2 Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, Dec., 1943, p. 302.
3 An Essay on Man, I, 1732.
4 I am indebted here to Mrs. W. W. Elmer, Jr., of Idaho City, Idaho, and to Mr. Peter V. Chew of Berryville. Va.
1 An American Euphuism, by Ted Robinson, American Notes and Queries, Aug., 1943, p. 78.
2 Veiled Language, by Otto Jespersen, S. P. E. Tract No. XXXIII, 1929, p. 424.
3 Ajax was then pronounced a-jakes. Harington was Elizabeth’s godson, and is best remembered as the translator of Orlando Furioso. In 1605 he applied for appointment as Archbishop of Dublin, though he was not in holy orders. The Metamorphosis of Ajax included working drawings of his invention. It was republished in London in 1927. He followed it with An Anatomie of the Metamorphosed Ajax, and Ulysses Upon Ajax.
1 This work was reprinted in England, but H. W. Seaman tells me that it was a failure there. “Its only sales,” he says, “were among the extremely up-to-date.”
2 Aliases for the Latrine, American Notes and Queries, Oct., 1941, p. 103.
3 The Physiology of War, Journal of the American Medical Association (Tonics and Sedatives section), Jan. 29, 1944.
4 I am indebted here to Mr. S. H. Abrahamson of Montreal.
1 No New Jazz Age, This Week, Dec. 12, 1943; reprinted in full in the Congressional Record, Dec. 14, p. A5857.
1 I am indebted for this text to Mr. Alfred J. Croft, of the Hays office in New York. During the heyday of kidnappers and Prohibition gangsters special regulations were drawn up for the making of films dealing with crime, but they are now rather obsolete. In 1940, under pressure from the American Humane Association, pictures showing cruelty to animals were forbidden. The producers also subscribe to an Advertising Code prohibiting “profanity and vulgarity” in their advertising.
2 Quoted in the New Republic, Jan. 4, 1943.
3 Look, Aug. 2, 1938, p. 16. Censors’ Bans, News Review (London), Feb. 7, 1938. When Al Jolson’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum was shown in England the title had to be changed to Hallelujah, I’m a Tramp, for bum, over there, designates the backside. Sissy is even worse to English ears, for it means a homosexual. Why shyster is objected to I do not know. Partridge says that the English borrowed it from America, in the sense of a disreputable lawyer, c. 1890. In 1938 the British Board of Film Censors forbade Walt Disney’s Snow White for showing to children on the ground that it might frighten them. At that time all the children in London were being taught how to wear gas-masks.
1 Under the heading of Verbotens of 1929, compiled by Joe Laurie, Jr., Variety, the theatrical weekly, once printed a list of the words and phrases forbidden to vaudevillains in that year. It included to bell with, cockeyed, wop, Arab (signifying a Jew), pushover, dammit, belly, fanny and lousy. It should be added that these prohibitions were imposed by the Keith booking-office, not by any official censorship. See also Lefty’s Notebook, by the aforesaid Laurie, Variety, June 14, 1944.
2 The result in one case was described by Wolcott Gibbs in a review of Storm Operation, by Maxwell Anderson, New Yorker, Jan. 22, 1944, p. 34, as follows: “The humor is hard to discuss in a magazine that is distributed by a moral Postoffice. For purposes of verisimilitude (to give him the benefit of a considerable doubt), Mr. Anderson has found it necessary to use a good many Anglo-Saxon monosyllables; for obvious reasons he has had to rearrange them a little, which he does by changing their initial letters. Obviously nothing is disguised by this clever trick and there is even a certain amount of emphasis gained by forcing the ear to adjust itself to a variation; it is almost as if the original had been underlined.”
3 You Can’t Sing That, March, 1935.
1 The NED traces backside to c. 1500 and shows that it was used by Addison. Bawdy-house is traced to 1552, and behind to 1786.
2 I am indebted here to Mr. William McNulty, of Bedford Village, N. Y.
3 Five Days Wonder, New Yorker, Nov. 6, 1943, pp. 70 ff.
4 Romance, by Mary Mielenz, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 237.
5 Euphemism, Monroe (Mich.) Evening News (editorial), Nov. 21, 1931.
1 Vancouver (B. C.) Daily Province, June 9, 1936.
2 Syphilis Sive Morbus Humanus, by Charles S. Butler, rear admiral, M.C., U.S.N., ret.; Washington, 1939, p. xii.
3 Shadow on the Land (editorial), Feb. 2, 1938.
4 Perhaps because what even medical men used to conceal under the euphemism of Neisserian infection is more frequently the subject of folk ribaldry. Albert L. S. Neisser (1855–1916) discovered the gonococcus in 1879.
