The slurs you’ve been using without even knowing it

Liar! Bastard! Dill! Just three words banned in Victorian parliament, joining bullshit, prick and patsy. Add rorter to the mix and you have the set. Grub, meanwhile, plus cretin and drongo, can be traded with impunity.

In Canberra, we’ve seen the ruckus a word like racist can trigger. Not to mention liar and the odd f-bomb, both of which have been uttered, then denounced by the house, the terms labelled unparliamentary.

Most rude words are obvious, but some are hiding in plain sight.Credit: Getty Images

Phrases too can push the nasty envelope. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Jacqueline Maley reported on Allegra Spender, the teal independent member for Wentworth, taking to the floor when new in her tenure. Poised to challenge an opposition member over a point of policy, Spender heard behind her shoulder: “Rip him a new one!” Five innocuous words arrayed into one obscene connotation.

On the street, we play by similar rules. Everyone knows the loaded terms, the lewd phrases, and we avoid them or let them fly, depending on our circle. We don’t need Mr Speaker to draft a no-no list as we rely on our own radar. Grandma Jessie hated my B-brigade, from bugger to bloody, so I kept them at bay as a teen, and in the classroom. But set me loose among mates, and the Bs were the least of it.

Linguists call it code-switching. Tribal talk. We adjust our tones, our glossaries, depending on the audience. Yet what about innocent words, or those we imagine to be harmless? While you may avoid smut in your daily intercourse, do you really know where a word has been?

Jess Zafarris can help, the US word nerd offering an effusive book of sly obscenity. Aside from the usual suspects, are you aware of the bigotry of maroon? The sexism of paraphernalia? Words From Hell (Chambers, 2023) spills the beans, the subtitle promising lexical scandal: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology.

Slavery is a stain on Western history, and the dictionary. Maroon is one such blotch. Chestnut in French is marron, the origin of the shade. No problems there. Yet maroon the verb is a corruption of cimarron in Old Spanish, meaning untamed. This feral sense soon transferred to runaway slaves in the early 1700s, emerging from American colonies in the Caribbean.

Or consider concierge (from conservus in Latin), translating as fellow slave. Just as vernacular draws on verna, Latin again, meaning home-born slave. In chains with galoot, what grandma Jessie often called me, a fond dig echoing galeoto in Spanish: galley slave. Even ciao, Slav and robot carry covert roots of serfdom.

As for paraphernalia, this fancy term for stuff bears a patriarchal past. Beware when you cite the word you’re alluding to the goods a wife brings to her marriage over and above her dowry. Equivalent sexism imbues hysteria (from womb in Greek) or spinster, while frenzy has an ableist aura, ascribing panic to a neural disorder, in tandem with bedlam and delirium.

Even the words we recognise as edgy, like syphilis or pudenda, own iffy rap sheets. The former draws on pig-love (don’t ask), the latter literally “items of shame”. As for sardonic and scallywag, know you’re bagging two islands: Sardinia (with its face-contorting herb, ranunculus) and the Shetlands village of Scalloway, where many poor locals left to connive (“wink together”) a life in America.

On second thoughts, maybe we do need a no-no list, as Zafarris shows how English is one furtive mess. Some slurs are plain; others hide in plain sight.

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