‘WHAT a c***.” The three small words – guess the third –that cost Channel Four News’s anchorman Krishnan Guru-Murthy a week’s banishment from his big chair. Guru-Murthy’s insult was captured off stage, not on air, as he was tailing off from a sharp exchange with Tory MP and Brexit hardman Steve Baker.

Is such an unguarded moment familiar to you? Do you recognise this choice of vocabulary? Both of my hands are aloft. I am on the point of reform about ever using it again. But the incident is also a great opportunity to explore language, taboo and power, now and across the ages.

Just to illustrate the very point, I asked my fine editors what The National’s style-book said about the c-word. “We are fairly liberal, Pat,” came the measured reply, “but it’s c*** for that one.” So, them’s the r***s).

Let’s measure the taboo by what Krish could have said, on a spectrum of genital insults: “twat” or “fud” on the female side, “prick”, “dick”, “bastard”, “wanker” or “fucker” on the (mostly) male side, with “arsehole” or “shit” possibly occupying the neutral zone.

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The options – there are many more – at least illuminate the core challenge of swearing. It’s the performance of a deep-seated, near-involuntary emotion, aggressive or defensive, that is triggered by a fundamental challenge to your being.

One that reaches for the sexual and the excremental to express itself. (Guru-Murthy’s very competence as an interviewer was being questioned live on TV by Baker, which might explain his need to lash out.) There are acres of excellent, multidisciplinary scholarship to be explored here. But let’s get into it from the leading edge – the reason why one would call for the asterisks, the very blurring of the sight of the term, in the first place. Why is the “worst word”, the most contemptuous insult we can manage, a term for female genitalia? Isn’t this, clearly and plainly, an act of the sheerest misogyny?

Towering 1970s feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, believed this was so – the notion that the greatest taboo term for men is a woman reduced to her most “essential, criminal part” (Dworkin).

Interestingly, their peer Germaine Greer has been ambivalent about the word over the years. In the early 70s, she wrote an article for Suck magazine, titled, “Lady, Love Your C***”. When reporting on taboo terms for the BBC in the mid-2000s, Greer expressed a preference for the c-word over “vagina”, which has an etymology of being “a sheath for a sword”. Yet she also held that the c-word “was sacred … a word of immense power, to be used sparingly”.

The much younger feminist writer Laurie Penny wrote in 2011 that “it’s the only word we [women] have to describe the female genitalia that is neither mawkish, nor medical, nor a function of pornography”. Penny relates causing a storm when she used it at a leftie conference, noting that “people who were currently cheerleading calls for a general strike and/or the overthrow of the government … still considered a young woman saying “c***” in public a little too, too much.”

Could, or should, the c-word be reclaimed for women’s autonomy and empowerment, in the way that the n-word was by black American communities, artists and activists? The cultural roots of the term both does and doesn’t support this.

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On one side, scholar Catherine Blackledge has identified “kunthi” as referring to female genitalia in the Sanskrit language, while a Hindu nature goddess bore the name “Kunti” as well. In the 25th century BC, the word “kunt” was discovered in the texts of an Egyptian vizier named Ptahhotep, used as a term of respect for women. (The Egyptian for mother is “k’at”, which means “the body of her”).

On the other side, linguist Kate Warwick notes the c-word’s early use in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, particularly in the Miller’s Tale. “As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte;/And prively he caughte hir by the queynte.” What Warwick calls the association of c*** with “nasty and devious” can be seen to begin here.

AS I previously noted, the c-word is one end of a continuum of explosive, sex-and-shit-oriented taboo words. Maybe we can make our assessments on how we should use the term, based on the power and functionality of swearing in general.

A comprehensive overview of swearing research was published earlier this month, in the journal Lingua. Maybe predictably, the parts of the brain that activate when we swear are primary and primitive – the amygdala and the basal ganglia of our “limbic system”.

We also find that the more you swear when you plunge your hand into icy water, the more painkillers are flooded into your neurophysiology (compared to politer words). Also, swearing increases your physical strength – while it also blocks your brain’s cognitive processing of other words.

Most fascinating are some findings about why swearing is so explosive within us. As the authors write in The Conversation: “Like music, swearing possibly takes on new meaning in adolescence. It becomes an important way to respond to the intense emotions we tend to have during this time, and an act that signals independence from parents and connection with friends. So, swear words and songs used during this time may become forever linked with important and highly memorable experiences.”

It’s not news to me (and, I bet also, not to Guru-Murthy) that an outburst of swearing returns me to the struggles of my youth, and all those challenges faced by my frail and emerging sense of self-mastery.

If you listen to Krish’s giggled phrase in the clip, he’s deploying “c***” as an enjoyable way to rebond with his production team, while a rude political beast slouches off into the distance. Has that ever happened to me in rock ’n’ roll, activism or organisations – the c-word used as a way to define in-group from out-group, “good guy” from “wank”? C’mon. Is the Pope a Marxist?

We shouldn’t forget the claims made by writers such Irvine Welsh and others (including socio-linguists), that the Scottish use of the c-word is distinctively different. The examples often cited are Scots calling phone-ins, who obliviously use the phrases “anyc***” and “everyc***” when talking about their fellow football fans, or culinary practices.

For example, there’s Dan calling into the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen on December 2018 (available on YouTube). Plaintively he asks: “You ken what it’s like this time of year, everyc***’s banging on about parsnips and all that, so what’s a barry side for Christmas?”

(Welsh is obviously a master modulator of the term: ”Ah wis the c*** wi the fuckin pool cue in ma hand, n the plukey c*** could huv the fat end ay it in his pus if he wanted, like.”) I’m not going to shelter behind all that, I’m afraid. Whenever I’ve been called the c-word in a public space – and hoping that some of Greer’s “immense power” can be channelled into the situation – I do try to remember to say, “thank you so much. I’m honoured!” And then, inexplicably, I’m running … But for myself, it’s an omerta on the negative use of c*** from now on, at least as an enunciating bloke in a still-sexist society. When the Hindu nature goddess returns to us in her full flowering – “beautiful, intelligent and shrewd”, as the Mahabharata describes her – you can let this soft c*** know.