The Mother Tongue (35 page)

Although Shakespeare had a weakness for double entendre puns, on the whole he was a fairly restrained and not terribly inventive swearer.
Damned
appears 105 times in his thirty-seven plays, but for the rest he was content to insert the odd “for God's sake,” “a pox on't,” “God's bread,” and one “whoreson jackanapes.”
Julius Caesar,
unusually for the period, has not a single instance of swearing. By contrast, in the same year that
Julius Caesar
was first performed, Ben Jonson's
Every Man in His Humour
offered such colorful phrases as “Whoreson base fellow,” “whoreson coney-catching rascal” (
coney
being a synonym for pudendum), “by my fackins faith,” and “I am the rankest cow that ever pissed.” Other of his plays contain even richer expressions: “I fart at thee,” “Shit o' your head,” “Turd i' your teeth.” Another play of the period,
Gammer Gurton's Needle,
first performed about 1550, contained literally dozens of instances of swearing: “By Jesus,” “dirty bastard,” “bawdy bitch,” “for God's sake,” and many more in the same vein. It even had a parson describing someone as “that shitten lout.” Other oaths of the period included such memorable expressions as “kiss my blindcheeks” and “stap my vitals.”

Soon after Shakespeare's death, Britain went through a period of prudery of the sort with which all countries are periodically seized. In 1623 an Act of Parliament was passed making it illegal to swear. People were fined for such mild oaths as “upon my life” and “by my troth”—mild utterances indeed compared with the “God's poxes” and “fackins faiths” of a generation before. In 1649 the laws were tightened even further—to the extent that swearing at a parent became punishable by death.

But the greatest outburst of prudery came in the nineteenth century when it swept through the world like a fever. It was an age when sensibilities grew so delicate that one lady was reported to have dressed her goldfish in miniature suits for the sake of propriety and a certain Madame de la Bresse left her fortune to provide clothing for the snowmen of Paris. Prudery, so often associated with the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), actually considerably predated it. One of the great names in the field was that of Thomas Bowdler, an Edinburgh physician who purified the works of writers such as Shakespeare and Gibbon, boasting that it was his practice to add nothing new to the work, but simply to remove those words that “cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” His ten-volume
Family Shakespeare
appeared in 1818, a year before Victoria was born, so it is clear the queen didn't establish the trend, but simply helped to prolong it. In fact, almost a century before she reigned Samuel Johnson was congratulated by a woman for leaving indecent words out of his dictionary. To which he devastatingly replied: “So you've been looking for them, have you, Madam?”

It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas Pyles in his outstanding
Words and Ways of American English
tracked the story to a book called
Diary in America,
written in 1837 by an English traveler, Captain Frederick Marryat, and concluded that the story was told for comic effect and almost certainly was untrue. Rather more plausible was the anecdote recorded in the same book in which Marryat made the serious gaffe of asking a young lady if she had hurt her leg in a fall. The woman blushingly averted her gaze and told him that people did not use
that
word in America. “I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to having been accustomed only to
English
society,” Marryat drolly remarked, and asked the lady what was the acceptable term for “such articles.”
Limbs,
he was told.

It was an age in which the most innocuous words became unacceptable at a rate that must have been dizzying.
Stomach
became a euphemism for
belly
and in its turn was considered too graphic and was replaced by
tummy, midriff,
and even
breadbasket.
The conventional terms for the parts of a chicken, such as
breast, leg,
and
thigh,
caused particular anxiety and had to be replaced with terms like
drumstick, first joint,
and
white meat.
The names for male animals, such as
buck
and
stallion,
were never used in mixed company. Bulls were called
sires, male animals,
and, in a truly inspired burst of ridiculousness,
gentleman cows.
But it didn't stop there. Euphemisms had to be devised for any word that had
cock
in it—
haycock
became
haystack, cockerel
became
rooster
—and for the better part of a century people with
cock
in their names, such as Hitchcock or Peacock, suffered unspeakable embarrassment when they were required to make introductions. Americans were rather more squeamish in these matters than the British, going so far as to change the old English
titbit
to
tidbit.

Against such a background one can easily imagine the shock that must have gripped readers of
The Times
of London, who turned to their paper one morning in January 1882 and found a lengthy report on a parliamentary speech by the attorney general concluding with the unexpectedly forthright statement: “The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking.” Not surprisingly, it caused a sensation. The executives of
The Times
were so dumbstruck by this outrage against common decency that four full days passed before they could bring themselves to acknowledge the offense. After what was doubtless the most exhaustive internal investigation ever undertaken at the newspaper, it issued this apology: “No pains have been spared by the management of this journal to discover the author of a gross outrage committed by the interpolation of a line in the speech by Sir William Harcourt reported in our issue of Monday last. This malicious fabrication was surreptitiously introduced before the paper went to press. The matter is now under legal investigation, and it is to be hoped that the perpetrator will be brought to punishment.” But if they hadn't caught him after four days I doubt if they ever did. In any case, he or someone of like sensibilities struck again six months later when an advertisement appeared promoting a book about “Every-day Life in our Public Schools. Sketched by Head Scholars. With a Glossary of Some Words used by Henry Irving in his disquisition upon fucking.” Whatever soul or souls were responsible for this sequel, they kept their peace thereafter—though I have been told that when Queen Victoria opened the Clifton Suspension Bridge the sentence “Her Majesty then passed over the bridge” came out in
The Times
as “Her Majesty then pissed over the bridge.” Whether this embellishment of the facts was intentional or fortuitous (or even possibly apocryphal) I could not say.

