by Ralph Keyes
Cleaning Up Potty Mouths
During his reign from 1603 to 1625, James I, himself no slouch in the swearing department, fined members of his court twelve pence for each curse they uttered there. An Act of Parliament in 1623 made it illegal to swear in general. Subsequent laws that proscribed speech considered blasphemous or seditious accelerated the need for judicious euphemisms. Oliver Cromwell retained the King James approach to swearing when warning his soldiers in 1642 that “Not a man swears but pays his twelve pence.” Repeat offenders risked having their tongues pierced with a hot iron. In 1694, Parliament passed an Act for More Effectual Suppressing Profane Cursing and Swearing.
As more people moved into the middle class, social insecurity mounted—about language especially. Upwardly mobile residents of England and its colonies turned to primers for guidance. Books on proper speech were especially popular. In America’s first grammar, a William and Mary professor wrote in 1721, “None of good Manners use nasty Expressions, and foul vulgar Terms, which are nauseous, and odious.”
In the prelude to the Victorian era, fear of blasphemy gradually gave way to fear of impropriety. Sex, body parts, and bodily functions became subjects of mounting verbal concern. Anxiety about taking the Lord’s name in vain was rivaled by apprehension about using inappropriate language. This was especially true among those who regarded themselves as genteel or wished to be seen that way. By using proper verbal evasions—what linguists call “minced oaths”—status-conscious speakers of English distanced themselves from the vulgar mob. In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne depicted a mid-eighteenth-century gentleman who when provoked consulted a list of mild oaths that he considered acceptable substitutes for profane ones.
Pioneering dictionary compilers such as Samuel Johnson left out words they considered inappropriate. Although Johnson included “piss,” “turd,” “arse,” and “fart” in his 1755 opus, he omitted other terms such as “shit,” “penis,” “vagina,” “cunt,” and “fuck.” When a proper London lady congratulated him for keeping such words out of his dictionary, the lexicographer responded, “Then you have been looking for them?”
Beginning in Dr. Johnson’s time and throughout the next century, bourgeois Englishwomen in particular grew increasingly prudish. As the Industrial Revolution left more and more women at home with time on their hands, developing good manners became both their occupation and preoccupation. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens satirized this sensibility with the character Mrs. General, whom the newly affluent Dorrits hire to teach them how to be more refined. A truly refined mind, she tells them, is one that appears to be “ignorant of the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and pleasant.”
“Refinement” was the word of the hour among the upwardly mobile. Freshly minted members of the middle class were keen to demonstrate how respectably they could speak. Fastidious concern about propriety fueled a constant demand for more euphemisms, especially in the areas of sex, secretions, and anatomy. When it came to the body, it wasn’t just talk of reproductive organs that raised eyebrows. Reference to any part at all became questionable. In 1810 novelist Susan Ferrier wrote a letter to a male friend in which she referred to cutting corns off her feet. For this breach of decorum, Ferrier later observed, she was subjected to “the scorn of the virtuous and the detestation of the pure in heart,” adding, “I must have had some ingenuity, if I could extract either immorality or indecency from a corn! But so it was. I was reprobated… as one of the abandoned of my sex.”
To those who laid the foundations for the Victorian era, language was seen as something that needed to be purified, cleansed of any terms that might inspire improper thoughts. Mastery of euphemisms became no less a part of womanly arts than the ability to make crumpets and gracefully pour tea. “What did she say?” asks the narrator of Jane Austen’s 1816 novel, Emma. “Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.” Linguist Kerry Linfoot-Ham has determined that Emma is filled with oblique references to erotic activity. They include “a little movement of more than common friendliness” (seductiveness), “go away in the evening attended by her pleasant husband” (going off to have sex), and “flutter of pleasure” (sexual excitement itself ). One character’s pregnancy was referred to simply as “her situation.”
Among women of Austen’s class, language grew increasingly circumspect. Considered too vulgar for tender ears, “sick” was replaced by ill. “Sweat” became perspiration, and “spit” was euphemized to expectorate. At an extreme, a profanity such as “cunt” was referred to as the monosyllable.
One reason for the heavy use of euphemism in literary works at this time was that books were so commonly read aloud within families. This was what motivated a retired English physician named Thomas Bowdler to edit a collection of Shakespeare’s plays for tender ears. In The Family Shakespeare, “Out damn’d spot” was revised to “Out crimson spot”; Romeo and Juliet were a chaste young couple; and Ophelia’s suicide became an accidental drowning. Bowdler was sure that the Bard himself would have approved. In recognition of his efforts, we still call censorship of all kinds “bowdlerization.” Dr. Bowdler later had a go at the Bible.
Deleting bad words from the Bible was a practice of long standing, one the American lexicographer Noah Webster took to new heights. Even though the King James Version had been considered appropriately reverent during two centuries of use, Webster concluded that some of its language was unsuited to the more refined discourse of his time. In Ruth 1:11, Naomi’s question, “Are there yet any more sons in my womb?” was changed to “Shall I bear more sons?” Biblical mothers would no longer “give sucke” to their babies in Webster’s Bible, though they would nurse their young ones. The line “they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss” in Isaiah 36:12 was refined to read “they may devour their vilest excretions.” Even seemingly inoffensive phrases such as “the river shall stink” in Exodus 7:18 gave way to “the river shall be offensive in smell.”
