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
