I make no claim of superiority for ‘my’ genre though, because with a few exceptions mainstream indie has been awful for a while too, but I don’t get the impression that the truly aggressively anti-social stuff has been quite so bad.

I am still trying to figure out where the awful cartoonish portrayal is coming from – from within the community itself, from marketing execs trying to sell to a suburban audience, from execs who want a simplistically defined product, or from whom?

Maybe it’s like many prejudicial stereotypes: starts off outside the community in question and is slowly co-opted by them as a way of taking it off the people who are prejudiced against them.

Yes, there is an enormous amount of ugly pigheaded hiphop sprayed all over the media, but there is as much again, maybe more clever, thoughtful, conscious, witty, self-deprecating and downright life-affirming music out there if you can be bothered to look beyond MTV and shite payola radio.

I make a point of never watching music tv, reading mainstream music/style mags, listening to corporate radio. I get my new music from switched-on friends and djs, conscious bloggers, internet radio, good record shops -remember them? – for great hiphop try:

http://www.fatcity.co.uk/sales/

The renewed enjoyment I’ve found in music over the past ten or more years since I ditched any form of advertised/hyped music has been immense, and has led me to discover many amazing artists and tracks. Hiphop, as can be said for so much music today, is a genuine artform that has been perverted by the industry to reinforce stereotypes and make a ton of money.

Roots Manuva’s Witness never fails to get a party started (or provide the end of night anthem). I have just done a dirty re-edit which you can find on my blog-

http://floormanpresents.blogspot.com/

Keep on digging for the goodstuff, and stop buying/listening to the bad – then it may stop…

I promise I’ll behave the next time you go away.

I always thought of cwtch as a tender and compassionate word, used as it in Welsh families to mean ‘cuddle’.

From now on I’ll think twice when someone says “Aww.. give us a cwtch..”

And you’ve given me a delicious new term of endearment to use on my mates down the pub.. “Oi! You fuckin’ quimwedge!”

Lovely, lovely stuff..

Cheers!

quite the response drunk country.

Yes, it has female/sexual links (that cannot be denied) but, like a whole host of words which are now in common use & no longer bear the mark of ‘violently’ derogatory due to the passage of time & assimilation, it is only offensive to those who carry the baggage of a long dead direct association (specifically, in this case, to a derogatory term meaning ‘whore’ or ‘prostitute’). It gets flak because it is such a powerful cnostruction of a word in itself – mono-syllabic, heavy on vowel expression, the hardness of the “cuh” & “nnn” sounds, & the stress relationship between the ‘uh’ & the ‘tuh’ sounds, all add up to the way it bursts out of your mouth even when said softly. Some may consider this ’sound’ aggressive or offensive, I consider it almost a perfect word albeit one that should be used wisely & economically, yet devoid of censorship & misguided fear.

Cunt isn’t a word that’s in general use in Drunk COuntry House mainly because I think it is (a) a beauiful word in danger of being anethetised through over use & (b) quite a shocking word*, again in danger of being anethetised through over use. Now, you might counter, I use it a handful of times in my poorly informed diatribes above & therefore am adding to the dumbing/numbing of its overall effect. I do, I hope, use it with some tongue in cheek & not too inaccessible humour & it is considered as such; I also do like the use of the word (in the same way as Fuck or Nigger – another beautiful word with such damning connotations – are sometimes used) as a shock device i.e. usage for usage sake in the complete polar opposite of its usual ‘comfort’ zone (think the Tea Shop scene in Withnail & I).

However, & this is where I am positive our paths, alisalove, most certainly divide, I am using the term with its contemporary usage & meaning – i.e. as an insult absolutely not directly associated with female genitalia. In the UK at least it’s a long time since Cunt has been a serious & direct associate of Pussy, Vagina, Fanny, Snatch, et al. I don’t even think it’s that prevalent in the hardcore porn industry these days, simply because it isn’t deemed a particularly attractive term, even when utilized within the sexually semi-aggressive context of “fuck me in my fucking tight, wet cunt you fucking fuck; I love it” or somesuch.

