People will complain, and there are people out there that will write letters every time someone says, "Oh my god," on TV, there's a couple of people that will do this, but generally though channels have come to the decision in the last 10-15 years that that's allowable. You know, generally it's not a problem. Most people in this country aren't bothered by religion, I would say the majority, but most people still are bothered by sex, and sex will always have a taboo element to it, and therefore swear words will always... Whereas I think religion isn't such a big deal anymore, isn't it? 

HZ: So we're a country of prudish heathens? 

LEON WILSON: Are you just trying to say "cunt" there? 

HZ: I think at this point in the episode, I'd just say it outright if I wanted to. Quantity really reduces the shock quality of a swear. 

LEON WILSON: We are mindful of not having too much swearing in the show, because they lose power over time. I think, in a show like Celebrity Juice, swearing is helpful in certain contexts. 

HZ: Why? 

LEON WILSON: Because swear words have power. They have impact, you know, and you've got to hold some back. I think it would be hard to make Celebrity Juice without any swearing, but I do try and limit it. And when we've got more time in the edits, we do try and take out swear words. We do  remove little... Unnecessary "fuck"s annoy me more. Like some guests will use "fuck" almost as a punctuation, just trying to get a cheap laugh, and sometimes it helps the joke because it adds emphasis, and sometimes it just feels gratuitous and they're just doing it to sort of try and get a cheap laugh. 

HZ: Are you allowed unlimited "fuck"s? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah. They've never placed a limit on the number of "fuck"s in the show, ever. That's more down to us, as a production, trying to self-censor. So the most "fuck"s we've ever had on a Celebrity Juice episode was 110. 

HZ: 110? And how long is the show? 

LEON WILSON: In 33 minutes. 

HZ: Nailing the self-censorship there. What do you think would happen if there was an edict passed tomorrow that just says, "All of our current swears are now neutral, none of them are rude anymore"? Would we have to get by not swearing at all, or would other swears... 

LEON WILSON: Other swears would come in, other swears would appear. There's always something that is taboo. Other words will always replace them, I think, yeah. At my daughter's school they obviously aren't allowed to swear, but they, my daughter's said that the words "you're a swear word" has become a swear word. So they go, "You swear word!"

HZ: So they're self-censoring? 

LEON WILSON: Yes, they self-censor, but now the teacher says, "You can't say 'swear word'," because that in itself became a swear word. So now the kids aren't even allowed to say "swear words", they'll have to think of something else. 

HZ: So it's all about intent, rather than the words themselves? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah. I think that goes back to what I was saying about aggression, whether if it's meant in aggressive way, then swearing is harder to justify. 

HZ: And are your little daughters running around going, "Swear word!" in a particularly aggressive way?

LEON WILSON: Yeah, they do, because I really found this out, one called the other one a "swear word" at the dinner table, and the other one went, "You can't say that, you can't say that!" I said, "What's going on, why you talking about 'swear word'?" And this sort of came out, and it kind of made sense of, you know, something taboo becomes, has power. 

HZ: So perhaps "cunt" isn't really inherently ruder than other words. It's just something had to be rudest. When I was at school, one teacher suggested that in the place of swear words, we all use the word "Jeff", as in the name Jeff. We didn't, and that was for the best. Did she not realise that this was the fastest way to wreak misery upon Jeffs everywhere? Maybe she did realise, and this was an elaborate revenge plot against her ex-boyfriend, Jeff?

Today's show was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Leon Wilson, Jane Garvey, and all the people who contributed swears, especially my friend Tom's mum. She loves to say the word "cunt".

Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…

Maskinonge. Noun. Another term for 'muskellunge'.

Oh, what? What's "muskellunge"?

Muskellunge. Noun. A large pike that only occurs in the Great Lakes region of North America.

Try using it in a sentence today. 

Also try visiting me at @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter, and at theallusionist.org, where, following the last episode, Stephen commented, "May I suggest the origin of 'broad' being the German 'braut'? Noun, bride, a woman taking part in a marriage." Seems plausible to me, Stephen. If I had rosettes for etymologist of the day, I'd give you one. I should get those.

In a fortnight there'll be another episode, with only Category C language and below. But until then... 

[A chorus of voices together say "cunt"]