Rotten Wood: A brief etymological history of punk

What do words really mean? Do they mean more than one thing? Where did they come from?

Such questions refer to etymology: The history and origins of words. 

My interest in the etymology of punk lies in my past as an English graduate. While researching and writing the initial series of essays that sewed the seed for the ongoing punk women book project, I was reminded of the fact that the word 'punk' had been in existence since Shakespeare's time, if not earlier. 

I was also still working at the university library at the time, and the floor I shelved on was mainly made up of Languages (the 400's), Literature (the 800's) and History (900s) books.* Meaning that I was in daily proximity to not just the language dictionaries, but also the etymological dictionaries; great big bulky things that explained the history of specific English words over the centuries.  

Study of these etymological dictionaries revealed that the earliest usage of the word punk dates back to 1596, although this excellent piece published on the British Library website has it slightly earlier at 'before 1575', from a ballad called 'Simon The Olde Kinge', at which point the word referred to a prostitute. Specifically, it was used to refer to women in Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and in Jonson’s The Alchemist, two texts I studied for my degree. The word 'punkling', in use around the same time, refers to a young prostitute. 

The British Library piece mentioned above also found the word punk being used to refer to a young man being kept by an older man for sex as early as 1698, from a "bawdy song, 'Women's Complaint to Venus'."

Traditional ballads, which were sung, printed and distributed on the streets, were historical sources that I didn't have access to when writing this piece, but in retrospect it feels obvious that as sources they would be ahead of the game when it comes to changes in slang and language use over the centuries. 

So far as the Etymological dictionary research went, the next recorded use of the word punk is in the 18th century when it was used (mainly in the US) to describe a piece of rotten wood.

It's early in the history of the word but already we have three entirely separate meanings of the word that suggest someone, or something, is suspect. 

In the late nineteenth century there's a slight twist in etymological proceedings with the use of the phrase 'punk and plaster' being used by tramps to refer to bread and butter, which no doubt says much about the state of British bread baking at the time, as well as the British enthusiasm for butter. 

It's in the early twentieth century that the word punk becomes more codified to formally include the meaning 'passive male prostitute', often in a prison context, following on from it's earlier, seventeenth century usage to refer to a young man being kept by an older man for sex. It's also in the early twentieth century that we first encounter the word being used to refer to a 'worthless person'. It is these two particular set of meanings that are often quoted when the etymological origins of punk are being discussed, either because people haven't bothered to look any further back, or because it has suited the agendas of various punk writers over the years to go with this particular origin story: It being somewhat sexier to them than sixteenth century strumpets and harlots presumably. 

In order to try and hammer down the precise timeline for when the word punk starts to be used to refer to a particular style of music, I've had to go beyond etymological dictionaries and look as well at dictionaries and histories of music journalism. In terms of when the word punk was first used to describe music or subculture, the Oxford English dictionary says 1974 but this is a bit too late to be entirely accurate, and the British Library article agrees. 

If we’re taking into account journalists use of it to describe artists and scenes that didn’t end up being codified as punk in the recognised sound of 1976 sense, it goes back a few years earlier than that. Like me, the British Library article has homed in on the ? and the Mysterians song '96 Tears', which was released in 1966. As the British Library piece acknowledges, this song was retrospectively described as being punk by the US rock journalist Dave Marsh in 1971. The piece also points out that that the words 'punk music' were also used a year earlier, in 1970, on flyers to promote the minimalist electronic music of the band Suicide. 

As such, I would conclude that the use of the word punk to describe a particular musical and cultural moment in time that we would recognise historically as the punk scene probably starts around 1974 or 1975, but in terms of its use to describe music and musicians, it’s a few years before that. 

What's striking about the etymological history of punk is that, right from the start, the word was being used as a pejorative, a negative. Whether that be to refer to a woman or girl thought to be a prostitute, or to rotten wood, to suspect bread, to a man or a boy thought to be a prostitute, or to a generally worthless person. If it was punk, it was suspect, no good, worthless, terrible. And if you were a music writer in the late 1960s or early to mid 1970s and you saw music being made by some generally suspect youths, rougher than the normal rock'n'roll stars in waiting, it would perhaps be a natural leap to think of them as punks and the music they made as punk music. If there were rumours that some of the young, sexy, male musicians attached to those scenes did sell themselves for sex then all the better as that would fit a certain unspoken subcultural credo about rock'n'roll, male delinquency and male homosexuality. The earlier etymological history of punk could therefore be conveniently forgotten about.

