Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (22 page)

Elyot broaches this conflict in a Latin epistle
to his “truly learned readers” that prefaces his
Dictionary
. The topic of obscenity is itself so volatile that it can be discussed only in Latin. He declares: “If anyone wants obscene words, with which to arouse dormant desire while reading, let him consult other dictionaries and spurn mine, under this excuse, if he likes, that it lacks words of this very sort.” Although
copia
is one of his guiding principles, and he boasts that his dictionary contains a thousand more words than the next man’s, Elyot maintains that none of those words is obscene. “I knew how much human feelings are always ready for blazing up, once they are even moderately able to enjoy a little bit of half-hidden fire within a few lascivious little words,” he writes. Therefore his dictionary will remove these little words and not “furnish raging Cupid with a torch.”

This is very much the medieval view of foul words inciting other sins—a few lascivious little words ignite the blaze of desire, and pretty soon “Cupid” is running around with a “torch,” sticking it who knows where. It differs from the medieval view, however, in that Elyot singles out “obscene words” (
obscœna uocabula
) as the ones that light the fires of sin. He seems to consider obscene words as more dangerous than other words, more capable of arousing that terrible and ultimately punishable desire.

Which words are obscene? Looking through Elyot’s dictionary, we find that they correspond pretty closely to what we might expect, with some interesting exceptions. He includes the Latin
vulva
but explains quite chastely that it refers to “the womb or mother of any female kind, also a meat used of the Romans, made of the belly of a sow, either that hath farrowed [has had a litter], or is with farrow.” He has deliberately censored the definitions found in earlier Latin-English dictionaries; Wynkyn de Worde’s
Ortus Vocabulorum
of 1500, for example, defined
vulva
as “in English, a cunt.” And he while he includes
cunnus
, he defines it not with its vulgar English equivalent but as “
a womans wycket
.” In this case, Elyot judges all Latin words proper to print, accompanied by their circumlocutionary explanations in English, but decides that their straightforward English equivalents must be avoided. These plain English words evidently wield more power to arouse lascivious desires than their Latin equivalents or vulgar euphemisms.

That Elyot singles out obscene English words as the chief—almost the only—inflamers of concupiscence is even more apparent when we look at the words he includes for breasts. He starts off with the very factual
mamma
, “a dugge or pappe,” and
mamilla
, “a little dugge or pappe,” words that might apply either to people or to animals and which are described quite clinically, with no hint of the wanton uses to which these mammae could be put. Elyot goes on, however, to define
mammosus
, “having great dugges,” and perhaps most strikingly
mammeata
, “a woman with greate dugges or pappes.” The description Elyot provides for
mammeata
seems as likely as any word in his dictionary to stir up lust—after reading about “a woman with greate dugges or pappes” it seems hard not to picture one, and in deference to Elyot we won’t speculate about where imaginations might go from there. But Elyot seems to have found nothing wrong, nothing dangerous to his readers’ mental landscape, about including
mammeata
and words related to it in his
Dictionary
. We saw in the previous chapter how John Stanbridge,
following the medieval model, censored anything tending toward licentiousness from his
Vulgaria
: remember
vulva
as “locus ubi puer concipitur.” For Elyot, in contrast, only words such as
cunt
corrupt—words such as
pappe
or
dugge
, though they have sexual referents and might be thought to inflame the passions, are not obscene and are therefore less dangerous. There seems to be something magical about the way obscenities infiltrate the mind. They have an offensive (or erotic) power in excess of their literal meaning.

In other ways, though, Elyot’s definition of obscenity is different from our own. Words for excrement are not on his forbidden list, because they have little chance of arousing any sinful desires. He defines the verb
caco
, for example, as “to shit.”
Urina
is “urine or piss,” while
vomo
is explained as “to vomit or parbrake.” These words are not dangerous because they do not arouse lust and so lead to moral corruption, and instead the principle of
copia
reasserts itself.
Caco
is “to shit,” but
cacaturio
is the more decorous “to desire to go to stool.”
Urina
is either the blunt “piss” or the more polite “urine.” With scatology, it appears important to master words of different registers—these might be useful to add to the rhetorician’s rich store of vocabulary.

Other lexicographers abandoned didactic responsibility
, or rather, refused to worry about their readers’ moral education. John Florio, who published his Italian-English dictionary
A Worlde of Wordes
in 1598, and John Palsgrave, whose
Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse
(The Clarification of the French Language) appeared in 1530, wanted instead to present their vernacular languages as they were really spoken, in all their morally dubious glory. In a preface, Palsgrave boasts that one could actually learn to speak French from his dictionary. Perusing these dictionaries, it quickly becomes apparent that obscene words must have played a vital part in early modern communication. Florio includes several terms that signify in some form or another “a mans privie member.” There is the simple
cazzo
, the privie member itself. There is
cazzaria
,
“a treatise or discourse of pricks,”
*
cazzo ritto
, “a stiffe standing pricke,”
cazzuto
, “a man that hath a pricke,” and several more cognates. One of these words is intriguingly unlike its fellows—
cazzica
, “an interjection of admiration and affirming, what? gods me, god forbid, tush.” Florio here chose to translate a word that derives from “penis” with a vain oath on God’s name. Even in the Renaissance, it was still common to use oaths where we today—and the Italians of four hundred years ago—would use an obscenity. Florio and Palsgrave are writing at the birth of English obscenity, not yet its ascendancy.

