by Ralph Keyes
In the privacy of his own notes, Thomas Carlyle called a famous French courtesan “that old wh-re.” When his nephew Andrew Carlyle edited these notes for publication in 1858, “wh-re” proved too bold and was changed to “female.” Following Nathaniel Hawthorne’s death in 1864, his wife, Sophia, combed through her husband’s journals to clean them up for public consumption, deleting every mention of “whores” and “pimps.” Hawthorne’s expression “of that kidney” became “of that class.” The author’s widow also fastidiously replaced the word “leg” with “limb” wherever it appeared.
This type of bowdlerizing reflected continued concern about referring directly to certain body parts. The articles of clothing that covered them remained problematic too, particularly those closest to the skin. As late as 1908, an English author referred to two young women wearing gowns so short that they displayed “certain heavily-frilled cotton investitures of the lower limbs” (i.e., petticoats). Linen was a common euphemism for underwear among Victorians, echoed in today’s concern about “washing one’s dirty linen in public.” “Lingerie” first appeared in the late-nineteenth century, a word borrowed from the French that only gradually became suggestive.
As historians of the era keep reminding us, the Victorians were far lustier than we imagine or they would have had us believe. An underground trade in erotica was robust at that time. Queen Victoria herself enjoyed collecting, and even drawing, pictures of naked men. Some forty-two thousand children were born out of wedlock in England and Wales in 1851 alone. A mid-nineteenth-century doctor estimated that one in twelve unmarried Englishwomen had “strayed from the path of virtue.” For the historical record, however, the Victorians’ words spoke louder than their actions.
The list of words that proper Victorians thought required euphemisms was especially long when it came to sex. Any term that conveyed even a breath of sexuality was subject to revision or deletion. During English legal proceedings, rape was referred to as “taking improper liberties” or “feloniously ravishing.” Other kinds of sexual imposition—including molestation of children—came under the heading of “acting in an indecent manner.” “Certain” was an important multipurpose word in divorce-related testimony and might refer to a certain organ, a certain unnatural vice, a certain posture, or a certain condition (i.e., pregnancy).
The monumental Oxford English Dictionary was published serially during this period, commanding attention not just for the words included but also for those left out. As a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language later noted of this classic work, “They excluded some infamous four-letter words, moving directly from fucivorous to fuco’d, for example, although they entered other ‘Anglo-Saxonisms’, such as those between shisham and shiver, alleging however that these words are ‘not now in decent use’, the same judgment made of fart.”
AN INTERESTING CONDITION
In his 1864 novel, Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens portrays a wife dillydallying for several paragraphs before telling her husband “there is a ship upon the ocean…… bringing…… to you and me…… a little baby, John.”
Why not just say “I’m pregnant”? Because in Dickens’s time, pregnancy was a sensitive subject. It brought to mind events that led to this condition, and the body parts involved. Instead, pregnant women were dubbed with child, in a family way, or simply expecting. A line in an 1861 book about Mexico illustrates the kind of verbal tap-dancing that this subject evoked: “Whenever a Zapoteque woman is about to add one to the number of their community, the expectant father of the child assembles all his relations in his cabin.”
Pregnant Englishwomen who were made to stay abed used to be referred to as confined. In one case, a proper Victorian lady read aloud to a group of friends a letter about an unmarried woman named Mary that began: “We are in great trouble. Poor Mary has been confined…” She paused—this being the last word on a page—then fumbled about for the letter’s next page, which had fallen to the floor. Only when the woman picked it up and resumed reading did her shocked listeners get to hear the end of this sentence: “to her room for three days with what, we fear, is suppressed scarlet fever.” They breathed a sigh of relief.
In an interesting condition was a popular nineteenth-century euphemism for pregnancy, as was in a delicate condition. Or just condition. (“A woman in your condition.”) At the turn of the past century, the phrase “I’m pregnant” in Anna Karenina was translated into English as “I am with child.” Several years earlier, German translators relied on “I am blessed” for the same phrase, trusting readers would get the message.
