On Foul-Mouthed Footballers

England's Finest

In the UK it has been a sad week for models of manhood. The captain of Chelsea Football Team, and erstwhile captain of England, was filmed calling a professional colleague with darker skin than his a “fucking black cunt”. But John Terry’s outburst has this week been officially judged not to count legally as a use of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour or disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress” in which “the offence was racially aggravated”. Beyond belief.

 

Catullus, Expert at Homosocial Insults

In Regina vs. Terry, the she-monarch whose name rhymes with "vagina" as well as "angina", lost her case. I wonder if she objected, as did all the women I discussed it with yesterday, to the lack of public outcry against Terry’s use of the horribly misogynist word for the elastic fibromuscular tube connecting a woman’s womb with the outside world.  While Lisa Brown was recently banned from addressing the Michigan House of Representatives for using the less ideologically laden term "vagina", it is apparently fine for a world-famous Centre Back, who also happens to be the father of 6-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, to scream "cunt" viciously on TV screens across the world.   

 Lampard coaches Terry in Latin Slang

Why does the birth canal supply the English language with by far its worst swear word? Terry's other term "Knobhead" sounds so wholesome and jolly in comparison.

Perhaps one solution would be for Terry to take more lessons in swearing from his Chelsea vice-captain, Frank Lampard, a talented Latinist who scored an A* in the ancient language at GCSE. How much more fitting for the homosocial world of football for Terry to hurl threats at his colleagues like "pedicabo vos et irrumabo", "I will bugger and facefuck" you, as Catullus threatens two of his male acquaintances in his 16th poem. 

Or if Terry really wants racist abuse, how about St. Jerome’s verbal assault on the British heretic Pelagius, whom he addressed as a "slanty-head" and a "fat mountain hound"  who was "weighed down with Scottish porridge" (Scotiis pultibus pregravatus). [Actually, Pelagius was an ascetic whose worst crime was to believe in free will].

The one illumination I have experienced this week was learning about the application of the term "choc-ice" by some black people to another who colludes with white power—however dark his or her skin, the "choc-ice" is effectively white inside. 

Pelagius, "Scottish porridge-eater"

A classical scholar I know, ostensibly a flirtatious female, was persuaded in the 1980s by some male dons at Oxford University to argue AGAINST the provision of childcare for staff. As Madeleine Albright said, there is a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women in public life. 

What I want is a term which with equal economy and pungency as "choc-ice" describes women who suck up to men and collaborate with them against other women—pink on the outside but blue on the inside. "Feminine cryptophallocrats" doesn’t really roll off the tongue. We need this word to describe the WAGS, the women who fight each other for the right to prostitute themselves with overpaid footballers. Suggestions welcome.