A few years ago I was talking to my boss when
he suddenly got huffy and told me "Don't you dare use that
language around me." I wasn't even sure what I had said but
finally figured out it must have been "Oh Jesus!" or maybe
"God Damn." He was religious and in charge and insisted that
I never again say such things in the office. He put up a "No
Profanity" sign and decided to enforce his pious views on
language despite it being a government workplace and his objections
being religious ones but he refused to tell me exactly what
words were forbidden. I wasn't even sure what profanity was
till I looked it up. It has to do with religion, actions or
speech irreverent toward God or sacred things. I was shocked
and amused that I was being compelled to conform my speech
to a religious standard whether I believed in it or not. I
wasn't even sure which religious standard. There are so many.
Or maybe, I thought, it's vulgarity that he means to forbid.
The word vulgarity comes from the Latin word vulgus,
meaning the common people. That includes me. By definition
vulgarity is a class distinction. My boss even described the
words he objected to as low class. Much of the vague standards
of speech to which I was ordered to conform originated as
an attempt by the lower classes to imitate their betters,
to ape their speech because they couldn't achieve their affluence.
Since I wasn't sure what words were forbidden,
I bought a book called "Wicked Words" by Hugh Rawson. It didn't
really help because so many words have been considered bad
at one time or another. There are two factors that determine
taboo words: religion and class. Catholic cultures are mostly
concerned with profanity, with the irreligious. In Catholic
countries there was usually a greater penalty for profanity
than for vulgarity. For instance, in 1606, in Protestant England,
Parliament made it a crime punishable by a fine of ten pounds
for any theatrical production to jestingly or profanely speak
or use the Holy Name of God, or of Jesus Christ, or of the
Holy Ghost, or of the Trinity. In Catholic New Orleans in
1769 anyone who committed a similar infraction could have
his tongue cut out and all his property confiscated, half
going to the public treasury and half to anyone who informed
on him. In The Divine Comedy Dante freely uses vulgarity but
puts blasphemers in the seventh level of hell along with murderers
and perverts. Hell, by the way, is generally used as an intensifier,
as in What the hell, rather than a suggested destination,
as in Go to Hell! At least these days.
The word damn is from the Latin damnare
which means to inflict loss or to condemn. Soldiers,
especially, have always been fond of cursing and swearing.
It was so common in the Continental Army that George Washington,
in July 1776, issued a general order condemning it. It wasn't
uncommon among the British either, in that war or others.
There are records of Joan of Arc, in 1431, referring to the
English soldiers she was fighting as Goddem, for their
favorite expression.
In Protestant cultures hell and damn
and by God tend to become rather minor taboos with
little force behind them. The great Protestant taboo is the
body. Most of this nonsense began with the rise of the Puritans,
or perhaps with the rise of the middle class, and reached
its zenith during the Victorian age, a time when, as Margaret
Mitchell put it, "mares never foaled nor cows calved. In
fact, hens almost didn't lay eggs." By that time the ass
had completed its transformation into the donkey and the race
of male chickens, called cocks for a thousand years,
had become a nondescript group of creatures called roosters.
By the early 1800's belly was considered so vulgar
that it was removed from the Bible in Britain and America.
Leg also became an obscene word and when referring
even to a table leg a cultured person would say "the limb
of the table." In some circles it wasn't even nice
to refer to a person as nice, since nice was
how food was described, not people. Pregnant was a
taboo word until after World War II. So was rape and
to some extent still is. Until very recently it was not uncommon
for newspapers to speak of a woman having been beaten but
not assaulted. Virgin, a word familiar in the Bible,
was forbidden in movies until the 1950's. It shocks me that
words everyone now considers innocuous were once taboo.
The word stink first appeared in the
eight century and included any odor, sweet or foul, but by
the 1800's it had become a taboo word. In 1935, in Atlanta,
361 Emory University students were asked to name a coarse
or obscene word. Belly came in first and stink
second. The Victorians also objected to belch (from
about the year 1000) as they did to most Standard English
words for body parts and body functions. Fart is another
Standard English word that troubled our Victorian ancestors
but not our Old English ones. They were much less squeamish
about language than are most of us. In Cockney rhyming slang,
fart became raspberry tart and then merely raspberry. The
next time you blow a raspberry, think of what you're
imitating. The original meaning of fizzle was to break
wind silently. Rawson points out that it that gives a whole
new meaning to "Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief
it is."
