The Mother Tongue (34 page)

Other name changes have been less disastrous but still of questionable benefit to the company. Fewer than 60 percent of people polled in 1987 knew that Esmark was an American conglomerate—about as many as remembered Swift, the name it had changed from twelve years before. Other companies whose former identities have been submerged for better or worse in new names are Unisys (formed from the merger of Burroughs and Sperry), Trinova (formerly Libbey-Owens-Ford), and Citibank (from First National City Bank).

When a company changes its name, the procedure is generally much the same as when a name is sought for a new candy bar or washing powder. Usually the company appoints a name specialist such as Novamark or Lippincott & Margulies. The specialist then comes up with several hundred or even thousand potential names. These may be suggested by employees or by panels of people chosen for the occasion, or simply churned out randomly by computers. Typically three-quarters of the names must be discarded because they are already trademarked or because they mean something offensive or inappropriate somewhere in the world.

If you are thinking of launching a new product yourself, I can tell you that among the names you cannot use are Sic, Pschitt, Plopp, and Super Piss. The first two are the names of soft drinks in France, the third is a candy bar in Taiwan, and the fourth is a Finnish deicer. Sorry.

*
 Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.

14.

Swearing

A
mong the Chinese, to be called a turtle is the worst possible taunt. In Norwegian,
devil
is highly taboo—roughly equivalent to our
fuck.
Among the Xoxa tribe of South Africa the most provocative possible remark is
hlebeshako
—“your mother's ears.” In French it is a grave insult to call someone a cow or a camel and the effect is considerably intensified if you precede it with
espèce de
(“kind of”) so that it is worse in French to be called a kind of a cow than to be called just a cow. The worst insult among Australian aborigines is to suggest that the target have intercourse with his mother. Incest is in fact so serious in many cultures that often it need be implied in only the vaguest terms, as with
tu madre
in Spanish and
your mama
among blacks in America. Often national terms of abuse are nonsensical, as in the German
schweinehund,
which means “pig-dog.”

Some cultures don't swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2:00
A
.
M
., rather oddly adopted the word
ravintolassa.
It means “in the restaurant.”

But most cultures swear and have been doing so for a very long time. Dr. J. N. Adams of Manchester University in England studied swearing by Romans and found that they had 800 “dirty” words (for want of a better expression). We, by contrast, have only about twenty or so, depending on how you define the term. The Rating Code Office of Hollywood has a list of seventeen seriously objectionable words that will earn a motion picture a mandatory R rating. If you add in all the words that are not explicitly taboo but are still socially doubtful—words like
crap
and
boobs
—the number rises to perhaps fifty or sixty words in common use. Once there were many more. More than 1,200 words just for
sexual intercourse
have been counted.

According to Dr. Adams's findings, certain things have not changed in 1,500 years, most notably a preoccupation with the size of the male member, for which the Romans provided many names, among them
tool, dagger, sickle, tiller, stake, sword,
and (a little oddly perhaps)
worm.
Even more oddly, the two most common Roman slang words for the penis were both feminine, while the most common word for female genitalia was masculine.

Swearing seems to have some near-universal qualities. In almost all cultures, swearing involves one or more of the following: filth, the forbidden (particularly incest), and the sacred, and usually all three. Most cultures have two levels of swearing—relatively mild and highly profane. Ashley Montagu, in
The Anatomy of Swearing,
cites a study of swearing among the Wik Monkan natives of the Cape York Peninsula. They have many insults which are generally regarded as harmless teasing—
big head, long nose, skinny arms
—and a whole body of very much more serious ones, which are uttered only in circumstances of high emotion. Among the latter are
big penis, plenty urine,
and
vagina woman mad.

English is unusual in including the impossible and the pleasurable in its litany of profanities. It is a strange and little-noted idiosyncrasy of our tongue that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to undertake an anatomical impossibility or, stranger still, to engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than almost anything else. Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbable sentiment than “Get fucked!” We might as well snarl, “Make a lot of money!” or “Have a nice day!”

Most of our swear words have considerable antiquity. Modern English contains few words that would be unhesitatingly understood by an Anglo-Saxon peasant of, say, the tenth century
A
.
D
. but
tits
is one of them. So is
fart,
believe it or not. The Anglo-Saxons used the word
scītan,
which became
shite
by the 1300s and
shit
by the 1500s.
Shite
is used as a variant of
shit
in England to this day.

Fuck,
it has been suggested, may have sprung from the Latin
futuo,
the French
foutre,
or the German
ficken,
all of which have the same meaning. According to Montagu the word first appears in print in 1503 in a poem by the Scottish poet William Dunbar. Although
fuck
has been around for centuries, possibly millennia, for a long period it fell out of general use. Before 1503, the vulgar word for sex was to
swive.

Pussy,
for the vagina, goes back at least to the 1600s.
Arse
is Old English. Common names for the penis, such as
dick, peter,
and
percy
(used variously throughout the English-speaking world), go back at least 150 years, though they may be very much older.
Jock
was once also common in this respect, but it died out, though it survives in
jockstrap.

