Warning: If slang words entailing a hard “ck” sound invoke trauma, hysteria or bad middle school memories, please cover your eyes. For the rest of you, here’s the good news: “motherfucker” got a thumbs-up from three federal appellate judges. The decision may not rise quite to the level of Brown v. Board of Education, but it was music to ears of disgruntled employees, particularly those who have a m’fer for a boss.
What a long, strange judicial trip it’s been for this nasty moniker, the titular pinnacle of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. According to those who study these things, motherfucker made its jurisprudence debut in a 1889 Texas Court of Appeals case, Levy v. State. A witness testified that Defendant Levy was a “God damned mother-f–king bastardly son-of-a-bitch.” The legal precedent established an expletive hierarchy, allowing every word except m’fer to be spelled out. A decade later, however, the same Texas court reversed itself and filled in the blanks. The case at hand involved a murder defendant who argued justifiable homicide on the basis that his victim had called him a “mother-fucking-son-of-a-bitch.” Twenty years after that, according to a book by historian Henry Louis Gates, a young man ordered to fight in World War I, fired off a letter to the editor of a Memphis newspaper calling his draft board “low-down motherfuckers”. He was court-martialed and did 10 years of hard labor.
Thanks to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, motherfucker has come a long way, etymologically speaking. Here’s the deal: Back in 2011, workers at a New York catering company, Pier Sixty, were trying to form a union. Shortly before the vote, one of the organizers, Hernan Perez, was berated by his boss, Bob McSweeney. On his break, Perez, smartphone in hand, punched out a Facebook vent about the encounter. Here, unedited, is what he posted: “Bob is such a NASTY MOTHER FUCKER don’t know how to talk to people!!!!!! Fuck his mother and entire fucking family!!!!! What a LOSER!!!!! Vote YES for the UNION!!!!!”
As you might imagine, Pier Sixty management did not shower Perez’s Facebook page with likes. Instead, it fired him. Therein began an intense six-year search for the true meaning of motherfucker by some of the best legal minds in the country. Under federal labor law, bosses are generally prohibited from disciplining workers who are acting together for the betterment of working conditions. In this case, Perez didn’t just call McSweeney a “nasty motherfucker,” he called him that in the context of a union organizing campaign. In labor law parlance, that is called “protected concerted activity.” In other words, you can’t be fired for that.
But wait, there’s more. There are limits to this protection. What if Perez had no Facebook access during that catering event and, instead of calling McSweeney a motherfucker, had, say, dumped a three-bean salad on his boss’ head? Under labor case law, an employee loses protection if the concerted activity is “opprobrious”. (In the interest of saving you a click, that means pretty darn bad.) So, exactly one century after some poor guy got 10 years of hard labor for calling his draft board a bunch of m’fers, thanks to Facebook and an angry union organizer, the legal system was posed to answer a question many of us had never pondered: Is motherfucker opprobrious?
Imagine the scene in the mahogany confines of justice: ponderous thinkers in black robes, judges accustomed to complex sentences packed with words like collateral estoppel, subrogation, tortfeasor and habeas corpus, studiously examining a vocabulary they’ve hidden from their children. They pour through the case law, decades of testimony about angry employees calling their managers everything from “stupid fucking moron” to “egotistical fucker”, from a “fucking asshole” to a “fucking crook”, without crossing the opprobrious line. But now they were faced, in a very literal sense, with the mother of them all.
Lawyers for Pier Sixty, with straight faces included in their $650-an-hour rate, argued that Perez went well beyond the common pale of vulgarity when he pulled his supervisor’s poor, innocent mother into the mix. Yes, they stipulated, their client’s managers had, indeed, discovered new conjugations of the f-word on a daily basis. They admitted the bosses said the following to their charges: “Are you guys fucking stupid?”; “a fucking little Mexican,” and a “motherfucker who should eat shit.” But, but, but, they insisted: the vile, disgusting words Perez used are “distinguishable from a passing epithet uttered in frustration”. When he said, “Fuck his mother and his entire family,” the corporate lawyers insisted, this worker was getting personal and involving his boss’ family members. And that, they said, is as opprobrious as it gets.
That argument was respectfully rejected, first by an administrative law judge, followed by the National Labor Relations Board, and then by the Second Circuit appellate panel. They concluded that Perez was not literally proposing sexual intercourse with his supervisor’s mother or other family members; he was simply dissing the guy himself. Any teenager could have explained that to the learned judges. But these kind of weighty matters need expert opinion, so they plowed through numerous academic treatises (here and here) on the use of mother-denigrating slang as a means of verbally attacking an adversary.
As a result of all this litigation. Perez won his job back. M’fer means many things to many people, but whatever it is, thanks to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, it is not opprobrious. Let’s hope this case does not end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Who knows what those motherfuckers would do with it?