Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (32 page)

Larking
is another “lascivious practice that will not bear explanation,” according to Grose in 1785. (It also disappears from later editions of his dictionary.) It is a bit harder to figure out to what
larking
refers. Farmer and Henley go with fellatio again, but
Gordon Williams argues persuasively
that
larking
is having sex with the man’s penis between the woman’s breasts. In an 1800 engraving called “The Larking Cull,” the man is shown in just this position.

A practice considered less horrifying, in that it gets a real definition, is
to tip the velvet
. In the eighteenth century, this apparently meant “French-kiss”—Grose describes it as “tongueing a woman,” or “to put one’s tongue into a woman’s mouth.” A hundred years later, Farmer and Henley are defining it as cunnilingus. It is possible that the meaning changed in the intervening years, or that it was already ambiguous in the eighteenth century—“tongueing a woman” could refer equally to either action. Such kissing does seem to have been considered deviant;
Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies
, a guide to London prostitutes published annually between 1757 and 1795, mentions how “
a velvet salute
of this kind” from Miss H—lsb—ry “had nearly disgusted Lord L——.” For two guineas they worked it out, however: “he found that her tongue was attuned to more airs than one.” (Covent Garden was a well-known center of
prostitution. According to Grose,
covent garden ague
was venereal disease, a
covent garden abbess
was a bawd, and a
covent garden nun
was a prostitute.)

Other wonderful words that may be unfamiliar to you include
godemiche
, another French import, meaning “dildo.” A dildo, Grose helpfully explains, is “an implement resembling the virile member, for which it is said to be substituted, by nuns, boarding school misses, and others obliged to celibacy, or fearful of pregnancy. Dildoes are made of wax, horn, leather, and diverse other substances, and if fame does not lie more than usually, are to be had at many of our great toy shops and nick nackatories.” Grose is wonderfully able to describe what a dildo is while denying any firsthand knowledge of them.
Lobcock
is “a large relaxed penis, also a dull inanimate fellow.” A
rantallion
is “one whose scrotum is so relaxed as to be longer than his penis, i.e. whose shot pouch is longer than the barrel of his piece.”
Fartleberries
are “excrement hanging to the hairs about the anus, &c, of a man or woman.” (Here
&c
, “et cetera,” is back to being slang for the private parts.) And then there is
burning shame
, “a lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick.” Why this lascivious practice bears mention when larking and huffling don’t is not completely clear. Grose defines
cunt
as “a nasty name for a nasty thing”; perhaps he was simply unable to deny himself the pleasure of the pun:
burning shame
is “terrible shame/shame (cunt) on fire.”

There were many vulgar slang words
for the penis and the vagina themselves as well.
Pego
was popular, as were words that depicted the penis as splitting the woman’s anatomy or plugging a hole:
arse-opener, arse-wedge, beard-splitter, chinkstopper, plugtail
. It was also
Thomas
or
man Thomas, machine
, and
tool
, which are still in use today. The vagina was the
monosyllable
(Grose’s default word),
quim
, or
pussy
, a woman’s
commodity
—what a woman has to offer in the free market—or her
madge
(Madonna’s nickname is more appropriate than we thought). Slang for sexual intercourse included
roger
(also eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slang for the penis;
popular in Britain today),
screw
, and
have your greens
, the last putting a different spin on a phrase I have shouted at my children for years.

Breasts
and
bubbies
were the standard terms for breasts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Bubbies
was pronounced “bubbies,” as in Jewish grandmothers, not “boobies,” as in our own juvenile word for breasts.
Harris’s List
finds many occasions to describe bubbies and breasts—
Mrs. B-ooks
, who lodges next to the pawnbroker on Newman Street, for example, “is tolerable well made, with well formed projecting bubbies, that defy the result of any manual pressure, panting and glowing with unfeigned desire, and soon inviting the gratification of the senses.”
Betsy Miles
, at a cabinetmaker’s in Old Street, Clerkenwell, is “known in this quarter for her immense sized breasts, which she alternately makes use of with the rest of her parts, to indulge those who are particularly fond of a certain amusement”—larking, it sounds like. (She does it all, actually, “backwards and forwards.” “Entrance at the front door” is “tolerably reasonable,” but she gets “nothing less than two pound for the back way.”)
*
Diddeys
was another word for the breasts themselves, while
bushelbubby
was slang for a woman like Betsy Miles, who had large breasts.
When the
List
describes
the “two young beautiful tits” of Mrs. Mac-tney, Great Titchfield Street, however, it is referring to her teenage protégées, not her breasts.
Tit
came into its modern meaning only in the early twentieth century; from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, it indicated a young girl. (
Tit
as a variant of
teat
was used in the early Middle Ages—a tenth-century vocabulary defines
mamilla
[breast] as “tit” and
papilla
[nipple] as “titt-strycel.”)

Racial and Ethnic Slurs

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the age of decorum, but also the age of nationalism, with the expansion of the British Empire and the growth of America as an industrial powerhouse. Nationalistic pride was reflected in the desire of grammarians and lexicographers to “fix” the English language, making it a fit vehicle for imperial ambitions, as Latin had been for Rome. “Fixing” English meant two things—preserving it from change, so that Englishmen of the future would be able to understand the language of their forebears, and correcting its faults, getting rid of transitory slang and low terms that sullied the purity of the national language. Samuel Johnson sums up the aims of many lexicographers, as well as his own: he wants to create “
a dictionary by which the pronunciation
of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.” Noah Webster had similar aims for his dictionaries of American English—they should promote America’s distinct national character and, as he saw it, cultural superiority. He wrote in 1789:

As an independent nation
our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard. For the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language is on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be our model and to instruct us in the principles of our language.

