To conclude words to say when you’re Fucked Over is the mother of all insult Fucks. It’s one hell of a story that involves a well-known actor, MLK Sr., and starts all the way back in the 6th century BC.
Defined:
surprise, familiarity, humor, frustration, anger, fury, despicable
Shorthand: Mofo
In a sentence:
“What, motherfucker, what?!””
“I love that motherfucker so much.”
Motherfucker is considered one of the most vulgar of Fuck expressions, but the word has come a long journey. It’s no longer a word to demonstrate just anger or a lousy person. People can use it to express a range of emotions, from excitement, humor, even as a term of endearment.
Before we get into the culture change of usage, let’s look at the word’s history.
Motherfucker is an ANCIENT expression.
Thousands of years before the term MILF came about, humans had ways to express beliefs about mothers and anyone who wasn’t their husband having sex with them. There’s a lot of historical gender politics and misogyny to unpack in the expression, and this is a crash course. So, buckle up, Motherfuckers!
Picture it, Ancient Greece. Before Christianity existed. The year is the mid 500-something BC, in the busy Greek city of Ephesus. This city was a Mediterranean hub for trade, which is located in modern day Turkey. Ephesus was a special place and had one of the 7 wonders of the early world, the Temple of Artemus. In ancient times, this was the place to be and party.
In this city, a child was born in 541 BC, named Hipponax. He would grow in life to be the first creative professional to call someone in print a motherfucker.
As an adult, Hipponax became a well known satirist who became politically exiled from his home town. Hipponax wrote vulgar blame poetry. The legend is that he could throw so much literary shade on his enemies, they would take their own life. Historical RuPaul, is that you?
His verbal bite is said to stem from public cruelty toward facial deformities, although some historians have doubts, believing this detail was carried over from a previous poet in ancient times.
Hipponax made no effort to hide his distain for women, right alongside his male enemies. Perhaps one of the oldest incels in history, he pined, “If Only We Could Reproduce Without Woman!” and “Zeus made this the greatest pain of all: Woman.” Based on his work, it sounds like ol’ Nax was a Fuckless Wonder.
For our interest, his most relevant passage was, “Bupalus, the metrokoites (motherfucker).” Hipponax, deformed or not, certainly wasn’t beautiful on the inside, but he did bring about popular use of Motherfucker as an insult that could be read and shared. This, no doubt, increased usage.
So, we’ve established that the concept of a Motherfucker has been around since, basically, forever.
When did Motherfucker become popular in English?
Fast forward to 1775, the first time Motherfucker is recorded in an English dictionary. Obviously, use precedes an official definition. It’s safe to assume that throughout history, the term was used, albeit frowned upon in polite circles.
Evidence shows that after WWII, popularity of the word grew as puritan culture started to give way to freely expressed vulgarity. Also, with so many men coming back home after seeing countless horrors of war abroad, who was going to tell them to mind their language?
Since WWII, popular use has grown as vulgarity has become less taboo. And thanks to popular culture, usage remains common. And it has nothing to do with mothers or who they sleep with any more. Moms need nooky, too.
Now, here’s where we tie Ancient Greece and MLK Jr’s father together…
Why does Samuel L Jackson say Motherfucker the best?
Hipponax doesn’t hold a candle to the smooth vulgarity of actor Samuel Leroy Jackson. Everybody knows about Jackson’s love of using Motherfucker. What a lot of people don’t know is why he uses it, and why he was a badass motherfucker in his youth. Let’s dive in.
Growing up, Jackson struggled with a stutter. Before his acting days took off in the ‘80s, Jackson was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta in the mid-60s. He enrolled in drama and theater with the hopes of improving his stutter. He claims the only word that never linguistically caught him up was, Motherfucker.
After the Fucked Up murder of Martin Luther King Jr, Jackson decided fighting for Civil Rights meant more than appealing to moderate White culture. He says of the time:
I knew that change was going to take something different – not sit-ins, not peaceful coexistence.
Less than a year after MLK was assassinated, a group of Morehouse students, including Jackson, made several demands of the school. They wanted a change in White control of the school, which had been a problem of HBUCs. And the students demanded creation of specific African American courses. Not at all unreasonable demands.
The students’ petition to the Morehouse board of trustees failed to produce any changes, so, students decide to up the ante.
They gather industrial chains on the property of the university and decide to conduct a “chain-in” until their demands were made. They locked themselves into a room with board members, with faulty and other students, and refused to budge until leadership makes concessions. The chain-in lasted about a day and a half.
Among the hostages was MLK Jr’s father, Martin Sr.
The students released MLK senior early in the standoff, out of a window, after he complained of chest pains. Jackson later recalled, “We let him out of there so we wouldn’t be accused of murder.” Smart motherfuckers.
Jackson was later expelled from Morehouse and spent time in Atlanta engaging in escalated unrest. After the FBI visited his mother in Tennessee, she came down to Atlanta and put him on a plane to L.A. to live with an aunt. After a while, Jackson enrolled in Morehouse again, with a change in tactics.
I decided that theater would now be my politics. It could engage people and affect the way they think. It might even change some minds.
The rest is history, with Jackson solidified as not only a great master of Motherfucker usage, but as a truly bad Motherfucker. And that’s what BC Ancient Greece and MLK Jr’s father have in common: Motherfucker.
The below video has all of Jackson’s film Motherfucker moments captured. Obviously Rated R, so you must be signed into Youtube to view.
If you’ve been struggling to capture the perfect emotion in your usage of Motherfucker, Jackson explains in this video how to foster your passion.