Punk

Like many swearwords or terms of insult, punk has undergone the semantic trends of generalization and weakening. It is also part of a fairly large group of words, including harlot, tramp, slag , and hustler showing change of gender over time. In its earliest sense, in Elizabethan times, punk meant a prostitute, subsequently the mistress of a soldier or criminal, then the male concubine of a tramp, finally a worthless male person. In the course of this strange eventful history, it has moved from a British to an America provenance, but has retained the original elements of underground sexuality.

The word is of unknown origin, although Eric Partridge suggested ingeniously that “It may be a piece of erudite slang: Latin punctum , a small hole” (1947, 170). Nevertheless, it had a clear underground Elizabethan sense, shown when the Duke in Measure for Measure (1604) says of Mariana: “She may be a punk, for many of them are neither Maid [virgin], Widow or Wife” (V i 179). Thomas Middleton was more explicit in his Michaelmas Term (1607): “I may grace her with the name of a Curtizan, a Backslider, a Prostitution, or such a Toy, but when all comes to all ’tis but a plaine Pung [sic]” (III i). In his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) Francis Grose defined the term as “a whore; also a soldier’s trull,” that is, a female companion.

The word is found in these senses in British contexts up to about 1928, but even by the turn of the century it was being used to mean a passive male homosexual or catamite in American contexts concerning hoboes, sailors, and prison inmates. (The Oxford English Dictionary Supplement has quotations dating from 1904.) There is, however, a remarkable antedating recorded in 1761, in The Genuine Memoirs … of J. D****s , (possibly John Dennis) wherein the readers are informed that “Augustus Caesar owed his first preferment to having been p—k to Histius in his youth” (23). The New Yorker explained in 1977: “The involuntary homosexuals tend to be good-looking young men … forced into becoming jailhouse ‘punks’ by older men serving long sentences” (October 24, 64). This is the emphasis in Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive (1994): “a weak man; any youth who gives in to anal intercourse in prison.” Hugh Rawson quotes interesting evidence for the phrase “punk in a bunk,” referring to prison sex relationships (1991, 313). There is also a slang verbal sense of “to sodomize.”

By the 1920s punk was appearing in criminal contexts, suggesting both incompetence and male concubinage. Dashiell Hammett was an early user of the term in The Maltese Falcon in both the text (1930) and the filmscript (1939), mischievously adding the related term gunsel (meaning a catamite) in a context which suggested a gunman, but then sufficiently new and unfamiliar to evade censorship by the Production Code censors. The sense of a young petty criminal became established for decades in American English, steadily acquiring the sense of “hooligan” or “obnoxious macho type,” finally becoming a highly generalized as “a person of no account; a worthless fellow.” The term is now almost exclusively American, being no longer common in British slang and virtually unknown in Australian and South African English.