Indeed by the ’70s you didn’t even need to say it: Isaac Hayes could call a sex-machine detective a “bad mother-” if he was just talkin’ about 1971’s Shaft. “What a motherfucking man he was, Shamus!” exclaims one character, similarly, in the 1973 novel Fogarty & Co. A 1954 line in the The Life, a collection of oral poetry about black hustlers, reads, “I love him madly, he’s my motherfucking man,” showing that the adjective form could also be used positively. 1 hit-though the song was cleaned up before it could top the charts. The next year R&B singer Lloyd Price made the song into a no.
The first instance recorded in the OED comes from a 1958 recitation of the folk tale of “Stagger Lee,” the legend ( based on a true story) of the black man who would not back down. The slight euphemism “ mother-fugger” appears repeatedly in his 1948 World War II novel The Naked and the Dead, and one of the first recorded instances of “ motherfuck” can be found in his 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? He later said he used the word because “ it was a fair word to use to give the quality of the Army experience.” He also said that the word “was not used to intimidate” but instead to “ fill certain spaces in the thought waves.” As that latter quote suggests, it was around this time that the word lost its purely pejorative status, and when (in the case of motherfucking) it became an intensifier.īy the late ‘50s and ‘60s, motherfucker finally became, in some usages, a positive description. Norman Mailer was particularly fond of this usage. Their records from 1898 include an account in which the word is offered almost as grounds for murder: A defendant suggests that he should be partially excused of killing a man just because the man had called him a “ mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch.” The earliest citation of the noun motherfucker (as opposed to motherfucking) tells of a man who faced a different kind of punishment for wielding the word: After a black soldier sent a defiant letter to his draft board in which he called them “ low-down Mother Fuckers,” he was court-martialed and did ten years of hard labor.īy World War II the word was used to refer to something “unpleasant, difficult, formidable, or oppressive,” i.e., a pain in the ass. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals apparently felt more comfortable printing the word just a few years later. State, where witnesses describe a defendant being called a “ God damned mother-f-cking, bastardly son-of-a-bitch.” It’s perhaps revealing that, of the four expletives, mother-fucking is the only one to get censored.
#WHERE DOES THE WORD MOJO COME FROM TRIAL#
The OED’s first citation of the word comes from the Texas Court of Appeals’ account of the 1889 trial of Levy v. The earliest citations of motherfucker and motherfucking in the Oxford English Dictionary come from the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, and they give a sense for how seriously the word was taken. People have been calling each other motherfuckers for over a century, but until World War II the term was typically used as an insult. When did it become badass to be a “motherfucker”?Īround the 1950s. Colubrine was first recorded in English in the 1520s.The most memorable line in Zero Dark Thirty, the one that prompted its own article in the Los Angeles Times this month, comes when the hero (played by Jessica Chastain) defiantly tells the CIA director (played by James Gandolfini), “I’m the motherfucker that found this place, sir.” For Maya and others to be a “motherfucker” can be a mark of pride, with everyone from Kanye West to Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winnfield wearing it proudly. From serpēns, literally meaning “crawling,” English has serpent and serpentine. From dracō, originally a borrowing from Ancient Greek, we have dragon as well as draconian and the name of an antagonist in the Harry Potter book series.
In addition to coluber, two other Latin terms meaning “snake” that have descendants in English were dracō and serpēns, which you may also recognize as constellations. Much as English has multiple names for wolverines, as we learned in yesterday’s Word of the Day podcast about quickhatch, the Romans had several words for snakes. Colubrine “of or resembling a snake” derives from the Latin adjective colubrīnus, of the same meaning, from coluber “snake.” Despite the similar spelling, coluber is not the source of coil, the circular gathering movement that typifies snakes coil derives instead from the Latin verb colligere “to gather together,” and coil’s resemblance to colubrine is a happy coincidence.
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