1 The record of this episode is to be found in the Editor and Publisher — Catholic News Protests VD Ad Campaign, Sept. 2, 1944; CWV Continues Protest Against Anti-VD Ads, Sept. 16, and U. S. Agencies Prepare Guides on VD Ads, Sept. 23 — and in the Congressional Record, Sept. 18, 1944, p. A4413.
2 Gonorrhoea is the English spelling.
1 Hush-Hush Over V.D., News-Review, London, March 11, 1943, p. 19
1 The history of the war upon nudity in America remains to be written. It had its forgotten heroes, and they deserve to be resurrected. One of them, apparently, was Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–81), editor of Scribner’s Monthly and author of “God Give Us Men!”, a favorite school declamation of the Gilded Age. At a time when the art museums of the country were still hesitating to take the drawers off their statuary he printed in Scribner’s (Nov., 1879, p. 24), a shameless woodcut of Raphael’s “Apollo and Marsyas,” showing anatomical details that must have shocked many a reader.
2 A Diary in America; New York, 1839, p. 153.
1 Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Frances M. Trollope; London, 1832.
2 Mr. Collier’s Corrected Folio of 1632, by Richard Grant White, Putnam’s Monthly, Oct., 1853, p. 401, footnote. Two years later, in March, 1855, Putnam’s turned ass, the name of the animal, into a—.
3 The NED’s first example is from James Flint’s Letters from America; Edinburgh, 1822, p. 264. Its first example in English use is dated 1882. The DAE traces rooster in American use to 1772, but it does not seem to have become general until the 30s. At the start it was regarded as somewhat advanced, and an anonymous writer in Bentley’s Miscellany, 1838, p. 581, records that a New York landlady preferred barndoor he-biddy.
4 In the sense of the front of a shirt, bosom is traced by the DAE to 1852. Shirts themselves became linen.
5 Traced by the DAE to 1837 and marked an Americanism.
6 Inexpressibles, Unmentionables, Unwhisperables and Other Verbal Delicacies of Mid-Nineteenth Century Americans, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, April, 1930, pp. 285–87.
7 Charles Sealsfield’s Americanisms, II, by John T. Krumpelmann, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 109, and Lexical Evidence from Charles Seals-field, by James B. McMillan, American Speech, April, 1943, p. 122.
1 Bartlett, 1859, listed hose as a Western term. “Stockings,” he said, “is considered extremely indelicate, although long socks is pardonable.”
2 I take this from Bartlett, 1859.
3 New York, 1937, p. 316.
1 Sulphur Springs of New York, Harper’s Magazine, June, 1856, p. 4.
2 Mary A. Dodge (Gail Hamilton): Country Living and Country Thinking; Boston, 1864, pp. 94–96.
3 The DAE traces like a thousand of brick to 1842, to dry up to 1854, and to knuckle to to 1864.
4 The DAE traces truck, in the sense here indicated, to 1822 and marks it an Americanism. Its first example of dicker is from the book here quoted. It does not list traps in the sense of luggage.
5 Apparently knocked up had not yet acquired its American sense of pregnant — or maybe La Dodge was too refined to be aware of it. On p. 4 of the same book she thus described herself: “Representing the gender half of humanity, of respectable birth, tolerable parts, and good education, as tender-hearted as most women, not unfamiliar with the best society, mingling, to some extent, with those who understand and practise the minor moralities, you would at once infer from my circumstances that
I was a very fair specimen of the better class of Americans, — and so I am. For one that stands higher than I in the moral, social, and intellectual scale, you will undoubtedly find ten that stand lower.”
1 Mary Abigail Dodge (c. 1830–96) is not to be confused with the Mary E. Mapes Dodge (1838–1905) who for many years edited St. Nicholas. Mary Abigail was born at Hamilton, Mass., and got her pen-name from the last syllable of her middle name and the name of her native town. She wrote many books and was editor of Our Young Folks for a short time in the 60s.
2 American Journalism; New York, 1041, p. 232.
3 Verbal Modesty in the Ozarks, Dialect Notes. Vol. VI, Part I, 1928, pp. 57–64.
1 See AL4, p. 301. A Study of Verbal Taboos, by J. M. Steadman, Jr., American Speech, April, 1935, p. 95, shows that nerts itself is considered “coarse, obscene” by not a few college students.
2 An Obscenity Symbol, American Speech, Dec., pp. 264–78.
3 Lexical Evidence From Folk Epigraphy in Western North America; Paris, 1935.
4 In A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English; New York, 1938. See also his revised and enlarged edition of Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue; London, 1931.
