The C-bomb has been defused. Now we weaponise more dangerous words

As I crossed the road the other day, a motorist called me a c—.

My first reaction was to give him a fruity reply, but on reflection, I had taken the zebra crossing on my bike and neither acknowledged nor thanked him for stopping, so he had a point. I’d given him two reasons to call me a c—.

His tone was more weary than venomous, as if I was just the latest in a long line of c—s he’d had to deal with that day. He didn’t have to call me that word, but as the saying goes, life’s disappointments are easier to take if you can swear at them. So I gave him a nod. Far from a sign of the decline of civil society, our brief encounter was peacefully resolved to mutual agreement.

It’s always said something about our misogynist culture that a slang word for female genitalia is our most offensive word. By contrast, you can call someone a dick or a prick or a cock and it doesn’t even get blanked out of a family newspaper. But no matter what the body part, our forbidden language – and our threshold for offence – is quickly moving beyond the sexual organs and their functions.

Beyonce is currently performing her live show in front of a sign saying “KNTY 4 U”. The drag artist Ru Paul has a song titled Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve & Talent. From the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to social media, the word c— has been weaponised in favour of abortion rights. Fifty years ago, Germaine Greer started the reclaim with an essay titled, “Lady, love your c—”. The reclamation has taken a while, but the ladies have spoken. As a Rolling Stone article pronounced last month, “the most offensive word in the English language is having quite a moment”.

(That said, it’s still a work in progress. The shower of c—s in Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson’s text messages before he was sacked shows that the word, reclaimed like Barbie by today’s empowered generation of women, is still in the arsenal of yesterday’s misogynists.)

C— is just the latest swear word to lose its oomph, in a generational process. As with all economies, oversupply dilutes value. In Australia, where one of our great contributions to the English language is our supply of invective, we had the ball rolling when, during the 1932-33 Bodyline cricket series, Australian vice-captain Victor Richardson asked his teammates who had offended the English captain Douglas Jardine. “Which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?” Half a century later, Richardson’s grandsons Ian and Greg Chappell enriched the tradition as Australian cricket captains. (Although, when I was working on a book with Greg Chappell around 2011, he asked me to delete his swear words. Why, I asked. “My mum might read it,” he said.)

Australia wasn’t alone in flooding the market. Russian obscenities date to the Middle Ages. The French, epic lovers of obscenity, had normalised their word for c— to such a degree that when used by Serge Gainsbourg in Je t’aime Moi Non Plus, his 1968 duet with the late Jane Birkin, it sounds a little sexy.