I get the juxtapositioning of the insult & its assumed comparison with the female sex organ, i.e. the usual aggression behind the usage must therefore transfer to the user’s opinion of the female genitalia &, by proxy, females themselves. That, I think, really is a very old & lazy method of crying victim for the sake of crying victim. If nothing else that statement alone will probably have me hunted down by a radical feminist element.

A short history lesson courtesy of a handful of etymology sites that can reduce the thinking on this kind of topic far neater than I: Cunt is believed to derive from a Germanic root kunton “female genitalia”, which also gave rise to Old Norse kunta (ancestor of Norwegian & Swedish dialectical kunta & Danish dialectical kunte), Old Frisian, Middle Low German & Middle Dutch kunte, & the English doublet quaint.

By the way, the word wasn’t always considered derogatory, even though it is today. Be careful about assuming that a word’s modern connotations must have governed its formation. Also, no connection has been made between the Germanic & Latin cunnus. The proto-Germanic root of cunt is ku- i.e. “hollow place”, while the Indo-European root of Latin cunnus is (s)keu- “to cover, to conceal”, the etymological meaning of cunnus being “sheath”.

‘Cu’ also has associations with knowledge: ‘can’ & ‘ken’ (both ‘to know’) evolved from the ‘cu’/'ku’ prefix. Indeed, there is a significant linguistic connection between sex & knowledge: one can ‘conceive’ both an idea & a baby, and ‘ken’ means both ‘know’ & ‘give birth’. ‘Ken’ shares a genealogical meaning with ‘kin’ & ‘kind’, from the Old English ‘cyn’ & the Gothic ‘kuni’

In Celtic & modern Welsh, ‘cu’ is rendered as ‘cw’, a similarly feminine prefix influencing the Old English ‘cwithe’ (‘womb’), from the Welsh ‘cwtch’. Interestingly, ‘cwtch’ (also ‘cwtch’, with modern forms ‘cwts’ and ‘cwtsh’) means ‘hollow place’ as a noun (& is thus another vaginal metaphor) & ‘hide’ as a verb. ‘Cwm’ also shares the ‘cw’ prefix, however its feminine origins seem initially perplexing, as it means ‘valley’. In fact, this topographical definition is clearly a vaginal metaphor, as valleys are as furrowed & fertile as vaginas (although the Welsh slang words for ‘vagina’ are ‘cont’ & ‘chuint’ rather than ‘cwm’). Viz magazine (William H Bollocks, 1997) punned on the sound of the Welsh phrase ‘pobol y cwm’ (‘people of the valley’) with ‘pobolycwm’, defined as “people who like quim”.

‘Cwm’ is pronounced ‘come’, though ‘quim’, an English slang term for ‘vagina’, is a mispronounced Anglicisation of it. ‘Quim’ has been extended to form ‘quimwedge’ (literally ‘vaginal wedge’, thus ‘penis’), which is especially interesting as it utilises ‘wedge’ to mean ‘penis’ when, in fact, ‘cunt’ itself derives from the Latin for ‘wedge’ (‘cuneus’).

So there’s a lot of reasons the word’s meaning/usage has evolved from simply female genitalia to a direct, aggressive, vulgar insult. All the connotations of & interpretive values of the sexual possibilities of the variants of the word’s origins are all mixed up with the formation of, as we know it, the English language.

The transgression of the F-Bomb, as my mate Ed in New York calls it, is a serious factor in the retardation of said common language – by that he means the more in use, say, the Fuck word is, the more available it is to vulnerable ears who retain its function minus the impact, the less of a threat it becomes, the less of a statement it makes & so on. Cunt is used as punctuation in certain parts of my home city (& I know for an absolute fact it is used without flinch, almost like breathing in & out, in certain parts of Edinburgh & Glasgow & the like) – the traveller encampments on the fringes of Cardiff for example, parents & children, are littered with its use (albeit with bile & gritted teeth). BUT I know for a fact it is not consciously used as a comparison to or an opinion of a lady’s front bum.

Not sure what dylan means by enlightened minority either. If anyone’s ever read the drowned in sound boards and comments you’d quickly realise the enlightened minority all sound like snobby cunts