5 There is a useful bibliography of the earlier literature of the subject in Read’s An Obscenity Symbol, just cited.
6 Strange Fruit, Saturday Review of Literature, April 1, p. 14.
7 Probably a slip of the pen for pre-Puritan.
8 The original spelling was hore. This is traced by the NED to c. 1100. Hure was an early variant. The NED’s first example of whore is from the Coverdale Bible of 1535. The word occurs 16 times in the King James Version. Whoredom occurs 26 times, whore-monger 5 times, and whorish 3 times. Dr. Leonard Bloomfield suggests in Language; New York, 1933, p. 401, that whore “must have been at one time a polite substitute for some word now lost.”
9 Edwin M. (Ted) Robinson printed an intelligent discussion of the subject in his Philosopher of Folly’s Column, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug. 19, 1944. He called attention to the anomalous fact that the current taboo applies only to the words themselves, not to the ideas behind them. “All the matters referred to by these awful words,” he said, “may be discussed in print by the use of Synonyms.”
1 The former is listed by Baker. A derivative, boolshevik, signifying an active trader in boolsh, was coined by C. R. Bradish of Melbourne.
2 Webster 1934 derives bushwa(h) from bodewash, a Western American mispronunciation of the French bois de vache, cow’s wood, i.e., the bits of dried buffalo dung used as fuel on the prairies in the early days. In Bushwah, San Francisco News Letter and Wasp, July 14, 1939, Peter Tamony argues that it is rather derived from bourgeois. But it is commonly used as a euphemism for bullshit, and I incline to think that it represents a deliberate mispronunciation of that term.
3 The last three are used in a poem called Oxiline, by a Tulsa, Okla., poet who conceals himself behind the initials R. M. H. His work was published at Tulsa in 1939.
4 Bull — Bunk, by P. G. Perrin, American Speech, April, 1940, p. 216. See also Bull, by Joseph E. Gillet, American Speech, April, 1939, pp. 97–98, and Bull, American Speech, Dec., 1939, pp. 303–04.
5 Verbal Taboo in a College Community, American Speech, April, 1938, pp. 96–107.
1 In my boyhood in Baltimore a loose paving brick was called a she-brick. On wet days it discharged a stream of dirty water on anyone who stepped on it.
2 In the Middle West, in the days when harlots were itinerants, the conveyances they used were called cat-wagons.
3 Call-house especially indicates a house whose inmates go out to parties on call. See Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, Oct., 1942, p. 204.
4 One of the earliest of these, indicating a woman infected with venereal disease, is fire-ship. The NED traces it in English use to 1672, but it is to be found in the archives of Maryland (Vol. LVII, pp. xxxv-vi; Baltimore, 1940) three years earlier. I am indebted here to Dr. J. Hall Pleasants of Baltimore, editor of the archives.
5 Among the New Words, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, April, 1941, p. 145.
6 Advertisement of Bonwit Teller in the New York Times, Oct. 2, 1935: “What can I wear that will make me flat enough for the new suits? This question is most frequently asked by women who have large derrières.”
7 When, in 1943, the WPB allotted some synthetic rubber to the makers of brassières it designated them breast forms and breast shields. I take this from an article in the New York Post by Earl Wilson, reprinted in Tonics and Sedatives, Journal of the American Medical Association, Jan. 1, 1944, p. 30. Brassière is usually reduced to bra.
1 A list of euphemistic brand-names invented by American manufacturers of such things is in Glamour Words, by Charles E. Bess, American Speech, April, 1941, pp. 96–99, among them, undikins, roll-ons, campus briefs and cup-forms.
2 Much Ado (editorial), Dec. 14, 1942.
3 One of Twins Delivered Here Was Never in Mother’s Womb, Aug. 25, 1944. This was one of the words expunged from the Bible by Noah Webster in his expurgated version of 1833. It occurs in the King James Version 40 times.
4 The Latin Quarter in Language, Dutch Treat Club banquet book, 1937. I have not seen this book, but have had access to the manuscript of the essay through the courtesy of Mr. Hughes.
5 The Interior Hierarchy, Smart Set, Jan., pp. 413–15. It was reprinted in A Book of Burlesques; New York, 1916, pp. 190–98.
1 On Bugs, by Steven T. Byington, American Speech, Feb., 1938, p. 41.
2 I am told by H. W. Seaman that squanderbug was used in official advertisements during 1944 as a symbol for waste. Also, that a song called The Love-Bug Will Bite You was popular c. 1938.