The word piss was common in the 1200's
and for the next 600 years. Piss occurs in the works
of Chaucer, More, Shakespeare, as well as many others. It
occurs in old translations of the Bible as well as in the
King James version. Piss is from the Middle English
pissen and the Old French pissier (which was
also adopted in German, Swedish and other Teutonic languages).
In days past to say someone had the pissing evil was
not an insult but a diagnosis. Pissing evil is an old
name for diabetes because diabetics urinate so frequently.
Shit is also an old word. It can be traced
to before A. D. 1000 and was formerly spelled schite
or shite. Although this word was used by Swift, Burton,
and others, by Shakespeare's time shit was taboo. Making
a word taboo is like watering a weed. The more taboo a word,
the more widely spread and used it becomes. For example, dipshit,
diddly shit, dumb shit, full of shit, holy shit, hot shit,
pile of shit, shit ass, shitface, shit for brains, shit list,
tough shit, ad infinitum. A related word, nitty-gritty, was
originally, and not long ago, slang for the anus. Except for
the dread F-word, shit is the word most often used as an exclamation
or intensifier. Oh, Shit! is the universal cry.
As the Puritans and, later, Victorians tabooed
more and more words, new words, often slang words, replaced
them. So many words have been used to replace taboo words
that you can't talk for long without saying something that
might offend some prude. Take cock for instance. (These days
most people can't understand the relationship between cocks
and...ahh...cocks. If you've never handled a live rooster,
you probably don't know that when you wrap your hand around
its neck, it has a very penile feel. If you're familiar with
chickens it's obvious why a penis is called a cock and if
you're not no explanation will suffice.) The word is first
found in written English in Chaucer. Shakespeare himself uses
it in puns, jokes, and wordplay but by the late 1700's and
early 1800's the taboo had grown so strong that apricox, haycocks,
and weathercocks became apricots, haystacks and weathervanes.
As the old word was rooted out, new ones, and not so new ones,
came to replace it - such as prick, Peter, Dick (thus a Dickless
Tracy is a policewoman), Jack, John Thomas, knocker, tool,
gun, pistol, short arm, truncheon, pole (as in Mae West's
immortal line: I wouldn't let him touch me if he had a ten
foot pole.), schlong, putz, shaft, root, snake, one- eyed
trouser snake, Cod, bone, fishbone (the bone used to fish
in what Shakespeare calls that peculiar river) and
so on and so on. Penis replaced cock after the older
word became unprintable even in scientific literature. Penis
is Latin, not for cock, but for tail. The Latin word for penis
is gladius or sword, something placed in a vagina
or sheath.
So we come to cunt, probably the most
heavily tabooed of English words. This was not always so.
The word appears in the Canturbury Tales (ca. 1400), spelled
queynte, "And prively he caught hire by the queynte...
And heeld hire by thehaunchbones." The earliest known
reference is from the 11th century and in 1230
there was a London street called Gropecunte Lane (Lover's
Lane maybe?), and, in 1328, even a Bele Wydecunthe (poor thing!).
Shakespeare uses cunt as a pun in Twelfth Night. As cunt became
taboo, new words sprang up. A woman's external genitalia have
been known as cat, beaver, beard (thus a beardsplitter is
a womanizer), snatch, twat, nokie, piece, squirrel, tail,
mutton, Lapland, slit, scut, Netherlands, cozzy, quim, mouse,
monkey, fish, cony, bit, bunny, scut, hat (because frequently
felt), furburger or a boxlunch or hair pie (the dish in cunnilingus)
and Carvel's ring. In a poem from 1230 a jealous old doctor
named Carvel dreamed the Devil gave him a ring that would
prevent his wife from being unfaithful as long as he wore
it. Carvel 's wife woke him with the complaint "You've thrust
your finger God knows where!"
The ever popular word pussy has referred
to the female genitalia for at least four hundred years but
at the same time and in, one assumes, different circles, it
was also used to refer to a young girl. Victorian fathers
could refer to their daughters as puss or pussy as in "'What
do you think, pussy?' said her father to Eva" in Uncle
Tom's Cabin. Surely that quote proves that there are no
objective standards and obscenity, blasphemy, and vulgarity
exist only the mind of the prude and are as about as inconstant
as the weather.
