The Hole Truth

It’s already almost impossible to respond to the recent flurry over a repellent observation from Washington concerning African countries and Haiti, but I will try here to be grown up about this.

Let’s turn our attention to Bodleian Rawlinson Poetry 148, an Oxford manuscript that is having its moment in the sun (something manuscripts do not in fact like), owing to the curious fact that this 1629 document is the first recorded instance in the noble English language of That Word.

You know which one. The word that’s now the object of a reverse cooptation, as people proudly identify aspects of their lives and heritage, even their homes, with what The New York Times calls a “disparaging” term.

Indeed.

Ben Zimmer has already written about Rawlinson Poetry 148 in The Atlantic, pointing out that the context of That Word is a scabrous verse left to us by one John Lilliat.

As the holiday season recedes from us at light speed, it’s comforting to know that the first occurrence of That Word is a bit of doggerel that reads like “The 12 Days of Christmas” with poop jokes in every line. It begins “ten tuff Turds.” The melody is up to you.  (You can even consult the annotated text, published in 1985 by the University of Delaware Press and edited by Edward Doughtie.

The early 17th century might have been the dawn of poop jokes in printed English literature (at least one of the dawns in this perennial genre). In his great 1614 comedy Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson created a bad-tempered character who is given to the expletive “a turd i’ your teeth” — more or less an order to eat feces. You can see how polite I’m being.

The bunghole, a standard feature of a drum or barrel, became a vulgar name for one’s bottom at least by 1653, when Thomas Urquhart translated Rabelais’s riotous and deeply strange Gargantua and Pantagruel into riotous, deeply strange English.

There are lots more vulgarisms in the x+hole format. Even readers of Lingua Franca will have heard them. And there are other words in the x+hole formula that seem to flirt with nastiness rather than diving in.

You may know the expression cakehole or piehole, an English vulgarism for the mouth. “Shut your cakehole!” is an expression I’m sure I first heard on the classic Britcom Are You Being Served? 

Then there’s The Onion, which publishes Clickhole, a parody of clickbait, and maybe inaugurated click+noun, a new verbal construct for our distracted times. 

But to the vulgarism of the moment: One of the most interesting features of That Word is the response of the media. Who can say it on television? Can it show up silently on the crawl? Could it be OK in text but not in a headline? What publications require the visual display s—hole or maybe the starry form  s***hole?

Indeed, The New York Times and other gray ladies of the fourth estate must now figure out whether That Word either remains verboten or can now be safely printed (at what risk? of alienating the same readers who are encountering it in social media or other outlets?). Time, and possibly Time, will tell.

Meanwhile, in The Washington Post an article by Samantha Schmidt reports on how non-Anglophone publications are struggling to translate That Word when used as a modifier for countries.

The results are pretty funny. “Countries that are dirty like toilets,” an approximation of the Japanese effort to explain the term, is both clinical and discreet. I especially admire the poetic Taiwanese version, where the Phrase in Question is translated as “countries where no birds lay eggs.”

In this bizarre linguistic-political moment, where every new day brings a new not very bon mot, those ten tuff turds are seeming more and more like business as usual.

And that’s my holistic view of the matter.