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Miss Poubelle has recently been enjoying a fascinating book Cursing in America, by Timothy Jay. Jay's object in the book is to study dirty words from a scientific point of view-- trying to understand their meanings and how they are used.

One of the interesting aims of this research is to compare the offensiveness of various words that are synonyms. For example, Jay asked people to rank on a scale from 1 to 9 how offensive various words. Comparing words referring to the penis (erect or not), the ranking is cock (5.82) > prick (5.74) > dick (5.29) > pecker (5.10) > hard on (4.92) > pud (4.51) > dong (4.25) > penis (4.02) > peter (3.74) > bone (3.29). Among words for the vagina, the offensiveness hierarchy is cunt (6.80) > pussy (5.78) > fur burger (5.63) > twat (5.12) > hairpie (4.37) > beaver (4.25) > poontang (4.02) > vagina (3.51).

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What makes some words more offensive than others? Jay discovered an interesting correlation with frequency. He asked the same people to judge how frequent they thought various taboo words are, and found that the most taboo items were also the most frequent.

When the experiment was conducted in 1978, they didn't have the Internet. That has turned out to be a valuable (though often quirky) way to figure out what is more or less frequent in any language. If you go to the main search page at Google and type in a word, the upper left of the screen tells how many hits that word gets on the web pages of the world.

So Blanche was curious to see if the frequency results from the college survey would match up with frequency results from Google. Though there a few differences, in general the correlation still holds up. In terms for penis, Google gives the following frequencies (in millions of hits): dick (30) > cock (28.4) >penis (22.7) > dong (7.6) > hard-on (3.7) > prick (1.68) > pud (.99) > pecker (.59). (Of these, the numbers for dick and dong are artificially inflated by lots of people with Dick as their first name and Chinese websites with the word dong in them.)

What about Google results in words for vagina? Here we get pussy (45.8) > vagina (7.7) > cunt (5.9) > twat (1.1) > fur-burger (.1) >poontang (.08) > hairpie (.004).

In both sets of synonyms, we can still see Jay's correlation between the words that we use the most frequently and those we consider most obscene. The correlation doesn't work 100 percent of the time, but it usually seems to be the case that if you look at the top two or three most frequent slang terms for a body part, those will also be the terms that are judged most offensive by people in surveys. For the penis, it's pretty clear that cock and dick are both the most frequent and the most offensive. For the vagina, it's pretty clear that pussy and cunt lead the pack in both categories.

Jay doesn't spend much time on why this correlation should exist. It might seem logical that people would try to use the least offensive word available to them-- say pud or pecker-- and reserve the most offensive word - cock-- for very rare occasions. If that were the pattern, then we would see the reverse correlation between frequency and offensive.

Instead, Blanche suspects that something else is going on here. Could it be that becoming frequent is what makes a word offensive to begin with? That hypothesis would say that the more frequently we hear a taboo word, the more offensive it becomes to us. The reason might be that people don't really object so much to the words themselves as to the public discussion of the things they refer to.

That would suggest that whenever a new taboo word gains in frequency, it will also tend to become more offensive. That's not good news for those who hope to change public opinion by changing public language.

We've already seen that with the word gay, which was adopted as a term for our community largely because it represented a less offensive alternative to fagor queer. If Jay's correlation continues to hold, that suggests that as gay becomes more and more common, it will also become more offensive. And we've already seen this happening with school kids, where "That's so gay" has become a common insult.

Miss Poubelle spends much of her time thinking about words and language, and would never want to discourage careful thought about the language we use. But changing language is a poor substitute for changing the attitudes that underlie language. If we merely change the way people talk about us without changing deeper attitudes about homosexuality, Jay's correlation argues that gay will someday become just as offensive as the older words we've tried to leave behind.