Taking a cuck’s tour
Surprisingly, young women are responsible for starting linguistic trends.
Surprisingly, young women are responsible for starting linguistic trends.
When it comes to the dress code for a swanky do, what exactly is “business”? Google isn’t helpful – “Business attire is more formal than ‘casual’ attire, but less formal than ‘formal’ attire.” I have two ties to choose from and one blazer. I’m not tall enough to make a suit look good, and just wide enough that I look like a bouncer. Imagine me at said swanky do, tugging at my tie and hoping there won’t be an emergency that requires me to move fast to save my life.
The conversation turns, as many do at the moment, to America and the Coming of Trump. Apparently, there has been a dramatic surge in the use of the work “cuck” as a pejorative, but what does it mean? If it’s pejorative, then maybe it’s a misspelling of at least two other words that we know rather better.
At this point, it’s great to have a psycholinguist at the table. In this case, Professor Paul Warren. “Cuck” is a derivative of “cuckold”, the word for a husband oblivious to the fact that his wife is seeking satisfaction elsewhere. It has a rather long history in the context of race relations and prejudice that I won’t go into here. The oblivious husband is the cuck.
I hope Paul won’t mind me outing him as a Listener reader. I infer this from the fact that when I write about language in these columns, I can usually expect an encouraging email or, in more than one case, a beautifully constructed invitation to learn more on whatever topic is involved.
Last time I wrote about language, I delved into some of my earliest research – on the subject of power and persuasion in language. Specifically what was in the early 1990s called “powerless speech”.
Powerless speech was exemplified by the rise in intonation that sometimes occurs at the end of a statement, usually by a (young) woman, when the orthodoxy of the time suggested rising intonation is characteristic of questions. If it’s a statement, the logic goes, why have the rise at the end to make it sound like a question? That just makes people (young women) sound uncertain, signalling their low power status in whatever context it occurs.
Paul is something of an expert on this, which is why he is a professor of linguistics and I am a jack of all trades. In fact, he has written a book on the subject,
Uptalk: The Phenomenon of
Rising Intonation. Thanks to advances in the audio-monitoring tools at our disposal,
Paul points out that we can
“see” that the intonation rise that accompanies a question has a different “shape” from that of a statement-concluding rise.
More than that, humans are quite sensitive to these and can tell the difference. For example, would you nod your head to encourage someone to carry on if they’ve just asked what you recognise as a question? But this is what happens when it’s not a question but has that terminal rise.
Paul argues that we made an early mistake in assuming that because it was documented among young women, this means it signals low status or uncertainty. It transpires that young women are our linguistic innovators – they’re responsible for starting linguistic trends, and the terminal rise is just one of these.
But back to Trump. It seems ironic that “cuck” is the word du jour among the altright. Cuckold itself relates to the behaviour of the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest.
Although it makes sense in the context of infidelity, I can’t help but feel as though it’s Trump who is the cuckoo, and the Republican Party his nest of choice.
The word cuckold relates to the behaviour of the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest.