An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. Editor: Geoffrey Hughes. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006.
Clearly this term represents in its literal sense the violation of the most extreme sexual taboo, that of incest, and has thus been long regarded as a heinous term unmatched in impact. It essentially encapsulates the potent Oedipal archetype identified by Sigmund Freud as a form of illicit subconscious desire. (There is, curiously, no corresponding expression of the Electra complex, that is, no fatherfucker.) However, the articulation of the desire in such gross terms represents in an intensified form a violation of both cultural and verbal taboos.
The literal Freudian emphasis suggests that the taboo and its violation are a European fixation, since the insulting injunction “Go and have intercourse with your mother!” is highly dispersed among European languages (some of which extend the invitation to one’s sister). Ernest Hemingway remarked in a letter from Spain in 1929: “In a purely conversational way in a Latin language in an argument one man says to another ‘Cogar su madre!'” Malinowski covered incestuous swearing in a number of cultures, commenting that it was a specialty of the Slavic peoples (1927, 106-7). Similar idioms have been recorded among the Cape York aborigines of Australia, according to Ashley Montagu (1973, 17), and in Cameroon pidgin in the form “Chak yu mami!” (Todd 1984, 104). The Vietnamese du-ma is recorded from 1983 in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1997).
The term and its currency are paradoxical on a number of grounds. In the first place, unlike bastard and bugger, the word is hardly ever used literally. Random House describes the literal use as “rare,” but gives no clear examples, carrying the concessive usage note: “usu. considered vulgar,” rather than “taboo.” The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) classifies it as “coarse slang.” The Random House Dictionary has many examples of the general meaning, “a despicable or contemptuous [sic] man or woman.” First instances have been steadily backdated as dictionaries have become bolder, and currently date from 1928, although some authorities claim uses as early as about 1900. Several quotations are highly emotive, such as this from 1935: “Motherfucker, I’ll slice off your prick” (Logsdon, Whorehouse Bells, 95) and the threat in the radical newspaper Black Panther in 1973: “We will kill any motherfucker that stands in the way of our freedom” (16).
Historically the word was originally exclusive to the provenance of Black American English, and it is a possible speculation that it was carried over from a pidgin or creole form of the kind cited earlier. Its expansion into general American parlance started at the time when this variety was starting to show a resurgence of obscenity after a long period of puritanical restraint. (A similar development surrounded the earlier emergence of cocksucker.) The reasons for the more generalized usage are usually given as the integration of the American army in the late 1940s and the spread of the term with the demobilized troops returning from wars in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. An article on “Army Speech and the Future of American English” in 1956 offered the following explanation: “This linguistic vacuum [created by the overuse and resulting enfeeblement of fuck] is being filled by a new obscenity symbol, motherfucker, which goes beyond simple obscenity itself by outraging the most engrained of human sensibilities” (American Speech XXXI, May 1956, 111). Certainly one early source for the euphemistic variant motherfugger was Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead (1947).
The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang separates a sense (b), designated as Black English & Military and defined as “(with reduced force) fellow; person; (hence) a close friend or admirable person,” with quotations from 1958, including the definition in Dictionary of American Speech (1967): “A familiar, jocular even affectionate term of address between males.” Clarence Major’s lexicon of African-American slang, Juba to Jive (1994), claims a greater historical time span (1790s–1990s) and even wider application: “profane form of address; a white man; any man; anybody; of black origin; sometimes derogatory, sometimes used affectionately; other times used playfully.” A further sense is that of “a difficult or infuriating situation” recorded from 1947.
As is typical with such powerful terms, a great number of euphemisms proliferate in the semantic field, including motherfuyer (1935), motherfeyer (1946), mothersucker (1946), motherfouler (1947), motherjumper (1949), motherlover (1950), motherhubba (1959), mother-raper (1959), motherhumper (1963), and mothergrabber (1963). The plain euphemistic form mother is recorded form 1935 and has become extremely common. (The dates are sourced from the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.)
Clearly, context is vital in determining the degree of insult. Yet there has obviously been surprising relaxation in usage over recent decades. Lenny Bruce’s complaint about the lighting of a show in 1967 (“Where is that dwarf motherfucker?”) in part led to his arrest for violating Penal Code Section 311.6—that is, uttering obscene words in a public place (Rawson 1991, 258). However, a “poetic” usage by Sonia Sanchez in “TCB” (Broadside Press, 1970) provoked no such response. The work consisted of three-line “verses” arranged in “incremental repetition” along the following scheme:
wite/motha/fucka
wite/motha/fucka
wite/motha/fucka
whitey
The burden is repeated six times, the only significant variation being the following ethnic insults that are substituted for whitey: namely ofay, devil, pig, cracker, and honky. The work ends with a call for collaboration: “now. That it’s all sed / let’s get to work.” The term has become common in films dealing with African Americans (such as those by Spike Lee) and the underworld.
The term has been exclusively confined to American usage. Norman Moss made the observation in his British/American Dictionary (1984) that motherfucker is a term “so obscene as to be beyond the bounds of native British speech.” That observation still holds, in spite of the infiltration of much American slang into British English. It surfaces only occasionally in Britain. When the pop star Madonna presented the Turner Prize awards in London in 2002, she created a mediated furor with her egalitarian exclamation: “Right on, motherfuckers—everyone is a winner!” While the popular press was outraged, a spokesman for Tate Britain described the remarks as “vintage Madonna. It is the sort of thing people expect her to say.” The term is not current in Australian or South African English.
Although context is vital, the term clearly shows the familiar semantic process of loss of intensity. Rating the term in 1991, Hugh Rawson commented that it “now has about as much punch as much bastard and bitch.” But, he continues, “the effective lives of the latter words were measured in centuries, while motherfucker was a force to be reckoned with for only a few decades” (1991, 258).