LITMIR.BIZ

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value – was actually a major city in the African nation of Mali. Imagine growing up there, and discovering that the entire Western world believes your hometown is a joke. It’s a bit like being born in Essex.

      The point is that, in the collective imagination rather than on the map of what we used to call, both patronisingly and racistly, ‘The Dark Continent’, ‘Bumfuck’ and ‘Timbuktu’ are twin towns. The fact that one of them exists and the other (probably) doesn’t – not yet, anyway – is an irrelevance. They’re both symbols of being so far off the beaten track that there simply isn’t a track to beat. So being sent to Bumfuck is even worse than being sent to Coventry, which is almost certainly twinned with Timbuktu.

      The Animal (F’)Kingdom

      Many of God’s creatures have found their way into the lexicon of English swearing, from the humble lark to the mighty … well, duck.

      BEARS: There is a Canadian TV series that you may have missed, entitled Trailer Park Boys: it’s the kind of thing that Chris Lilley of Summer Heights High fame might have dreamed up if he came from Nova Scotia and couldn’t afford a tripod for his camera. And in this series a new phrase was added to the language: ‘fucked by bears’. Besides its literal meaning, and the related sense of being attacked by our ursine cousins, it also carries wider connotations, as the worst possible experience that anyone can imagine. Especially if they’ve spent their entire lives in Nova Scotia.

      CAT: Let’s leave the poor ‘pussy’, in all its permutations, out of this, OK? Suffice to say here that if you ‘fuck up someone’s pussy’, you are not necessarily having sexual intercourse (though you might be). A polite translation of this phrase might be ‘winding up a rival’, and interfering with their cat might hit the spot perfectly. If someone does that to you, you might scream ‘Fuck a cat!’ in frustration.

      CHIMP: For some reason, cartoonists around the world often portrayed President George ‘Dubya’ Bush as a chimp. So you can probably guess the prime target of the casual insult, ‘fuck-chimp’, which doesn’t mean that he’s good in bed. It simply denotes somebody who is hopelessly out of his depth.

      COW: A dictionary of casual sexism would be bigger than the Bible and more depressing than the latest list of bankers’ bonuses. With the innocent cow already figuring in countless insults aimed at women, it’s not surprising that, by extension, it has also been dragged into describing parts of the female anatomy. The result – a triumph of the same refined twenty-first-century imagination that brought you the Kardashian family – is the word ‘fuck udders’, as a way of describing a pair of breasts. The intelligence of the person who coined this addition to our lustrous language is demonstrated by the fundamental non sequitur at its heart. I can understand (though not condone) a young man who has no female friends describing breasts (as they sometimes do) as ‘fuck handles’. And I can see (but not etc etc) the link between breasts and udders: keeping the species alive, and all that. But ‘fuck udders’ suggests that someone needs some very basic sex education lessons.

      DOG: ‘Fucking the dog’ is military slang for anything that seems like a complete waste of time (everything except fighting and drinking, in other words). A soldier could feel that he is ‘fucking the dog’ when the sergeant-major tells him to ‘paint that fence white, and then paint it black’. By association, the gallant infantryman may choose to ‘fuck the dog’ by engaging in something that is utterly pointless but looks useful (such as painting the fence), to avoid being commandeered for something less pleasant (e.g. cleaning out the latrines). It is probably best not to imagine what kind of bitter experience led to the original coining of this phrase, which apparently originated during the First World War in a more genteel variant, ‘walking the dog’. Or you might prefer to ‘fornicate the poodle’ (other breeds are also available). Some sources transfer the blame from the dog to the duck, incidentally, and offer a more polite alternative: ‘stroke the duck’.

       The abbreviation FTD, which probably ought to stand for ‘fuckingly transmitted disease’, is sometimes used by members of the military to summarise the pointlessness of their duties (see above). But there’s also an extended version of the phrase, which commands the lowly private to ‘fuck the dog and sell the pups’. What began as an expression of the meaninglessness of army existence has slowly crossed into civilian life, to the point where a young man might lust vainly over a celebrity on the internet, and boast to his equally retarded friends that he would be delighted to have the opportunity to impregnate her and then dispose of her babies. Not recommended as a chat-up line, though.

       More recently, young Americans have transferred the humble ‘dog-fuck’ from sexual braggadocio to non-related aspects of everyday life, as a synonym for trouble – ‘deep doo-doo’ or ‘deep shit’, in other words. And, of course, two sexual practices that can often be one and the same – entry from the rear and anal intercourse – have often been decorated with the ‘dog-fuck’ description, otherwise known as ‘doggy-fuck’ or ‘doggie-fuck’ – or, more traditionally, ‘doing it doggy style’.

       Inevitably, there is also a ‘fuckdog’ on the prowl: yet another of the marvellously inventive ways invented by young men to describe a young woman of their acquaintance who might actually enjoy having sex. But it can also be applied the other way around, you’ll be amazed to hear. If you’d been in Portland, Oregon in 2001, incidentally, you could have witnessed a theatrical production of something called Poona the Fuckdog. I’m waiting till it hits Broadway. Those with a musical bent can check out the 1995 album by metal band Autopsy. It’s called Shitfun, contains tracks called ‘Bowel Ripper’ and ‘I Sodomize Your Corpse’, but is worthy of mention here for the 42-second song, ‘Fuckdog’. If someone tells you that they’ve just fucked a dog in the river, don’t look for their water wings: they simply mean they’ve hidden something (probably deeply illegal) where it will not be found.

      DONKEY: Not noted for their intelligence, donkeys are the ideal way to signal your complete ignorance, suggesting that you’ve blundered your way through something without a clue – as in the phrase, ‘I had to fuck a donkey in that meeting’. No asses were harmed in the course of this discussion.

      DUCK: Quite how the harmless duck found itself the target of the exasperated exclamation ‘Fuck a duck’ is a mystery to historians of Britain’s verbal curiosities – though the internal rhyming scheme certainly didn’t hurt. Its first appearance in print was apparently in the expletive-soaked pages of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. More recently it’s inspired entire phrases, such as ‘Fuck a duck and see what hatches’ and ‘Fuck a duck and give it a buck’. Linguistic experts claim that the original inspiration was the word ‘duckfucker’, the person on board a transatlantic ship who was charged with keeping the domestic animals alive, rather than pleasuring them in exotic ways. This word in turn entered American stoner slang as a term for an annoying idiot. As the award-winning Italian film Padre Padrone demonstrated all too graphically, young men in remote country districts have been known to explore their budding sexual urges with the help of a handily placed chicken. But ducks probably flap about too much to make that a satisfying liaison. Two examples of Cockney rhyming slang might also be worth a quack at this point: Donald Duck, and goose & duck. You can probably work out what they rhyme with. The simple joy of creating a rhythm explains the American phrase ‘fucked duck’, which is basically anyone – any species, in fact – which is doomed for destruction. Sounds like an ideal slogan for the Green Party. You might say ‘I’ll fuck a dead duck!’ on occasions when ‘Blow me down with a feather’ simply doesn’t capture the full extent of your surprise. Being told to ‘Go fuck a duck’ (or a dog, for that matter) is an impolite way of being sent to hell, presumably coined by someone who has actually experimented with trans-species congress. If you are a ‘fuck duck’, you either have sex regularly with your friends or with people who aren’t your friends. And finally, if someone says that you ‘fuck a duck’, they are suggesting that perhaps you might be spreading your favours too widely. Unless, of course, you really are hanging out too much at your local duck pond.

      GOAT: Goats are altogether too frisky to be fucked in the ‘sheep’ sense (see below). Indeed, the

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