The
Worlde of Words
includes
cunt
too, in
potta
, “a womans privie parts, a cunt, a quaint” and
pottaccia
, “a filthie great cunt.”
^†
Florio also freely uses
fuck
in his definitions of the Italian
fottere
. He assigns the verb itself the meanings “to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy,” while
fottitrice
is “a woman fucker, swiver, sarder, or iaper” and
fottitore
the male equivalent. Palsgrave never prints the
f
-word in English, but translates
foutre
with
sard
and
swive
. He helpfully gives examples of how to use these words in conversation, such as “I will not swive her and she would pray me”—“I wouldn’t fuck her if she begged me.” Even worse, by the principle of didactic responsibility, might be his definition of
ie fringue
: “I frig with the arse as a queene doth when she is in japing,” that is, “I rub with the ass as a prostitute does while she is fucking.” I challenge you to read that without wading a little bit deeper into the ooze of sin.

Florio may have the most
fuck
s, but his are not the earliest examples of the word. That honor goes to a piece of marginalia in a manuscript of Cicero, “
O d fuckin Abbot
,” from 1528. An anonymous monk was reading through the monastery copy of
De Officiis
when he felt compelled to express his anger at his abbot. (We can be sure when this was because he helpfully recorded the date in another comment.) It is difficult to know whether the annotator intended
fucking
to mean “having sex,” as in “that guy is doing too much fucking for someone who is supposed to be celibate,” or whether he used it as an intensifier; if the latter, it anticipates the first recorded use by more than three hundred years. Either is possible, really—John Burton, the abbot in question, was a man of questionable monastic morals. It is interesting as well that while the annotator has no problem spelling out
fucking
(except for the
g
), he refuses to write out a word that is most likely
damned
. To this monk,
damnation
is the real obscenity, the one that can be hinted at but not expressed in full.

There are at least two instances of
fuck
dated before that of our monk, but scholars sometimes deny them the glory of first use because one is Scottish and one appears in code, with a Latin verb conjugation. The Scots poet William Dunbar (more of him later) penned these lines sometime before his death, in 1513:

He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit
,

As with the glaikis he wer ovirgane.

Yit be his feirris he wald have fukkit …

[He embraced fast [tight], he kissed and groped,

As if he were overcome with desire.

Yet [it seemed from] his behavior he would have fucked.]

The coded example is also from a poem, dated 1475–1500, this one attacking the Carmelite friars of the town of Ely. It is macaronic, that is, written partly in English and partly in Latin, with the dirty bits “concealed” in the most basic of ciphers:

Non sunt in cœli
, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.

…

Fratres cum knyvys goth about and txxkxzv nfookt xxzxkt.

For each letter of code, you simply substitute the previous letter of the alphabet, and you get, making allowances for late medieval spelling, “fuccant wivys of heli”—“They [the monks] are not in heaven, because they fuck the wives of Ely.” The third line unciphers to “swivyt mennis wyvis”—“Brothers with knives go about and swive men’s wives.” To this author,
swive
was apparently as bad a word as its synonym, also requiring at least the pretense of concealment. It is unclear whether the words are censored because
swive
and
fuck
are thought to be obscene, worse in themselves than the other words in the poem, or because the sexual sins of which the author accuses the monks are so horrible they cannot be stated outright. What is clear is that you didn’t want to mess with any Carmelite friar looking for oppljf.

There are many theories on the etymology of
fuck
. It is popularly supposed to be an acronym. When England’s population was decimated by the plague in olden times, the story goes, the king pondered how to get his subjects to reproduce. He issued proclamations demanding that they “fornicate under command of the king,” or F.U.C.K. for short. This is not true, nor is pretty much any story that explains the origin of a swearword as an acronym.
Naff
,
for example, is not
an acronym of “not available for fucking.” More familiar to Brits than to Americans,
naff
was a word in the gay slang language Polari in the 1960s, meaning “tacky.” Princess Anne caused controversy when she told photographers to “naff off” in 1982.
Shit
, actually one of the oldest words in the English language, has produced perhaps the best of these stories: Before the American Revolution, people used to ship manure back and forth across the Atlantic for fertilizer. When the manure in the hold of the ship came into contact with seawater, it would start to ferment, producing methane gas. When an unfortunate sailor would go belowdecks with a lantern, the ship would explode. As a result, bundles of manure began to be labeled “Ship High in Transit,” so that sailors would know to store them high enough that they wouldn’t get wet and blow up.

If it’s not an acronym
, what is the etymology of
fuck
? The real answer is rather less interesting. It is a word of Germanic origin, related to Dutch, German, and Swedish words for “to strike” and “to move back and forth.” It is also clearly not one of our good old Anglo-Saxon words, like
shit
, having come into use only in the late fifteenth century.

Florio and Palsgrave included words such as
fuck, arse
, and
swive
in their dictionaries because people used them in everyday life, despite the growing sixteenth-century sense that these words were obscene—worse, morally, than the other words around them. This increased use is reflected in court records of the period. Medieval insults that made it into suits of defamation and slander, as we saw in the previous chapter, overwhelmingly featured the words
false, harlot
, and
whore
, and various combinations thereof—“False whore-mongering harlot!”
In the sixteenth century, the insults
began to employ more of the words we would use today. In 1555, John Warneford and John a Bridges were at loggerheads over a piece of property, when John B. brought a defamation suit claiming that John W. had called him a “crooked nose[d] knave” and declared “shit upon his Crooked nose.” When in 1597 Roger Jackson wanted to vilify William Hobson by suggesting he was an adulterer, he didn’t use
adulterer
or
false
; he went straight to “he fuckes and sardes bothe Alen Sugdons wife of Stanley and her doghter.” And in 1629 John Slocombe complained that George Bailey was going around telling people that he had shown him his “pricke” and told him “this pricke hath fuckt Ioan Pecke many times.” Bailey was also spreading the rumor that Slocombe “did pisse or make water in the widdowe Tylles backside.” This is less kinky than it sounds: Slocombe had apparently peed in her garden.