A combination of religious fervor and upward mobility, with its attendant verbal insecurity, made the early-nineteenth century what H. L. Mencken called a “Golden Age of Euphemism.” As language grew more “refined,” entire new areas of discourse became candidates for verbal evasion. This trend did not go unnoticed. Nathaniel Ames, who spent years at sea after being expelled from Harvard in 1814, was less dismayed by the guttural talk of his fellow seamen than by the flowery circumlocutions he encountered on shore. There Ames heard squinting referred to as optical indecision, indigestion called dyspepsy, and a woman who shamelessly flirted with every man in sight described as very free in her manners. Ames was also put off by the growing use of euphemistic foreign expressions. “Our mother tongue is fast assuming a dress like that of a state’s prison convict,” he wrote, “one leg of its inexpressibles being made of Greek, and the other of French, while the waistbands are made of Latin.”
“Inexpressibles”? Surely Ames would not use this mealymouthed euphemism for “trousers” that was common in his time. Yet he did. Even plain-speaking Nathaniel Ames wasn’t willing to flout the nineteenth-century taboo against using this word or “breeches,” for fear that doing so might make ladies swoon. In John Baldwin Buckstone’s 1835 play “Dream at Sea,” one character reprimands another for referring to breeches. “Hush,” he is told, “you should say inexpressibles. That’s the way genteel people talk.”
During the first half of the nineteenth century, a wide range of other euphemisms for trousers were auditioned: irrepressibles, indescribables, ineffables, unutterables, nether garments, continuations, don’t name ’ems, and mustn’t mention ’ems, to mention just a few. In Sketches by Boz (1836), Charles Dickens wrote that one character wore “light inexplicables without a spot.” In The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), a servant named Trotter “gave four distinct slaps on the pocket of his mulberry indescribable.” Six years later, in American Notes (1842), Dickens said of a growing boy, “it had been found necessary to make an addition
to the legs of his inexpressibles.”
If direct reference to trousers was taboo in Dickens’s time, mention of stockings was considered downright degenerate. Hose was the preferred synonym in antebellum America, though long socks would do in a pinch. And what of underwear? Fear was rampant that saying the word “panty” might evoke an image of this portal garment, and who knew where that might lead? Better one should say undergarment, underthing, unmentionable, or smalls (short for small clothes).
When women wore corsets, there was always the troubling prospect that this word might enter men’s minds and emerge from their mouths. While visiting Cincinnati in the early 1830s, a German tourist was reprimanded for saying “corset” in mixed company. Foundation, he was informed, was the preferred synonym. (In England, it was stays.) During her own sojourn in Cincinnati a few years later, Frances Trollope, mother of English novelist Anthony Trollope, found that “many words to which I had never heard an objectionable meaning attached, were totally interdicted, and the strangest paraphrastic sentences substituted.”
Like Mrs. Trollope, visitors from abroad often commented on the unusually stilted language Americans used at this time. Alexis de Tocqueville thought the guarded discourse he heard so often when touring the United States might be due to the fact that men and women mingled freely there, forcing both sexes to choose their words carefully. In other words, the very social freedom and egalitarianism that Americans prized made them feel a need to self-censor when in mixed company. The fact that Americans routinely saw themselves as on their way to affluence (if not there already) made them feel it was crucial to use the right words, ones they thought would help them on their journey.
This presented a problem to foreign visitors, even ones who spoke English. Which words needed to be avoided and which ones were appropriate wasn’t always clear. Shortly after Tocqueville returned to France, the English naval captain Frederick Marryat got in trouble one summer day in 1837 by innocently asking a young American friend whether she’d hurt her leg after taking a tumble while they visited Niagara Falls. The outraged woman informed Captain Marryat that this word was not used in her country. When the aristocratic Englishman begged her pardon and asked what word was used for this body part, she responded “limb.”
The need to avoid saying “leg” at this time led to remarkable euphemistic creativity. In addition to the pedestrian limbs (a shortening of nether limbs), mid-nineteenth-century synonyms for “leg” included understandings and underpinners. In his 1849 novella Kavanaugh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow excerpted this rule from the prospectus of a fashionable girls’ boarding school: “Young ladies are not allowed to cross their benders in school.” A few years later, author Richard Meade Bache talked with an American woman who stammered about before averring that women in New England tended to have well-formed extremities (i.e., arms and legs).