Fuck! Fuck off! Fuck You! Get Fucked!
(Since the majority of the human race likes nothing better,
this recommendation should fall somewhere between "Have a
nice day," and "Hope you win the lottery," and, indeed, in
some circles "Fuck you" has taken on softer, even playful
tone.) Go fuck yourself! Impossible, as Woody Allen pointed
out, even if you're a mechanical engineer! In-fucking-credible!
Go take a flying fuck at the moon (a practical suggestion
only for a few astronauts)! Now that I'm a grown-up, I can
say fuck but I had to learn how. It did not come trippingly
to my tongue. Whenever I made myself say it, I tended to get
a kind of mental wince. Fuck, I would say and !FUCK! I would
think. I was so shocked at myself.
Fuck is thought to be a Scottish word.
The old English words for intercourse were swive, jape and
sard. Fuck is believed to have originated with the Middle
Dutch fokken or perhaps the Germanic ficken
both of which mean to strike or to copulate with.
So the word has roots of both violence and sex. The English
word firk, also a possible progenitor, meant to
move suddenly, to cheat, to force oneself froward, to beat,
and to copulate with. Like the other major taboo words,
fuck has a multitude of slang synonyms such as screw, poke,
plow, ride, sex, jazz, rock and roll, zig-zag, nug, roger,
ball, bang, hump, score, and, when in California, to Californicate.
In Australia Redfern or getting off at Redfern refers to coitus
interruptus, Redfern being the last railway station before
Sydney. My least favorite of the fuck words in motherfucker.
Let's face it. Very few people are fucking their mothers.
And if they were, it would probably be mutually consensual
behavior. It seems to me a much worse insult would be daughterfucker
or daughter molester, much worse because much more common
and, by definition, involving force, coercion or exploitation.
My favorite fuck word is Windfucker, a name for the European
Sparrow Hawk. A beautiful thought, that this winged creature
is on such terms of intimacy with the air.
Sometimes it's not what you say but who you
say it about. William Colyburne, in 1484, wrote a couplet
in which he referred to Richard III as a hogge [hog]. He fled
but was caught, hanged almost to death, cut down, disemboweled,
and his intestines burned. In 1812, in softer times, Leigh
Hunt, editor of The Examiner, described the Prince Regent
(the future George IV) as a corpulent man of fifty, for which
he was prosecuted for libel, convicted, and sentenced to two
years in jail. In 1984 the wife of the mayor of Pine Hills,
New York, called a reporter a fat pig and was convicted of
verbal assault and fined $250. Ah, how standards have declined.
So many words have been taboo. Some religious
people still believe that certain words should be forbidden
and attempt to force other people to conform to what they
consider appropriate language. That just makes me want to
use them more.
There's another reason not to shy from using
these words. History. It's no coincidence that most acceptable
words for intimate body parts and their functions, words like
copulate, defecate, urinate, derriere, penis, pudendum, have
Latin or French roots. England was conquered by the Norman
French in 1066 and by the Romans a thousand years before.
The stamps of those conquests are still impressed upon our
language just as American Blacks still bear the names of masters
rather than of ancestors. The conquerors got to say what was
good and bad, what was permissible and impermissible, what
was high class and what was low class. No doubt they thought
themselves the measure of all things right and proper and
their Anglo-Saxon subjects, serfs, and slaves, the measure
of all things undesirable. Their power and assurance were
so strong that they convinced their victims to conform to
their standards. So the old Anglo-Saxon words or words with
Anglo-Saxon roots became taboo while the languages of the
conquerors remained acceptable, even after conqueror and conquered
had merged into a single race. Violence and power reached
beyond death and grasped the descendants of its victims. There
is no logical reason that any English speaker should be allowed
to say defecate but not shit, copulate but not fuck, derriere
but not ass. There is even a good illogical reason to use
the old words and that is to use them to repudiate the old
legacy of defeat and subjection and the newer legacy of hypocrisy
and repression. These words, they're so old, so damn old,
we ought to use them just out of sentiment and because they
have seniority.
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