Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (52 page)

*
Or with “orgies on the mountains,” depending on your translation. This is a good example of the difficulties involved in translating the Bible from Hebrew. The Hebrew word
hamon
means anything from “a sound, murmur, roar, tumult” to “abundance, wealth” to “many, multitude, hordes, population.” In choosing “the multitude of mountains,” the translators of the King James, Webster, and Darby versions are linking the phrase to the worship of idols that often takes place in “high places”—as when God warns any Israelites thinking about backsliding that he will “destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars; I will heap your carcasses on the carcasses of your idols” (Lev. 27:30). In choosing “orgies on the mountains,” translators of the NRSV fit the verse into the biblical narrative that describes idolatry in terms of sexual deviance—“this people [those Israelites, again] will begin to prostitute themselves to the foreign gods in their midst” (Deut. 31:16). Both translations have something to recommend them, though perhaps getting
orgies
from
crowd
and
tumult
is a bit more of a stretch. Which one is “correct”? God knows.

*
A similar connection between genitals and swearing is present in the English word
testify
, which comes from the Latin word for “witness,”
testis
. In Latin,
testis
was also a “risqué and jocose
” (as J. N. Adams put it) word for “testicle,” perhaps because the testicles “bear witness” to a man’s virility. The English
testify
thus isn’t derived from a Latin term for “balls,” but the words share a common ancestor in
testis
.

*
Like later Protestants, Lollards denied the physical presence of God’s body in the Eucharist, translated the Bible and encouraged individual reading of it, and protested against what they saw as the material excesses of the Catholic Church. (We’ll talk more about the Lollards in the following chapter.)

*
Blame Alexander Pope
, at least for “finny prey.” In his translation of Homer’s
Odyssey
, we get both “finny prey” and “scaly tribe,” and moving lines about how said tribe “its loss of Ocean’s flood bewails” while “the sun’s torrid radiance each fish / Condemns to die” (618–25). We will talk in
Chapter 5
about how this kind of sensibility and idea of literary diction affects swearing.

*
Led, by a creative but false
definition in the 1976 Robertson Davies novel
The Manticore
, to believe that
anitergium
meant “trifle,” choreographer Phoebe Neville inadvertently entitled a 1988 performance “Anitergium II Hohodowndownho,” otherwise known as “Ass-wiper 2, the Hoedown.”

*
Stanbridge
does
avoid oaths. Phrases such as “by God’s bones” are what schoolboys should avoid, not “turd in your teeth.”

*
By
orthodox
I mean the strand of Catholicism that upheld traditional, Church-sanctioned views, as opposed to heretical groups that questioned parts of those doctrines—not the Eastern Orthodox churches.

*
Was Bill Clinton equivocating in the sixteenth-century sense of the word when he denied his involvement with Monica Lewinsky? While it is perennially popular to make statements that are hard to pin down, equivocation in the technical sense of the term had been out of fashion for almost four hundred years at the time of the scandal. Clinton, however, was educated at Georgetown, a Jesuit university, and was strongly influenced by the Jesuit father Tim Healy. This background raises the possibility that he added the crucial “so that it’s any of your business,” to make a mental reservation. More likely he employed amphibology, playing with two different meanings of
sexual relations
, e.g., oral sex isn’t “sex.”

*
Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with her. He prayed to Aphrodite to make the statue real, and she did.

*
Titillation
is only indirectly related to
tit
—it comes from the Latin
titillatio
, meaning “a tickling.”
Bescumbered
means “covered in dung”;
to scumber
is “to evacuate the faeces,” as the
Oxford English Dictionary
says, especially of a dog or fox.
Bescumber
, along with
bewray
and
beshit
, is one of those words that comes up a lot in the Renaissance but hardly ever anymore—all mean “to cover or spray with shit.” Just as medieval people seem to have felt a need to spit that no longer impels us, people of the Renaissance appear to have been interested in the act of covering something with shit, which doesn’t grab us today at all.

*
La Cazzaria
is the title of a circa 1530 dialogue between two humanists who address questions ranging from “Why the asshole is behind the cunt” to “Why the common people don’t understand the beauty of the Tuscan language.”

^†
In Randle Cotgrave’s 1611
Dictionary of the French and English Tongues
there are no
cunt
s or
fuck
s, but there is a greyhound. A
levretée
is “an Hare-lipt, or blabber-lipt wench; also, a wench that hath beene buggered by a Greyhound.”

*
Historians don’t like to use the terms
middle class
and
working class
to describe people of this period, as those words are too freighted with a Marxist sense of class opposition to delineate early modern social groups. “Middling sort” indicates people who were not wealthy and not poor, and who were for the most part merchants and low-level gentry. They were not “bourgeois,” with all that term implies today. And the “lower sort” were not ill-educated factory workers who drank lots of beer on the weekends, the unfortunate connotations of
working class
today. (Also, there were no weekends—only Sunday, and you had better have spent that day in church.)