In this ticklish verbal climate, even the extremities of poultry had to be approached with care. At a hotel, Bache overheard another woman ask a waiter to bring her a chicken’s trotter (leg again). During the same era, an English visitor to America was puzzled when asked by a woman at a dinner table if he’d please give her “the first and second joint of a chicken” (i.e., the leg). As Winston Churchill later discovered, polite guests at American tables knew that asking a poultry-serving hostess for white meat instead of “breast meat,” dark meat instead of “a thigh,” and a drumstick in place of “a leg,” saved embarrassment all around. Prior to his tour of the United States, Captain Marryat witnessed a similar fastidiousness in the West Indies, which he parlayed into a passage in his 1834 novel Peter Simple. The protagonist of that book is seated beside a local woman at a dinner in Barbados. “Fate had placed me opposite to a fine turkey,” he reports. “I asked my partner if I should have the pleasure of helping her to a piece of the breast. She looked at me indignantly, and said, ‘Curse your impudence, sar. I wonder where you larn manners. Sar, I take a lilly turkey bosom, if you please. Talk of breast to a lady, sar;—really quite horrid.’ ”
Poultry presented all manner of verbal pitfalls at this time. “Cock” in particular posed serious problems. This word was short for “cockerel,” a male chicken. But “cock” was also short for “watercock,” the spigot of a barrel, leading it to become slang for “penis.” Unfortunately, that tainted term was embedded in many others. In the United States especially, previously innocent terms such as “cockeyed” and “cocksure” could no longer be used when both sexes were present. Under this regimen, “weathercocks” became weathervanes; “haycocks,” haystacks; and “apricocks,” apricots. Those burdened with last names such as “Hitchcock” and “Leacock” began to feel under siege. In response, an American family named “Alcocke” changed their name to Alcox. Fearing that this might not be adequate, before siring a daughter named Louisa May in 1832, Bronson Alcox became Bronson Alcott.
In the United States, male chickens became crowers, then roosters. This was not without controversy. “The word rooster is an Americanism,” noted Richard Meade Bache, “which, the sooner we forget, the better. Does not the hen of the same species roost also?” One compiler of Americanisms quoted an English critic who defined “rooster” as “a ladyism for cock.” An English visitor to the United States professed to have heard a rooster-and-ox story (i.e., “a cock-and-bull tale”). A mid-nineteenth-century spoof written by Canadian humorist Thomas Haliburton featured a Massachusetts woman who described her brother as a “rooster swain” in the navy. When a man she knew pressed her for the meaning of that rank, the young woman responded, “a rooster swain, if you must know, you wicked critter you, is a cockswain; a word you know’d well enough warn’t fit for a lady to speak.”
Along with male chickens, bulls posed problems for proper speakers. In this case, it was the mental images conjured by this snorting, raging, rapacious animal that aroused concern. Presumably, not referring to bulls directly would censor those images. This led to a wide range of euphemisms, male cow being the most popular. Other acceptable synonyms included cow-critter, cow-brute, cow man, seed ox, toro, and roarer. Also permissible were he-cow and gentleman-cow. Many of those reciting Longfellow’s 1841 poem “Wreck of the Hesperus” sacrificed rhyme for refinement when they revised the last three words of one line—“like the horns of an angry bull”—in this fashion:
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked as soft as carded wool;
But the cruel rocks they gored her side,
Like the horns of a gentleman cow.
Victorians’ Secrets
The transition from piety to propriety reached its peak during the Victorian era. Reverence was in decline at this time, prudishness on the rise. Laws banning blasphemy in Britain broadened to proscribe obscenity and “indecency.” British judges in such cases focused less on sacrilegious expressions per se than on the words used to express them. To avoid being charged with blasphemy, wrote a British legal scholar in the late-Victorian era, authors were advised to “abstain from ribaldry and licentious approach.” In her book Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, Joss Marsh makes a compelling case that issues of class lay at the heart of this transition. Terms banned as indecent were ones commonly heard on British streets, if not in its drawing rooms. To Marsh, this illustrated a “fear of words endemic in a culture addicted to euphemisms.”
Euphemistic speech became an important means by which the newly affluent distinguished themselves from the vulgar masses. When a proper Victorian lady murmured to her pharmacist that she needed some curl paper, he reached beneath the counter and handed her a box containing sheets of what we would call toilet or lavatory paper. Should a sneeze erupt from this woman’s nostrils, she might apologize for her nose spasm. Instead of reading the King James Bible with all its crude words, she could turn with relief to a new translation that was filled with euphemisms.
Despite the devout Christianity being promoted at this time, it was fastidious concern with proper deport
ment that really drove evasive speech among Victorians. “The prudery of evasion was more indebted to middle-class gentility than to the Puritan revival,” concludes historian Walter Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind. A euphemism-rich vocabulary developed by Victorians is the sound track of their era. Respectable Englishmen and -women no longer “went to bed”; they retired. Wives didn’t “get pregnant”; they were en famille. What produced their pregnancy was only referred to in the most oblique terms. Victorians’ lives may not have been purer than those of their ancestors, observed author-editor William Makepeace Thackeray, but their mouths certainly were. Thackeray himself, who considered his era more “squeamish” than moral, rejected a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning because it included the word harlot. Yet harlot was originally a euphemism for “whore.”