3 Mark Twain (to an Englishman) in Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant, 1882: “When you are exhausted you say you are knocked up. We don’t.”
4 The DAE shows that, in 1833, to stay with, in American usage, had the meaning of to marry.
5 Mr. Alistair Cooke tells me that as a verb it is banned from refined discourse in England as in America.
6 In the sense of to keep up one’s courage or resolution the NED traces this verb-phrase to 1853. It was used bv Dickens in 1857. In W. S. Gilbert’s Trial by Jury, 1875, is: “Be firm, my moral pecker!”
7 Its use among American dog breeders is discussed in Dog Pups and Horse Colts, by Louise M. Ackerman, American Speech, Dec., 1942, p. 238, and Dog Terminology, by Elrick B. Davis, American Speech, Oct., 1943, pp. 235–36.
8 June 19, 1938, p. 15.
1 Children of a Harsh Age (a review of The English Child in the Eighteenth Century, by Rosamond Bayne-Powell; London, 1939), June 24, 1939, p. 303.
2 Hell in American Speech, Aug., 1931, pp. 433–35.
3 The choice between the and in is determined by euphony and the taste of the speaker. Sometimes, as Merryweather notes, both are used, as in how in the hell? Occasionally, hell is reinforced with another intensifier, as in what the goddam hell?
4 Sometimes used in a negative sense, as in George Ade’s hell of a Baptist.
5 Merryweather notes that hell of a time may indicate either the intensely agreeable or the intensely disagreeable.
1 This, says Merryweather, is the “most common” use of hell, “and the most soul-felt. With proper variations of voice it may be made to express resignation, weariness, boredom, exasperation, consternation, rage, and probably other emotions.” Certainly surprise, disappointment, alarm, and even mere disagreement might be added.
2 Transferred to airmen, c. 1935.
3 See also Hellion, by Willa Roberts, American Speech, Feb., 1932, p. 240, and Hell in American Speech, by J. R. Schultz, the same, Feb., 1933, p. 81.
4 It’s Hard Enough, Anyway (editorial page), March 10, 1944.
5 Especially, I should add, in American English.
1 Profanity and Social Sanction, American Speech, April, 1938, p. 153.
2 The NED Supplement calls heck a “euphe
mistic alteration of hell,” but for this there is no evidence, though in such forms as what the heck, heck of a time and by heck it is undoubtedly used in place of hell. Dr. L. G. Van Loon of Reading, Pa., suggests that it may be a Dutch loan. The rural Dutch, he says, often put bai je gek?, meaning are you crazy? at the end of a sentence, and heck may represent an American attempt to pronounce gek. The use of the phrase, he says, in no way reflects upon the sanity of the listener, but is intended to be merely intensive, like do you understand?
1 I have had access to it by the grace of Dr. Julian P. Boyd, the librarian.
2 Mainly, Exclamations in American English, by E. C. Hills, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part VII, 1924, pp. 253–84.
3 The DAE agrees that Sam Hill is a euphemism for hell, marks it an Americanism, and traces it to 1839, but in What the Sam Hill?, American Speech, Feb., 1940, pp. 106–09, A. E. Sokol argued that it really represents devil, and that it was probably suggested by Samiel, the devil in Carl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz, first performed in New York in 1825.
4 Hully gee (for holy Jesus) was introduced by Edward W. Townsend’s Chimmie Fadden and Major Max; New York, 1895, but it disappeared with the decay of the Bowery boy as an American comic type.
5 Sometimes jiminetty or jiminetties. See College Words and Phrases, by B. S. Monroe and C. S. Northrup, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part III, 1901, p. 142.
6 Traced by the DAE to 1857 and marked an Americanism. There are many spellings, e.g., gewhilikins, gheewhillikins and geewhilikins. Bartlett also lists jewillikens. He calls it “a Western exclamation of surprise,” and does not indicate any relationship to Jew.
1 Judas priest is listed by Wayland D. Hand, in his Dictionary of Words and Idioms Associated with Judas Iscariot, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, Jan. 30, 1942, p. 342, but he does not mention Judas Christopher. He also lists jumping Judas and great jumping Judas, both of them, I take it, euphemisms for holy jumping Jesus.
2 Cuss, in the sense of a worthless fellow, often used good-naturedly, is traced to 1775, don’t care a cuss to 1850, not worth a cuss to 1826, to cuss to 1815, to cuss out to 1881, cussed to 1840, cussedest to 1845, cussedness to 1857 and cussing to 1841. In all these situations, of course, cuss is a euphemism for curse, which is itself a euphemism for damn, very old in English.
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