*
If you want to see Shakespeare’s genius in action, compare
The Famous Victories
with the Henriad.

*
“Boxing the Jesuit” was eighteenth-century slang for masturbation. As Francis Grose explains in his 1785 dictionary of slang: “to box the Jesuit, and get cock roaches” is a “sea term [used by sailors] for masturbation. A crime it is said much practiced by the reverend fathers of that society.”

^†
Frig
as an obscene word is perhaps more familiar in Britain, where it refers to masturbation. If you come across it in America, it may occasionally be a misspelling of
fridge
, meaning “refrigerator.” I walked into my daughter’s school one morning and saw a sign posted: “Note: small frig needed Tuesday.”

*
The results for British swearing are similar—
God
and
hell
are two of the most frequently used swearwords, among all social classes.

*
As literary critic and historian
Joss Marsh writes, “Not to be competent to give evidence in a legal system that had come to rely upon evidence … was tantamount to nonexistence.” An atheist whose nine-year-old son was killed before his eyes by a reckless cabby was unable to give evidence at the inquest, as he couldn’t take the oath; atheists charged with blasphemy couldn’t speak at their own trials, as they could not be sworn.

*
British laws that granted rights to religious minorities, including the right to swear or affirm according to their beliefs, include the Toleration Act (1689) for Quakers and other dissenters who believed in the Trinity, the Doctrine of the Trinity Act (1813) for Unitarians, the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829), and the Jewish Relief Act (1858).

*
This was a popular motif. It also appears in a 1613 epigram by Henry Parrot:

Cacus
constraind on suddaine to untrusse,

Turn’d up his podex in the open street

But hid his face and to them answerd thus

That passed by, and told him t’was unmeet,

Ther’s none (quoth
Cacus
) by mine arse that knows me,

How beastly els soever they suppose me.

—Laquei ridiculosi

*
Another speculation was that she was menstruating and that nothing had prepared Ruskin for this either.
Other scholars have argued
that it would be impossible even for Ruskin to be this ignorant, citing a letter he wrote to his parents that some aristocratic young men possessed pictures of “naked bawds.” It seems unlikely that Ruskin, who very much wanted to burn the erotic paintings of his idol J. M. W. Turner, would have wanted to examine the naked bawds, even if offered.
He described Turner’s erotic works
as “painting after painting of Turner’s of the most shameful sort—the pudenda of women—utterly inexcusable and to me inexplicable.” He could only explain their production as “having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity.”

*
Open-arse
, we have seen, was a synonym for
medlar
, which was itself sometimes substituted for
vagina
. A
poperin pear
is a kind of pear that came originally from Poperinghe, in Flanders. In Shakespeare, though, of course, a pear is never just a pear.

*
An anonymous author waxed poetic on this theme in 1697 in “On Melting Down the Plate: Or, the Piss-pot’s Farewell”:

Presumptuous Piss-pot
! How didst thou offend?

Compelling Females on the hams to bend?

To Kings and Queens, we humbly bow the Knee;

But Queens themselves are forc’d to stoop to thee.

*
The
Gentleman’s Magazine
of 1891 contains an article titled “Some English Expletives,” in which it discusses “that most characteristic of English epithets.”
Bloody
, it argues, “
is often classed as profane or obscene
… but does not properly fall within either of such categories.”

*
These schemas work better with verbs than with nouns. Few would argue that
cunt
is one of the most highly charged words in the English language, yet it can fill at most two of Hughes’s slots,
personal
and
personal by reference
.

*
It is worth noting that Betsy, Miss H—lsb—ry and Mrs. B-ooks are extraordinarily well paid. Betsy gets two pounds for the backdoor, Miss H receives two guineas (slightly more than two pounds) a pop, and Mrs. B-ooks gets a banknote, the lowest denomination of which was £5. In the mid-eighteenth century, a housemaid could expect to earn £6 a year; Mrs. B-ooks can earn that practically every night she chooses to work. Even well-off, thoroughly middle-class (male) lawyers only earned around £165 a year—two to three months’ work for our ladies. Of course, not all the women did so well from their commodities. Many on Harris’s list sold themselves for a few shillings. Even these “cheaper” women outearned housemaids by a wide margin, however.

*
Despite preserving these songs for posterity, Brophy and Partridge (who a few years later published one of the best slang dictionaries and even a book devoted exclusively to bawdiness in Shakespeare) felt the need to go Victorian on the obscenity they contained. These words, they declared, “are ugly, in form and in sound. They are sexual but utterly unvoluptuous. Their use will coarsen and degrade, but it will not soften or seduce… . They are unshriven and, seemingly, past redemption. In
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
D. H. Lawrence experimented with two of them [
fuck
and
cunt
]… . The experiment was a failure: the two words instead of interweaving with the texture of his prose, rear their unlovely heads out of the page, gibbering abominably.” The inspiration for
Alien
?