It is often hard to trace such terms reliably because they weren't generally recorded and because they have, for obvious reasons, seldom attracted scholarly investigation.
Buttocks,
for instance, goes back to at least the thirteenth century, but
butt,
its slangy diminutive form, is not recorded until 1859 in America. As Stuart Berg Flexner observes, it seems highly unlikely that it took 600 years for anyone to think of converting the former into the latter. Similarly, although
shit
has been around in various forms since before the Norman conquest,
horseshit
does not appear before the 1930s. Again, this seems improbable. The lack of authoritative guidance has sometimes encouraged people to come up with fanciful explanations for profanities.
Fuck,
it was suggested, was originally a police blotter acronym standing for “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.” It is nothing of the sort.

After
O.K., fuck
must be about the most versatile of all English words. It can be used to describe a multitude of conditions and phenomena, from making a mess of something (
fuck up
) to being casual or provocative (
fuck around
), to inviting or announcing a departure (
fuck off
), to being estimable (
fucking-A
), to being baffled (
I'm fucked if I know
), to being disgusted (
fuck this
), and so on and on and on.
Fuck
probably reached its zenith during the Second World War. Most people are familiar with the army term
snafu
(short for “situation normal—all fucked up”), but there were many others in common currency then, among them
fubar
(“fucked up beyond all recognition”) and
fubb
(“fucked up beyond belief”).

Piss
goes back at least to the thirteenth century, but may be even older. It has been traced to the Vulgar Latin
pissiare
and thus could conceivably date from the Roman occupation of Britain. As
piss
became considered indecent, the euphemism
pee
evolved, based simply on the pronunciation of the first letter of the word. In America,
piss
has been documented since 1760 and
pee
since 1788.

The emotional charge attached to words can change dramatically over time.
Cunt
was once relatively harmless. Chaucer dropped it casually and severally into
The Canterbury Tales,
spelling it variously
queynte, queinte,
and even
Kent.
The City of London once had an alley favored by prostitutes called Gropecuntlane. It was not until the early eighteenth century that the word became indecent.
Shit
was considered acceptable until as recently as the early nineteenth century.
Prick
was standard until the eighteenth century.
Piss
was an unexceptionable word from about 1250 to 1750, a fact still reflected in the common French name for urinals:
pissoirs.
On the other hand, words that seem entirely harmless now were once capable of exciting considerable passion. In sixteenth-century England,
zooterkins
was a pretty lively word. In nineteenth-century England
puppy
and
cad
were highly risqué.

Today the worst swear words in English are probably
fuck, shit,
and
cunt.
But until about the 1870s it was much more offensive to be profane.
God damn, Jesus,
and even
hell
were worse than
fuck
and
shit
(insofar as these things are quantifiable). In early swearing religion played a much more prominent role—so much so that in the fifteenth century a common tag for Englishmen in France was
goddams.
Swearing by saints was also common. A relic of this is our epithet
by George,
which is a contraction of “by St. George” and has been around for centuries.
Cock
was for a long time not only a slang term for penis but also a euphemism for God. Thus in
Hamlet
Ophelia could pun: “Young men will do't, if they come to't; By cock, they are to blame.” Some of these were surprisingly explicit—“by God's bones,” “by God's body”—but as time went on they were increasingly blurred into more harmless forms, such as
zounds
(for “God's wounds”),
gadzooks
(for “God's hooks,” the significance of which is obscure), and
God's bodkins
or other variants like
odsbodikins
and
gadsbudlikins,
all formed from “God's body.”

This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing. Most languages employ
euphemism
(from the Greek, meaning “to speak well of”) in some measure. Germans say the meaningless
Potz blitz
rather than
Gottes Blitz
and the French say
par bleu
for
par Dieu
and
Ventre Saint Gris
instead of
Ventre Saint Christ.
But no other language approaches English for the number of delicate expletives of the sort that you could safely say in front of a maiden aunt:
darn, durn, drat, gosh, golly, goodness gracious, gee whiz, jeepers, shucks,
and so on. We have scores, if not hundreds, of these terms. However, sometimes even these words are regarded as exceptionable, particularly when they are new.
Blooming
and
blasted,
originally devised as mild epithets, were in nineteenth-century England considered nearly as offensive as the more venerable expletives they were meant to replace.

But then of course the gravity of swear words in any language has little to do with the words themselves and much more to do with the fact that they are forbidden. It is a circular effect. Forbidden words are emotive because they are forbidden and they are forbidden because they are emotive.

A remarkable example of this is
bloody
in England, which to most Britons is at least as objectionable a word as
shit
and yet it is meaningless. A number of explanations have been suggested, generally involving either a contraction of an oath such as “by Christ's blood” or “by our Lady” or else something to do with menstruation. But there is no historical evidence to favor one view over the other. The fact is that sometime around the sixteenth century people began to say
bloody
and to mean a curse by it. It's now often hard to tell when they meant it as a curse and when they meant it to be taken literally, as when in
Richard II
Richmond says, “The bloody dog is dead.”