Another euphemism—in a family way— persisted well into the twentieth century. Francophiles preferred en famille or simply enceinte. When several episodes of I Love Lucy were built around an obviously pregnant Lucille Ball, the first was titled “Lucy Is Enceinte.” Within another, Lucy wrote a note saying, “My husband and I are going to have a blessed event!” She later referred to herself as expectant.
During World War II, pregnant Women’s Army Corps members discharged from service were said to have back trouble. Civilians in the same condition were eating for two. Starting a family is a more modern euphemism, as are anticipating and carrying. Colloquialisms range from Shakespeare’s round-wombed to the subsequent bow-windowed and more recent standbys such as in the pudding club, having a bun in the oven, and under construction (on the chest of maternity T-shirts with an arrow pointing downward). In spoofier contemporary times, an online compilation of euphemisms for pregnancy included “buying sardine and pickle futures,” “flipping the bird at the Chinese government,” and “another eighteen years down the toilet.”
Proper Speech on the Silver Screen
Even though Victorian attitudes waned after World War I, they found refuge among censors of movies. These modern-day Bowdlers accessed a well-stocked pantry of euphemisms for alternatives to the smut they saw creeping into scripts. Pennsylvania’s censors demanded that a “loose woman” in D. W. Griffith’s 1920 film Way Down East be called an “adventuress.” A year later, the same censors concluded that having a character exclaim “It’s a boy!” in a film suggested too boldly that a baby had just been born. They proposed instead, “The boy is better” (leading one film critic to call this “the first case of pre-natal screen colic” on record).
In 1922 leading moviemakers hired onetime chairman of the Republican National Committee Will Hays to help them toe the verbal line. Even though the advent of talkies complicated his work, this snaggle-toothed Indianan was up to the job. His office made the producers of one movie muffle “damned” in its sound track. According to Gerald Gardner, author of The Censorship Papers, because “Oh God!” was considered too blasphemous for moviegoers’ ears, “a generation of screenwriters ground their teeth as they typed ‘Oh boy!’ ” Alternatively, they came up with nonsense euphemisms such as “Godfrey Daniels!” for W. C. Fields and “Jumping butterballs!” for the Marx Brothers.
By 1933, Hays reported that his office had required that some twelve hundred changes be made in scripts and story treatments during that year alone. Words banned by the Motion Picture Production Code included not just “hell” and “damn” but also “virgin,” “fairy,” “goose,” “Gawd,” “madam,” “pansy,” “tart,” “razzberry,” “S.O.B,” “son-of-a,” and “nuts.” For W. C. Fields’s film The Bank Dick, the Hays Office suggested that “black pussy”—referring to a cat—be replaced by black pussycat. They demanded that the word “slut” be deleted from For Whom the Bell Tolls. When Dooley Wilson played “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, the script called for Humphrey Bogart to say “What the (pause) are you playing?” Even a pause implying the word “hell” was considered questionable, however, and the Hays Office asked that movie’s producers to revise this line.
“The fight against filth kept us busy,” Hays wrote in his memoirs. “The dozens of ways of injecting sex into films led to a veritable game of hide-and-seek, in which we tried our best to keep producers adv
ised on the cutting out of unfit words or scenes before they reached the screen.”
Hays’s particular bête noire was Mae West. Some thought that the Production Code was created with her in mind. Far from being outraged, the sultry actress and screenwriter seemed to enjoy the challenge of jousting with Hays and his minions. “Censorship made me,” she once said. Like a low-rent Shakespeare, West sprinkled her movies with as many suggestive remarks as she thought she could get away with and some she knew would never pass muster, as red herrings. This led to a constant game of cat and mouse with Production Code censors. Under pressure from the Hays Office, a song lyric in I’m No Angel— “Takes a good man to make me”—was changed to “Takes a good man to break me.” The line “I like sophisticated men to take me home” became “I like sophisticated men to take me out.” Hays’s assistants blue-penciled “tart,” “jeez,” “punk,” and “Lawdy” from that film’s script. They also wanted one of West’s best-remembered lines—“When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better”—to be made less suggestive. Thankfully, they didn’t succeed.
