Norman Mailer was particularly fond of this usage. Their records from 1898 include an account in which the word is offered almost as grounds for murder: A defendant suggests that he should be partially excused of killing a man just because the man had called him a “ mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch.” The earliest citation of the noun motherfucker (as opposed to motherfucking) tells of a man who faced a different kind of punishment for wielding the word: After a black soldier sent a defiant letter to his draft board in which he called them “ low-down Mother Fuckers,” he was court-martialed and did ten years of hard labor.īy World War II the word was used to refer to something “unpleasant, difficult, formidable, or oppressive,” i.e., a pain in the ass. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals apparently felt more comfortable printing the word just a few years later. State, where witnesses describe a defendant being called a “ God damned mother-f-cking, bastardly son-of-a-bitch.” It’s perhaps revealing that, of the four expletives, mother-fucking is the only one to get censored.
#What does the word mojo mean trial#
The OED’s first citation of the word comes from the Texas Court of Appeals’ account of the 1889 trial of Levy v. The earliest citations of motherfucker and motherfucking in the Oxford English Dictionary come from the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, and they give a sense for how seriously the word was taken. People have been calling each other motherfuckers for over a century, but until World War II the term was typically used as an insult. When did it become badass to be a “motherfucker”?Īround the 1950s.
The most memorable line in Zero Dark Thirty, the one that prompted its own article in the Los Angeles Times this month, comes when the hero (played by Jessica Chastain) defiantly tells the CIA director (played by James Gandolfini), “I’m the motherfucker that found this place, sir.” For Maya and others to be a “motherfucker” can be a mark of pride, with everyone from Kanye West to Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winnfield wearing it proudly.
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