It was Webster who was in large part responsible for getting rid of the
u
in
honor
, giving Americans something of a spelling system of our own.

This nationalistic desire to “fix” the English language worked hand in hand with rising civility to banish slang, vulgar words, and taboo topics from polite public discourse. Paradoxically, it also led
to the creation of a whole new category of swearing—racial and ethnic slurs. Before the era of empire, people had of course been in contact with other cultures, felt pride in their own culture, and experienced xenophobia. For centuries, the English had shared their small island with the Welsh and the Scots (and they had colonized Ireland since the mid-1500s). Renaissance drama had made some use of ethnic stereotypes—Shakespeare’s rather obscure “leek” references mock the supposed Welsh penchant for this vegetable, for example, and the Welsh love of cheese is also ridiculed during this period. The Scots and the Irish came in for their share of such insults as well, and we’ve already seen Shakespeare mock the French with “I shall make-a de turd.” There were, however, “
comparatively few terms of abuse
” among these groups, as Geoffrey Hughes notes.

It was only with the development of nationalism, and the great mixing of people brought about by trade and colonialism, that racial and ethnic insults really took off. By 1682 the Irish were no longer gently ridiculed for mispronouncing
is
as “ish” but were being denigrated as
bogtrotters
and
boglanders
.
Abusive terms for other
ethnicities arose around the same time, in quick succession:
frog
(a Dutch or a French person, 1652),
hottentot
(originally a term for the African “Bushmen,” then for any “uncivilized” person, 1677),
dago
(Spanish or Italian person, originally a U.S. term, 1723),
macaroni
(a foppish and effete foreigner, especially Italian, 1764),
yankee
(a derogatory term from the southern United States for New Englanders, or, used by the British, for Americans generally, 1765),
nigger
(a black person, 1775), and
kaffir
(originally a Muslim term for “heretic,” which came to refer to black Africans; predominantly a South African term, 1792).

A bit later we get
sheeny
(a Jewish person, 1816),
coon
(a black person, 1837),
wi-wi
(the French, in Australia and New Zealand, 1841),
mick
(an Irishman, 1850),
yid
(Jewish again, 1874),
jap
(Japanese, 1880), and
limey
(an Englishman, used by people from the British colonies, 1888). By 1940, our lexicon of slurs is pretty much complete, with
ofay
(a derogatory term for whites, used by
U.S. blacks, 1898),
wop
(a U.S. term for an Italian or other southern European, 1912),
spic
(a Spanish-speaker from South America or the Caribbean, 1913),
wetback
(an illegal immigrant from Mexico, 1929),
wog
(a foreigner, especially of Arab descent, 1929), and
gook
(a foreigner, especially East or Southeast Asian, 1935).
Honky
(a white person) first appears a bit later, in 1946, and the last important entrant is
paki
(1964), British slang for a person of South Asian descent.
Paki
is not commonly heard in America, but in Britain it is one of the top-ten swearwords, ranked in 2000 as number ten in order of offensiveness—below
cunt
and
motherfucker
but well above
arse
and
bugger
.

Some of these words were originally neutral terms, including, surprisingly,
nigger
, which had been used since 1574 to designate dark-skinned people from Africa. In early examples such as “the Nigers of Aethiop [Ethiopia] bearing witness” (1574), the word is used without intent to wound; its derogatory sense dates from around 1775. Most, however, were originally intended to be insulting—they were slurs. They were immediately offensive to their targets. It took much longer, however, for them to become offensive to others, for society to decide that they too were “bad words” or swearwords. Farmer and Henley, the pioneering authors of the late nineteenth-century
Slang and Its Analogues
, include entries such as
nigger in the fence
, “an underhand design”;
nigger-driving
, “exhausting with work”; and
nigger-luck
, “very good fortune,” as well as
sheeny
and
yid
. Farmer and Henley define these racial and ethnic slurs without comment, even though they editorialized about the coarseness, lowness, and vulgarity of
bloody
and
bugger
.

Even the first edition of the
OED
failed to note the potential offensiveness of racial epithets, though it had refused to include
fuck
and
cunt
at all, and editorialized about many it did include.
Arse
, for example, was “obs. [obsolete] in polite use” in 1888;
bugger
was “in decent use only as a legal term.” Even
boghouse
, which, as we have seen, was a euphemism for a privy, was qualified as “dial. [dialect] and vulgar.”
Bogtrotter, frog, kaffir
, and other racial epithets, in
contrast, were defined without comment, though it did note in 1908 that
nigger
was a colloquial use and “usually contemptuous.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, English-speakers were firmly stuck in the Shit. Obscenities had become the most offensive words in the English language, the ones with which people preferred to swear. A new category of swearing arose during this era as well, though it would take a further fifty years or so until society as a whole began to condemn the use of racial epithets, making them too into obscene words.

Chapter 6
“Fuck ’Em All”
Swearing in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

A young soldier comes home to his family after World War II. His grandmother asks him how his time in the army was. The truth is that he has seen many men, friends and enemies, die horrible deaths, and he returns with a heavy heart. He doesn’t want to burden his family, though, so he says, “The boys sure were funny, Grandma—they had so many great jokes.” “Tell us one, tell us one,” his family begs. He says, “Oh, I can’t do that. You see, the boys also used an awful lot of bad language.” His family really wants to hear a joke, though, so someone suggests that he just say “blank” whenever he comes to a bad word. He agrees, and tells a joke: “Blank blank blank blankity blank. Blank blank blank blank, blankity blanking blank blank. Blanking blankity blanking blank, blank blank blank blank fuck.”