A watershed moment in pitched battles fought between the Hays Office and movie producers took place during the screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind. After reviewing the script for this film, they demanded that a brothel owner become a saloon keeper. Words related to her erstwhile profession such as “chippie,” “courtesan,” “floozy,” “mistress,” “slut,” “tart,” and “whore” had to be deleted. The Hays Office was also disturbed by the many references to another woman’s pregnancy, even though she was married. But no problem proved more vexing than Rhett Butler’s exit line in the movie’s closing scene, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Hays’s censors objected, of course. In response, MGM suggested some alternatives: “I don’t give a hoot,” “I just don’t care,” “It’s all the same to me,” “It is of no consequence,” and “My indifference is boundless.” To placate Hays, the studio actually filmed an alternate take in which Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara, “My dear, I don’t care.” It was as if Lady Macbeth had said “Out darned spot!” Fortunately, MGM stood its ground and won.
Discussing what the Hays Office would or wouldn’t allow on the silver screen became a popular American pastime. According to a widespread but unfounded rumor, the Hays Office would not permit any couple to be in bed on screen unless the man had one foot on the floor. That inspired an enduring euphemism for heavy petting without consummation: one foot on the floor. A 2009 magazine profile of the writer-director Rebecca Miller noted that she was suspended from her boarding school “after letting a boy take both feet off the floor while sitting on her bed.”
As this suggests, on the euphemistic carousel, one topic is a perennial source of verbal evasion, independent of time and place. You may suspect which one I mean. If any subject has transcended all eras and provided a constant source of new euphemisms it is, how shall we say, coital activity.
3
Speaking of Sex
IN 1638, MY ancestor Robert Keyes had to spend an hour in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, stocks because he’d engaged in “unseemly behavior” with Goody Newell of Lynn. She and Robert then sat side by side for an hour in Lynn’s stocks. Why were these two punished this way? Did they kiss? Fondle each other? Make love? Talk dirty? Any of these acts might have qualified for such a vague charge. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “unseemly behavior” was a catchall description for activities considered too scandalous to mention aloud.
Several years after Robert and Goody paid their debt to society, a Boston sea captain named Thomas Kemble spent two hours in the stocks for “lewd and unseemly behavior.” It seems that Captain Kemble had kissed his wife on their doorstep after returning from three years at sea. The charge was, in other words, a euphemism for what was considered inappropriate physical contact between members of the opposite sex—even when they were married.
There were many other such euphemisms. A few years before Robert and Goody served their sentence, a Massachusetts clergyman condemned marital sex engaged in for reasons other than procreation as “mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake.” In 1672, Sarah Roe and Joseph Leigh of Ipswich, Massachusetts, were brought up on charges for “unlawful familiarity.” Their crime? Conducting an adulterous affair while Sarah’s husband was off at sea. Joseph was whipped for his offense, and Sarah jailed for a month. After that she was ordered to appear before congregants in the Ipswich meetinghouse wearing a sign that read FOR MY BAUDISH CARRIAGE.
During the same period that Sarah and Joseph were enjoying unlawful familiarity in Ipswich, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was carrying on in the court of Charles II. This Oxford graduate was notorious not just for his lascivious behavior and lewd tongue but also for the poems he wrote celebrating sensual pleasures. One got him kicked out of court. In this poem, Lord Rochester averred that King Charles “loves fucking much,” that he owned “the sauciest prick that e’er did swive,” and that “Restless he rolls about from whore to whore, / A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.” Was there anything the Earl wouldn’t say?
There was. When it came to his own dalliances, even the exuberantly bawdy Lord Rochester drew the line at being too explicit. A poem attributed to him, “Et Caetera—A Song,” included these lines:
In a dark, silent, shady Grove,
Fit for the Delights of Love,
As on Corinna’s Breast I panting lay,
My right Hand playing with Et Caetera,
A thousand Words and am’rous Kisses
Prepar’d us both for more substantial Blisses;
And thus the hasty Moments slipt away,
Lost in the Transport of Et Caetera.
