Motherfucker, You Say?

I never pegged Asylum for historical scholars, but they seem to have done their research.

The word motherfucker is 120 years old, according to one source, which dates its first use to a Texas court in 1889. However, a variety of valid sources suggest that the polysyllabic word's exact birth date cannot be validated, but that it was likely born between 1900 and 1918. It spread most rapidly during World War II, a global bloodbath for which the word fuck was obviously insufficient, and grew in strength after World War II, when soldiers, upon discharge, brought it home to their families and workplaces.

(Note that some dictionaries date its birth as approximately 1935, when Dallas "Nevada Slim" Turner was known to sing a "bawdy version" of the cowboy ballad "The Strawberry Roan." The verse in question began, "Now I'm here to tell you that bastard could kick, I sez, 'Motherfucker, I'll slice off your prick.'")

Integration of the U.S. armed forces, which began in 1948, also marked a watershed moment for motherfucker, as black and white soldiers united in their quest to make motherfucker an all-purpose verbal weapon. As noted in "Army Speech and the Future of American English" in 1956, it edged out the all-purpose expletive fuck by going "beyond simple obscenity itself, by outraging the most ingrained of human sensibilities."

Many sources cite Norman Mailer's great postwar novel "The Naked and the Dead," published in 1947, as another source for the term's popularity, as Mailer's characters uttered the more acceptable "mother-fuggin" about a half-dozen times in the bestseller. Among his ground-breaking uses: "mother-fuggin sonofabitch," "mother-fuggin truth," "mother-fuggin luck," "mother-fuggin plot" and "mother-fuggin Army."

One might hypothesize that the noun was under such pressure that motherfucker began its rampant, nearly uncontrollable mutation, spawning variations such as mothereffer, muh fuh, mofo, motherplugger, mammy jammer, motherflipper, motherfugging, mother crusher, motherhopper, motherhumper and the much-beloved badass mofo. All of these noun variations also mutated adjectival forms to parallel the development of motherfucking, which could conveniently be used in the same sentence, i.e. "You lazy motherfuckers, get down in the mud and give me 100 motherfucking pushups."

Motherfucker began its slow demise when the acronym "MILF" began to gain positive currency in American popular culture. Anyone who termed anyone a "MILF" immediately branded himself a wannabe mofo; so many took advantage of the new label that nearly every U.S. male over the age of 18 proudly self-identified as either, literally, a motherfucker (one who makes love to someone who is, in fact, a mother); or as one who aspired to, literally, join in sexual congress with someone who was, in fact, a mother.

The term's brain death came about on May 1, 2009, with the publication of "The Complete Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words," by Jim Dawson, a former Marine as well as a former Hustler magazine editor.

The book's publication went virtually unnoticed. Currently ranked 611,095 on Amazon's sales list, it is especially popular, the Web site notes, with literary denizens who purchased "Who Cut the Cheese: A Cultural History of the Fart" (also penned by Dawson.) However, with motherfucker entombed within a biographical reference work, it's working life as a term that could shock and dismay was, for all intents and purposes, over.

This is not to say that Dawson's book is without merit. Among other fascinating tidbits, he explores the multilingual aspects of the term, and argues that its first recorded use dates back to a fifth-century B.C. Greek poet, using his native tongue's metrokoites; this argument is backed up by Michael Schmidt, who wrote about said poet, Hipponax of Ephesus, in "The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets." It is unclear whether Hipponax was able to come up with a proper rhyme for metrokoites; it is clear that he used the term to refer to a motherfucker in the word's most literal, incestuous sense.

Motherfucker's long decline was noted as early as 1991, by author Hugh Rawson, who wrote that motherfucker "now has about as much punch as bastard and bitch" and added injury to insult by noting that motherfucker had a relatively short life span compared to other expletives, such as the simpler fuck.

Fortunately, the term can still be used by those who miss it, but only sparingly. Answers.com suggests that, in times of need, asshole, bastard, cocksucker, dickhead, shit, prick and son of a bitch can do well as stand-ins.