Sometimes no other word will do. No word rivals its clipped impact, condenses so much violence into so little space. The cataclysmic diminishment of 'fuck' in the past two or three decades has been a disaster for obscenity. Cunt: what would we do without it?

Until recently, I believed this to be an uncontroversial position, if unlikely to be articulated in quite this way. When it slipped out at dinner in the company of a friend’s parents, I felt sheepish only in the way you’d feel sheepish swearing before the elderly – in recognition of an expletive carelessly aired. But the other night I used ‘cunt’ in what I took to be the safety of a friend’s room and provoked a rather lengthy debate. The claim was this: ‘cunt’ objectifies and dehumanises women, reduces them to mere body parts. It is degrading and offensive regardless of its object; to use it quite casually, as I do, is to be complicit in the oppression of women.

I rejected this claim. It’s true that ‘cunt’ was originally an insult applied only to women: the OED’s 2. a. definition is ‘A woman as a source of sexual gratification; a promiscuous woman; a slut. Also as a general term of abuse for a woman.’ But it has become a generic, gender-neutral insult, I argued, degrading to women only insofar as ‘dick’ or ‘prick’ are degrading to men. This might be phrased as the problem of linguistic compartmentalisation. A certain sort of argument seems to proceed from the assumption that the senses of a word invariably contaminate each other – that ‘cunt’ as a generic insult cannot shake its older, sexist meaning. I think homophony compellingly suggests that this is untrue. ‘Rose’ refers both to a flower and an action, but we don’t claim that roses are tinged with a suggestion of movement upwards, or that the preterite of ‘rise’ connotes eternal love. In fact we’re excellent at placing identical words into separate mental compartments: our languages depend on it.

‘Gay’ is problematic as a counter-example because homosexuality is implicit in the derogatory use of ‘gay’ – unlike for instance its older meaning of ‘carefree’ or ‘light-hearted’, which it more or less ousts. The direct link between societal rejection of homosexuality and derisive uses of the term drives what Pinker calls the ‘euphemism treadmill’, as with descriptors of mental impairment: the initially euphemistic ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’ are replaced by ‘retard’ and later ‘mentally disabled’, each in turn becoming a term of abuse. In the case of ‘cunt’ such a transition is far more difficult to identify, partly because there’s no widespread cultural connotation attached to female genitalia. Four-letter words seem naturally to derive from the sexual and the scatological. And if the suggestion that this reflects society’s view of sexuality – is fucking always bad? – is dubious, the claim that it shapes it is even more so.

I stand by this argument, in its essentials. But to claim a word is intrinsically unobjectionable is to make the same mistake, in inverse, as to label it intrinsically offensive. It’s no use telling the wounded to feel no pain. And you can no more believe that intention is the sole determinant of meaning than that reception is: either would make communication impossible. A better definition would cite words’ consensus meanings within particular social groups. This allows us to point to the re-appropriation of ‘queer’ and ‘gay’ since the 1970s, the spanner in Pinker’s treadmill. It also forces us to recognise that communities can understand words in different ways. At their broadest these communities are nations: while shortened versions of the OED define ‘cunt’ (today) as gender-neutral, the American Merriam-Webster has ‘an offensive way to refer to a woman’ and Australia’s Macquairie Dictionary ‘a despicable man’. My initial argument was ignorant of this geographic variation. And attempts to reclaim ‘cunt’, including an episode in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues or Dodie Bellamy’s invention of the creative process of ‘cunting’, may birth specific communities which recognise particular alternate meanings of the word. In this view branches of feminism which take ‘cunt’ to be inherently offensive are not so much identifying its meaning as creating it.

There are two ways to account for language: prescriptively (only John and I can go), or descriptively (me and John seem to be going all the time). But the distinction is made precarious by the fact that prescriptive definitions, like the declaration that ‘cunt’ is sexist, themselves shape our understanding and use of language. In my attempt to achieve a descriptive definition of ‘cunt’, I realised, I’d unwittingly arrived at a prescriptive one. It may be that, in a zone so highly charged, attempts at linguistic intervention are simply imprudent. But I’m also convinced that the blanket censorship of ‘cunt’ is doomed to failure, that not saying a word will only increase its power. Strange as it may sound, even radical feminists may be better off arguing that ‘cunt’ says nothing about female sexuality at all – and using the word freely. Tentatively, I reiterate my initial premise: ‘cunt’ is the best swear-word we’ve got.