She blush’d to see her Innocence betray’d,
And the small Opposition she had made;
Yet hugg’d me close, and, with a Sigh, did say,
Once more, my Dear, once more, Et Caetera.
But Oh! the Power to please this Nymph, was past,
Too violent a Flame can never last;
So we remitted to another Day,
The Prosecution of Et Caetera.
Sexual activity could be the all-time most popular inspiration for euphemisms, many of which are remarkably creative. Much ingenuity and wit are employed when we wish to talk about sex without saying what it is that we’re talking about. From courtship to consummation, euphemistic talk abounds.
Courtship
During the past several decades personal ads have become a common mating tool. Making sense of them requires an ability to navigate their euphemistic rapids. “Eligible,” for example, is a word commonly used by women to describe the type of man they’re looking for (“eligible bachelor”). After studying personal ads, psychologist David Buss concluded that this vague word refers less to a man’s eligibility for marriage and more to his status and wealth. As Buss puts it, eligible is “a euphemism for the highest-status, most resource-laden man around.”
“Professional” is in a league with “eligible,” a word that women in particular use to indicate that they’re only interested in well-educated, white collar, and, presumably, well-paid men. Older man can also be a euphemism for “financially secure.” Financially secure itself is euphemistic for “wealthy,” as is financially independent. Solvent suggests if not wealthy then at least not in debt. In transition probably means “unemployed.” Unencumbered is short for “not married or in a relationship” (and perhaps not even paying alimony). It can also refer to having no children to support. Reliable is euphemistic for, among other things, “emotionally stable,” a sought-after trait mentioned most often by men. Experienced could mean any number of things but alludes to sex.
When it comes to personal traits, good listener might mean what it says, or it could be a euphemism for “catatonically shy.” Outgoing, on the other hand, may refer to someone who can’t stop talking. As for physical attributes, curvy, full-figured, and classically proportioned are, of course, synonymous with “
overweight woman,” one with a mature figure. Short men, in turn, can describe themselves as compact or built for speed. (One bold man began his ad with “Life is short and so am I.”) Short women can be petite without penalty.
One study of online ads pointed out the ambiguity in some modifiers. Does self-educated mean “worldly and well read” or “high-school dropout”? Should still believes the best things in life are free be interpreted as “has great spiritual vision and lives in delight of the moment” or “has no money; don’t expect gifts”? Only the ad writer knows for sure.
Gay ads historically have had a nomenclature all their own. This was particularly true during more closeted times. In personal ads after World War II, discreet gay men advertised for “roommates,” “bachelors,” “servicemen,” and men interested in “adventure.” Some simply sought “male friendship.” Houseboys was one euphemism for those on offer, chauffeurs another.
Once face-to-face (f2f) contact is made, today’s minefield of courting nomenclature grows particularly explosive. At one time, the euphemistic question, “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” reflected a Playboy approach to seduction in which a suave man lured a naive woman into his sexual lair under false pretenses (or so he assumed). See my etchings lingers as a euphemism for seduction under false pretenses. An ironic variation on this theme among postwar teenagers was submarine watching, or heavy sex play in parked cars involving a gullible girl who was invited by a wily boy to “watch the submarines race” in some isolated setting. (Again, she may not have been so gullible.) While watching submarines race, they engaged in necking, petting, or even boodling.
Although there’s some debate about what kind of activity merits which label, in general necking is the milder version of petting. Based on her experience, a veteran of the 1950s sex wars had a bit more nuanced explanation: “necking was above the neck, boodling was between the neck and waist, and petting was below the waist.” Much was left to the imagination. Spooning was an older euphemism for nonspecific foreplay. So were billing and cooing, or simply fooling around. Getting fresh involved what the Victorians called unwanted attentions. So did making a pass at. Then, as now, men who made passes were thought to be horny, a concept that dates back to biblical times when animal horns represented virility and, metaphorically, an erect penis.