That said, because the first known usage of the word punk is from either 'before 1575' or 1596, and at both points it was just another way of calling a woman or girl a strumpet, harlot or prostitute. This means that, if we look at the history of the word punk in a crushingly literal sense, the first punk was definitely a woman.

* It also contained Philosophy (100's) and Generalia (000's), the latter of which contained all the comix books and all the history of journalism books.

Photo by Brian Lundquist on Unsplash

Droll, disinterested and devastatingly incisive: How The Economist covered punk

During my 2014 journey through various newspaper databases I would occasionally come across reports by writers at The Economist. The quality and insight of these stories piqued my interest and led me to do a separate durational study on The Economist database for stories involving the word 'punk' for the years 1975-1995. 

While there were less results than in my wider search, those that I did find tended to be of a marked contrast to the stories I was reading in the Daily Mail and The Times. By contrast to the hysteria, The Economist tended to write about punk in a removed, faux disinterested, frequently droll, always devastatingly incisive way. 

As is often the case with that publication, their writers seemed to have a knack, at the height of public and press hysteria over punk, to cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter. This is particularly evident in two stories they published about punk in the summer of 1977.

The first, titled ‘More money than music in nihilism’, concerns punk and the Silver Jubilee. The unnamed writer (The Economist doesn’t use bylines), sets out his or her stall quite early on, with the following:

Punk, or new-wave rock, gained notoriety when Mr Bill Grundy of Thames Television interviewed the Sex Pistols last year. The group so shocked the public (ie, delighted the press) and scared the record companies with its obscene language that it has already made £125,000 in broken recording contracts alone.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but, while they aren’t revealing anything readers probably didn’t already know here, the tone is striking. It suggests that both writer and publication are not prepared to join in with the moral panic around punk: they will comment on it, but they aren’t fooled by the machinations in the press and music industry that are fuelling it, and they don’t think their readers should be fooled either. 

Further on into the piece, the writer muses on what is meant to be shocking about punk, and concludes with the following shrewd observation:

This can be seen as just a re affirmation of rock music’s anti-establishment roots, which have been somewhat replaced over the past 10 years as the original working-class heroes have learned to enjoy the lifestyles of the rich.

Again, not imparting any new information here, but putting the point across in a delightfully low key snarky manner. They also aren’t fooled by the working class posturing of some of the punk fraternity either, reporting that while Mick Jones “once claimed that he had never lived below the 17th floor”, his bandmate Joe Strummer “went to a public school.”

The second of their pieces from the summer of 1977 is my personal favourite. It concerns the ongoing pitched battles between Teds and Punks on London’s Kings Road that summer, and is headed up ‘For an unlimited season, in Chelsea’. Full marks for droll understatement there.

In amongst the initial reportage of pitched battles on the Kings Road (or ‘Tribal warfare’ as the writer has it) are some interesting nuggets of information, including the observation that other people outside of the two tribes were being caught up in the violence, simply by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Last Saturday this meant a group of homosexuals who were protesting against the conviction of the editor of Gay News on a charge of blasphemous libel. 

As well as revealing in one stark sentence the extent to which the past is indeed a different country, I can’t imagine any other publication reporting on the Teds v Punks skirmishes including this particular detail.

The report goes on to describe the pitched battles as being “London’s latest tourist attraction” and points out that, as well as participants travelling from outside of London to be there, there were also some who’d travelled from outside of the country to be there as well, the report mentioning “continental” Teds and Punks. 

There then follows a thoughtful section on why the Teds and Punks have more in common than that which divides them, and the report concludes by offering some theories as to why it’s all kicking off in Chelsea in the first place. Their conclusion being that anti-hooligan strategies employed by the Metropolitan Police against Chelsea FC have led to violent elements gathering on or around the Kings Road instead, thus fuelling the violence. Not a popular conclusion, I suspect, when it came to fuelling the moral panic around punk, but I daresay there was something in it. 

