Читать книгу F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word - Rufus Lodge - Страница 14

It does not take a massive leap of the imagination to conclude that when you combine the words ‘bum’ and ‘fuck’, you arrive at ‘bumfuck’ – a word that can mean exactly what you think it means. If you saw ‘bum’ and assumed that we were talking about a person who might otherwise be dubbed an ‘arsehole’, then you’ll have calculated that ‘bum’ + ‘fuck’ equals an extremely unpleasant ‘arsehole’.

If, however, you took ‘bum’ as a ‘noun’ and ‘fuck’ as an activity, then you know exactly where you’re going, and you would have found yourself fully at home in the Old Testament city of Sodom.

Or, finally, you might take ‘bum’ to be an adjective – substandard, unsatisfactory, as in ‘a bum rap’ – and decide, with equal accuracy, that ‘bumfuck’ is an act of sexual congress that was great, darling, honestly, the earth moved for me too, it really did; but at the front of your mind you really wish you’d been in someone else’s bed with someone else (not necessarily the same someone, of course).

None of which prepares us for the newest and most obscure usage of that ‘bum’ and ‘fuck’ combination: the phrase that merges the two words as one, and then adds a geographical location on the end. Hence we arrive at ‘Bumfuck, Africa’ or, more commonly, ‘Bumfuck, Egypt’. (‘Bumfuck, Illinois’ works better for me, but as it was the Americans who came up with these things, maybe that was too close to home.)

As a child, I remember being amazed when I discovered that ‘Timbuktu’ – which adults were always using to describe an impossibly far-flung destination of no redeeming value – was actually a major city in the African nation of Mali. Imagine growing up there, and discovering that the entire Western world believes your hometown is a joke. It’s a bit like being born in Essex.

The point is that, in the collective imagination rather than on the map of what we used to call, both patronisingly and racistly, ‘The Dark Continent’, ‘Bumfuck’ and ‘Timbuktu’ are twin towns. The fact that one of them exists and the other (probably) doesn’t – not yet, anyway – is an irrelevance. They’re both symbols of being so far off the beaten track that there simply isn’t a track to beat. So being sent to Bumfuck is even worse than being sent to Coventry, which is almost certainly twinned with Timbuktu.