The Victorian horror at the thought of swearing in print has lingered up to our own day. According to Ashley Montagu, as recently as 1947
Technology Review,
a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology read almost exclusively by scientists and technocrats, changed the expression “doing his damnedest” to “doing intensely his very best.” Ten years later the same author used the same phrase in a book and again had it cut. Montagu also cites the instance in 1941 of a federal judge threatening a lawyer with contempt for using a base and indecent word in his court. The word was
darn.
In 1948, Burges Johnson actually managed to write a book on swearing,
The Lost Art of Profanity,
without once mentioning any of the four-letter words. He would not have gotten it published otherwise. And as late as 1949, the Hollywood Production Code banned the word
dames.
In that year, as Mario Pei notes, a movie called
Dames Don't Talk
had its title changed to
Smart Girls Don't Talk.

The editors of the
Random House Dictionary
of 1966 decided, after considerable agonizing, not to insert any four-letter words. They did not appear until the publication of
RHD-II
in 1987. The original
Oxford English Dictionary,
despite its determination to chart every word in the language, contained none of the four-letter words, though they did appear in the supplements to the
OED,
which began to appear in 1972. They also appeared in the
Concise Oxford Dictionary
from about the same time.

In 1988, William Safire managed to write a column in
The New York Times Magazine
about the expression
the shit hit the fan
without actually mentioning
shit.
The closest he came was to talk about the use of “a scatological noun just before the familiar
hit the fan.
” During the Watergate hearings, the
Times
did print the term
candyass,
used by Richard Nixon, but did so only reluctantly. The paper's stylebook continues to say that goddamn “should not be used at all unless there is a compelling reason.” And the National Transportation Safety Board displayed extraordinary delicacy when it published a transcript of cockpit voice recordings during the crash of a United Airlines jet in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989. An example: “We're not going to make the runway, fellows. We're going to have to ditch this son of a [word deleted] and hope for the best.”
^*

The British are relatively broad-minded about language, even in their advertisements. In 1989 Epson, the printer company, ran a lighthearted ad in British newspapers about the history of printing, which contained the statement that “a Chinese eunuch called Cai Lun, with no balls but one hell of an imagination, invented paper.” I doubt very much that any American newspaper would accept an ad referring explicitly to the testicular condition of the inventor of paper.

Most of the quality newspapers in Britain have freely admitted expletives to their pages when the circumstances were deemed to warrant it. Their first opportunity to do so was in 1960 when a court decided that
Lady Chatterley's Lover
could be printed in full without risk of doing irreversible damage to society's well-being. Three British publications,
The Observer,
The Guardian,
and
The Spectator,
took the opportunity to print
fuck
themselves and were promptly censured by the Press Council for doing so. But the word has appeared many times in the British press since then, generally without any murmur of complaint. (Ironically, the tabloid newspapers, though usually specializing in matters of sex and prurience, are far more skittish when it comes to printing swear words.)

In 1988 British papers were given an outstanding opportunity to update their position on obscenities when the captain of the England cricket team, Mike Gatting, reportedly called the umpire of an important match “a fucking, cheating cunt.” Only one newspaper,
The Independent,
printed all the words without asterisks. It was the first time that
cunt
had appeared in a British newspaper.

Some words are less innocent than they seem.
Bollix
is commonly used in America to describe a confused situation, as in this quotation from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
[October 7, 1987]: “It was the winless Giants' third loss of the bollixed strike-torn season.” Or this one from American Airlines' inflight magazine,
American Way
[May 1, 1988]: “Our faux pas of the month for February was the crossword puzzle titled Heavy Stuff, which was all bollixed up.” It is probably safe to assume that neither writer was aware that
bollix
is a direct adaptation of
bollocks
(or
ballocks
), meaning “testicles.” It is still used in England to describe the testicles and also as a cry to express disbelief, similar to
bullshit
in American usage. As Pyles notes, Barnacle Bill the Sailor was originally Ballocky Bill and the original words of his ballad were considerably more graphic and sexual than the innocent phrases beloved by generations of children. The American slang word
nuts
also means “testicles”—though oddly when used as an exclamation it becomes wholly innocent. Other words concealing unsavory origins include
bumf,
which is short for
bumfodden
or “toilet paper” in German, and
poppycock,
an adaptation of a Dutch word meaning “soft dung.” (In answer to the obvious question, yes, they also have a word for firm dung—in fact two:
poep
and
stront.
)

A few swear words have evolved different connotations in Britain and America. In America, a person who is pissed is angry; in Britain he's drunk.
Bugger,
a wholly innocent word in America, is not at all welcome in polite conversation in Britain. As Pyles notes, until 1934 you could be fined or imprisoned for writing or saying it. A bugger in Britain is a sodomite. Although
bugger
is unacceptable,
buggery
is quite all right: It is the term used by both the legal profession and newspapers when someone is accused of criminal sodomy.

*
 Published in The New York Times, September 19, 1989.

15.

Wordplay

S
ix days a week an Englishman named Roy Dean sits down and does in a matter of minutes something that many of us cannot do at all: He completes the crossword puzzle in the London
Times.
Dean is the, well, the dean of the British crossword. In 1970, under test conditions, he solved a
Times
crossword in just 3 minutes and 45 seconds, a feat so phenomenal that it has stood unchallenged for twenty years.