While The Economist doesn’t report on punk per se in the 1980s, there is a thoughtful piece about the youth of Poland from summer 1982 (‘A lost generation’) that points out that, since the outlawing of Solidarity at the end of 1981, many of the country’s youth have turned away from politics and have embraced punk instead. 

Other mentions of punk throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s include referring to Colonel Qaddafi as “the Libyan punk” in 1981, some ruminating on punks fashion legacy in 1988, and a deliciously bitchy piece on Nigel Kennedy from 1991, following his dissing by the controller of Radio 3, John Drummond.

Mr Kennedy’s carefully cultivated cockney accent and extravagant clothes led Mr Drummond to accuse him of becoming the ‘Liberace of the nineties.’ 

Ouch. It’s like reading the 1990s equivalent of Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown. 

Does any of this matter? In some ways yes, in some ways no. What The Economist coverage does, nearly fifty years after it was written, is provide a wider context to press coverage about the UK punk scene in those early years of hysteria and mayhem. The very nature of the coverage suggests that not everyone in the press was prepared to play along with the moral panic around punk, and that some intelligent mainstream press reportage and coverage was happening outside of punk. It’s important that intelligent and important questions were being asked, and that context was being provided. It’s easy to forget this when you look at the cultural narrative around punk, which tends to be written in black and white binary opposites.

Photo of London by Hugo Sousa on Unsplash

A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse

F. Tennyson Jesse's 1934 novel was based on what the back cover describes as "a sensational murder trial in the 1920s", namely the Thompson/Bywaters case. For anyone reading the book who is aware of that case, it means that you are coming to the book already knowing what the ending will be. While it's unusual to come to a novel already knowing the ending, it doesn't actually spoil the enjoyment of what feels like a surprisingly modern story.

Our tale begins just before the outbreak of World War I as a bildungsroman, with the teenage London born and based (anti) heroine Julia Almond about to leave high school to study fashion illustration at college. The picture we get of Julia at this point is of a slightly spoilt, slightly attractive, charismatic child given to pashes on teachers. She has a throughly developed imagination and her chief loves in life are her teacher, her dog Bobby and her own space. At this point, she is about 75% Collette's Claudine, 25% St Trinians.

From the fashion illustration course she uses her connections to gain an apprenticeship at a fashion boutique, where she rises through the years from apprentice to shop girl to fashion buyer and dependable second in command. She has her own money, she has glamorous friends who she goes to see in plays at the theatre, and can be found creeping up the stairs to bed at her parents house in the early hours of the morning.

When her father dies, her income is not enough for her or her mother to live on and it is decided that Julia's loathsome aunt, uncle and cousin will move into the house to keep them afloat financially. This arrangement means her mother acting like a skivvy to the Beales and Julia being forced to share her room with a younger cousin who bears a remarkable resemblance to a slightly older Violet Elizabeth Bott from Just William.

Julia, feeling claustrophobic and trapped, is faced with a choice at this point: She can move out, gain a greater degree of independence but be forced to live a hand to mouth existence in seedy digs on her wages, she can stay at home and endure the unpleasant, interfering Beales and continue to share a room with the nauseating Elsa, or she can accept the offer of marriage from Herbert Starling, a family friend and older man recently widowed, who has lusted after her for years.  She chooses to marry Herbert, despite having no real idea of what marriage will mean.

Her marriage to Herbert Starling, and what it will mean, isn't exactly up there with Tess Derbyfield being 'rescued' by Alec D'Urberville, but it's similar in the sense that it's at this point that a sense of unease begins to creep into the readers mind. At first, things are largely fine - Julia has a nice flat in a nice neighbourhood with a nice maid, who loves her dog Bobby. Herbert is away, fighting in the war, so she doesn't spend much time with him and is largely left to her own devices outside of work. She can, at this point, essentially live the life she wanted - that of a working single woman, living in a nice house. It's when the war ends that things change and she's forced to reckon with the consequences of what marriage means.

Julia, unusually, manages to hold onto her job and is quickly earning more than her husband in his gentleman's fashion outlet. This, and her unwillingness to allow him his 'rights', cause a great deal of the tension in the marriage, which didn't start from a happy place to begin with. 

