On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, John Kozak wrote:
> It's a person of absolutely no redeeming features, also wilfully
> malicious, petty, cruel and generally vile. Someone (possibly Anthony
> Burgess?) once lamented the lack of an English equivalent of Persian
> "drwg" - "a thoroughly and unredeemably bad sort": that would be the
> c-word.
>
> I'd claim that "cunt" in BritEng has two distinct senses, these two
> senses being only historically connected - in particular it is applied
> mostly to men and has no associations of effeminacy. The "vile person"
> sense is much the more widely used.
>
> It's probably used most by working class men; but the Jarvis Cocker
> usage isn't class motivated, as the word is really about what they
> used to call moral character.
Well that would certainly support Jenny's argument. If its purely the vilest thing men could think to call each other -- and the vilest thing in moral terms -- then it seems thoroughly misogynist in its origins.
Michael