When Julia re-meets Leonard Croft, who appears early on in the book as a naughty child in a class of younger children that the teenage Julia is asked to look after for the afternoon, she is attracted to this confident, charismatic younger man just as he is to her. 

Tennyson Jesse does a good job of summoning up the feverish atmosphere of Leo and Julia's love affair and their letters to each other, and this section of the book speeds along while also building a sense of increased desperation and the sense that their inner worlds are bleeding into the real world, with disastrous consequences. 

The later sections of the book are the ones that feel the most modern in some ways, with the issues Julia faces still relevant today. It is, needless to say, the final section of the book that is the most harrowing. Tennyson Jesse has created a heroine who is so vivid, so alive, so determined that it's a shock to see her brought so low.

This is a book that haunts you and stays with you long after you have finished reading it. 

“beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven”

The CD of Penetration’s 2015 album, Resolution, opens with a cacophony of sound: Chugging bass, soaring guitars, pounding drums, over which Pauline Murray intones a section from EM Forster’s The Machine Stops.

Although The Machine Stops was first published in 1909, and Resolution was released in 2015, I had cause to think of The Machine Stops in 2020 when lockdown happened. As society became more home and internet bound, it felt as though all Forster’s predictions about the future were coming true at once.

In The Machine Stops humanity lives in isolated underground cells, not meeting anyone, not going outside, communicating with others only through The Machine. I mean, unless you were a key worker and had to go out, that was lockdown in a nutshell, wasn’t it?

For a brief period between the end of April 2020 and the middle of May, I had a temp job in Adult Social Care at a nearby hospital. The thing I remember most about it was the journey on the almost empty bus where I saw the same two people every day, both of whom were also working at the hospital. 

I remember the silence. 

I remember how empty Oxford Road was, and that someone skateboarded down it. 

There is a fine line between nihilism and full blown dystopia but the nihilism of punk did lean on the door to dystopia, and artists such as Penetration did often use dystopian language and ideas when creating their music. ‘Silent Community’ from their first album, Moving Targets, has a dystopian feel to it, suggesting a sinister future, but in reality Pauline Murray’s memoir suggests it had its roots more in real life 1970s Ferry Hill than in anything else. 

Similarly, it is possible to find the odd bit of dystopian fiction in punk fanzines from the 1970s onwards, and the birth of cyberpunk seems an inevitable collision between two ways of thinking, leading to everything from Blade Runner to Victoriocity. 

There are definitely dystopian texts out there that owe something, or a lot, to punk - whether in the form of stylistics, or visual codes, or in overall tone - but there are also texts, like Forster’s, that have directly informed punk in some way, shape or form. 

It adds an extra layer to punk, an extra level of enjoyment if you like, an extra door of perception to step through.

EM Forster’s The Machine Stops was originally published in 1909. It was first published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review, before later being published in 1928 as part of Forster’s story collection The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. 

The story begins with Vashti, a lecturer of sorts, being contacted through The Machine by her son, Kuno. He wants to speak to her face to face, not through The Machine. A request that Vashti finds horrifying.

She does eventually make the journey to see him face to face, and he confesses a series of adventures that she finds both extraordinary and blasphemous. He has been outside of the world controlled by The Machine, and has found it beautiful. 

The nature of Forster’s dystopian world is revealed gradually, and subtly, through a third person narrator who seems to have observed at a remove but who does give out the odd explanatory aside, making the tone shift and feel slightly less formal at points.

The technology described is at once familiar and unfamiliar: Vashti speaks to Kuno through what would be recognisable as video conferencing software today. She lives in a small confined space that would be recognisable as a smart home. She is happy, in her way, until things begin to stop working properly. The machine stutters at first then, at the stories climax, it stops altogether. 

Written as it was in 1909, the story has some thematic similarities to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, which had been published in 1895. I would say that the world depicted in The Machine Stops is more thoroughly realised than that of The Time Machine, the narrative is more sophisticated and complex, and the implications of the kind of world it depicts are more thought out. The Machine Stops also looks forward (mainly in its descriptions of mechanised pleasure at a sophisticated level) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was first published in 1932. Like those two books, The Machine Stops operates as a warning, a vision of an at times beguiling and attractive but ultimately dysfunctional and dystopian future. 

It’s not a warning we have heeded yet, but its message still holds, over 100 years later. 

Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr

I have to confess, when I first starting reading Tim Mohr’s social history of the East German punk scene, I was disappointed.

It had nothing at all to do with the quality of his research or the story he was telling, it was simply to do with expectations and tone of voice. In short, I’d had it in my head that the author was German, not American, and as such the very American tone it’s written in really jarred with me when I first started reading it. Once I was able to get beyond that, I found myself really enjoying the book. 

As regular punk watchers will know, there are scenes and bands within punk that have been written about time and time again, but when it comes to making a list of scenes that remain strangely undocumented, or under documented, the East German punk scene would be high on the list. 

Punks in East Germany faced a unique set of circumstances that not only made it harder to be punks, and to find other punks, but which also specifically threatened their liberty: Punks in London, New York or Canberra were never up against the risk of being monitored by the Stasi, arrested and tortured, forcibly re-located away from friends and family, or - as a final move - deportation to West Germany. 

Mohr’s account begins with one 15 year old punk girl in Berlin, and goes on to document and describe a gradual network of friends building, coalescing, protesting, forming bands… and the ways in which the East German government and police tried, and failed, to shut it down. 

It would be impossible to divorce the East German punks from their surroundings and socio-political climate, so it’s not surprising that Mohr documents the scene throughout the 1980s and to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. What is surprising, perhaps, is that he chooses not to end with this moment, instead carrying on and making it clear that things didn’t change over night and that change, when it did come, also brought the less welcome spectre of gentrification. Needless to say, this had a very negative impact on the punks of East Germany. In some ways, the post-Wall section of the book is the most fascinating because it doesn’t provide a nice tidy romanticised ending, and instead asks a series of valid questions about who benefitted from the fallout of the collapse of communism.

Burning Down The Haus is a fascinating read that shines a light onto an area of punk history that I would suspect is rarely discussed outside of the former East Germany.

If you want to read an interesting piece about today’s Berlin punk scene, there’s a nice piece in Vice from March 2025.

In montage: The works of Hannah Hoch and Linder Sterling

The Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch and the artist Linder Sterling lived several generations apart (Höch died in 1978, just as Linder was becoming known) but both are known in their separate spheres for their subversive, surreal and explicitly feminist use of montage as an art form.

Höch, while patronised by her male peers at the time, received critical acclaim for her political montages critiquing gender roles and the failings of the Weimar Republic, whereas Sterling was respected by her peers in the punk world for her montage work for Buzzcocks and The Secret Public, but it took a long time for her to be accepted by the art establishment as an artist worth taking seriously. 

I first came across Höch, needless to say, while researching Linder and later went on to dig out a book from the art floor at work called Dada’s Women by Ruth Hemus, which reinforced for me the extent to which women were minimised and written out of the history of Dada, much as they have been from multiple other art movements, subcultures, musical genres…  

In an essay concerning the two artists for the book Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years, titled ‘The Exploding Image’, Ariella Yedgar points out that both Höch and Sterling were women operating as the minority within male dominated, heterosexual creative communities, and that they were “very aware” of this. You can see the conclusion of this awareness in Linder’s performance at the Hacienda in the famous meat dress, whereas Höch’s work was banned once the Nazi’s came to power in Germany, forcing her to retreat but not to stop creating work. 

Is montage uniquely a women’s art form? Helen McCookerybook pointed out to me that one of Linder's targets in her work was the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, and his 1956 piece 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?', which suggests that montage isn't a uniquely female art form. It is a very accessible one though and I do wonder if the very accessible nature of it might have contributed to Höch not being taken seriously by the Dadaists in her own time. 

Both Sterling and Höch used their skills as montage artists to critique gender roles and society in their respective cultures. They created work that was unsettling and surreal, and that perhaps made people uncomfortable. It was easy to laugh off their work perhaps, rather than take it seriously, because to take it seriously might have meant asking awkward questions about the societies they were living in. And so called radical artists don’t always want to bite the hand of the state, especially if it is feeding them.

You can read more about the work of Linder Sterling in this piece from the Tribune last year. 

Cut Up: The radical collage of Linder Sterling (Juliet Jacques, Tribune)

Photo of sticker art in North London, 20222 by Ch_pski on Unsplash