by Ralph Keyes
“Yes, miss,” replied her groom, “but I never heard it called by that name before.”
And what names might he have heard? In Elizabethan times, it could have been commodity, slit, cut, breach, or the king’s highway. In his 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Francis Grose included money (defined as “A girl’s private parts, commonly applied to little children: as, Take care, Miss, or you will shew your money”), pitcher (“The miraculous pitcher, that holds water with the mouth downwards: a woman’s commodity”), and hat (“A woman’s privities: because frequently felt”). In addition to monosyllable, Grose sometimes used **** in place of cunt. During a long-ago court case that he reported, a woman on the witness stand referred to her gender’s cauliflower. The presiding judge reprimanded this witness, saying she might as well call that private part an artichoke. “Not so, my lord,” she replied, “for an artichoke has a bottom, but a **** and a cauliflower have none.”
This woman’s invention drew on a long tradition of substituting horticultural euphemisms for the vagina. They include cabbage, mushroom, split fig, and sweet potato pie. When papaya became slang for vagina in Cuba, another name was conjured for that fruit among polite speakers: fruta de bomba. (Stories have been told of tourists asking a Cuban fruit vendor for a papaya, only to be angrily told that he was no pimp.) In Japan, the clam that shrinks is a vaginal metaphor comparable to English speakers’ the bearded clam. Other living creatures whose names have provided synonyms for the vagina include not just kittens and beavers but snails as well. In Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums, a Romanian woman travels to Hungary with a bag of smuggled gold “stuffed up her snail.” (“I wouldn’t buy gold that had been in the snail of some woman,” comments the novel’s narrator.)
As compared to the more assertive synonyms for “penis,” substitute names for women’s sexual organs tend to be softer, gentler, more classically euphemistic. The 650 terms John Farmer and William Henley recorded in their late-nineteenth-century compilation of slang included mossy bank, lamp of love, and lowlands. The same book had just half as many synonyms for “penis.” This reflects the fact that in most eras and settings, discussion of the female sex organ is more taboo than discussion of that of the male. A study commissioned by the BBC and others at the turn of this century found that participants considered “cunt” the most vulgar English word in common use. (“Fuck” was third, “prick” seventh.) A survey of ticklish body parts conducted by linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge determined that the vagina was the most difficult one for participants to mention by any name. This taboo is illustrated in a passage of Richard Russo’s novel Mohawk, which depicts a low-life couple insulting each other. The woman repeatedly refers to the man’s weeny. That man, however, in the author’s words, used “a simple four letter word to describe his companion and it is a part of her own anatomy.”
“Vagina” originated as Latin slang based on the word for sheath, the receptacle in which Roman soldiers inserted their swords. (Little girls in ancient Rome were told to call this organ their piggy.) From its slangy roots, this term became standard issue after being adopted by medieval anatomists. “So, thanks to similes and early anatomists,” writes Catherine Blackledge in The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality, “humans have sex with sheaths and tails. It could have been worse, though; it could have been a combination of the king’s highway and cabbage stalks.”
In a study of how vaginas are referred to in contemporary England, men proved far more willing than women to use slang synonyms. Women preferred vague euphemisms such as down below, downstairs, middle, and, of course, private parts. One Englishwoman was embarrassed to discover that when taken to a hospital after injuring her genitals on the crossbar of a bicycle, she couldn’t think of any non-euphemistic word for that part of her body. “My mum used to call it a tuppence,” recalls another. A third woman’s mum apparently placed less value on this body part. “When I went out in my teens,” her daughter recalls, “I was told to keep your hands on your halfpenny and everybody else’s off!”
According to an old jest, one James Joyce incorporated into Ulysses, when women of a certain age bathed standing erect, they first washed up as far as possible, then down as far as possible, then washed “old possible.” From bits to down there, when it comes to euphemisms for the vagina, blandness reigns. Gloria Steinem once referred to herself as a member of the “down there generation.” A participant in an online woman’s forum who still used “down there,” added, “I did just think of saying ‘down in Virginia,’ while pointing my finger downward and slightly lowering my head.” Another said she hated the coyness of “down there” or “private bits” and stuck to “vagina.” But this word was hard for her little girl to pronounce, one participant found. She first said “bachina,” then shortened it to “China,” and “we have both been happy with Chinas ever since!!!” her mom reported.
Several mothers who took part in this forum agreed that “vagina” was a bit clinical for their young daughters but were at a loss for a better alternative. “I’m going with… ‘girl parts’ for now,” said one. Another reported that her daughter calls it her stuff. According to a third mom, since their family calls her son’s penis his peepee, that’s what her daughter calls her vagina. The mother of a three-year-old said that while frolicking in a spray fountain, her daughter announced, “Mommy, my cooch is getting wet!” (This semicommon euphemism could derive from the Arabic cush or the Sanskrit cushi, meaning “ditch,” a synonym for “vagina.”)
With so little guidance from society, those who need to refer to this body part sometimes simply roll their own euphemisms. Some of the more colorful inventions include mussintouchit, pookalolly pie, the love cavern, squishy, and split knish. One woman calls her vagina Rochester because that’s where she lost her virginity. Another calls hers the downtown dining and recreation district.
More recent euphemisms draw on new resources. Due to modern depilation methods, we’re now able to talk comfortably about the wax line, bikini line, or bikini zone. An Oprah-endorsed attempt to have vajayjay become the preferred synonym for “vagina” hasn’t caught on despite being used in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which a pregnant doctor in labor tells a male intern, “Stop looking at my vajayjay.” Euphemisms don’t lend themselves to that type of self-conscious coinage. Vag (or vaj) has gained some traction recently, mostly among younger women. A universally acceptable euphemism for female genitalia has yet to be agreed on.
HAZARDOUS TRAVEL CONDITIONS
My friend Louise discovered the hazards of trans-Atlantic euphemizing when she left San Diego to visit an expat sister in London during the mid-1970s. Her sister invited some English friends to tea. “We were talking about family resemblances (and the fact that I didn’t resemble anyone in my family at all),” reported Louise, “and I remarked that my family had been so desperate to find a resemblance that they would say that I ‘had Aunt Harriet’s fanny.’ A dozen china teacups hit their saucers simultaneously as jaws dropped. Finally one woman asked, ‘How on earth would they know?’ ”
What Louise didn’t realize was that, while fanny refers to the buttocks among Americans, in the United Kingdom it’s slang for “vagina.”
The names of certain body parts have long posed problems when Brits and Yanks converse. During their Golden Age of Euphemism, Americans called the breast nipple a cone. “The American ‘cone’ is the English ‘nipple,’ ” author Sir Richard Burton told British readers in 1863. “Beg pardon for the indelicacy!” Eventually, Americans reverted to nipple for that part of the breast, then made this word do double duty as the suckable part of a baby bottle. In Great Britain, “nipple” refers only to the organic version.
Louise learned about this contrast when she told her sister’s British friends about bringing her son Dan home from an adoption agency. She had difficulty feeding him because the bottle that Dan’s foster mother had given her had a clogged nipple. “Finally, after an hour of desperation listening to my ti
ny screaming infant,” Louise told her sister’s friends, “I resolved this problem by sticking a toothpick into the nipple to unclog it.
“There was that same look of horror,” she later recalled. “The guests had been totally confused by the story, as there people have nipples and bottles have teats. Sticking a toothpick into one’s nipple was an image that had them almost swooning with pain. By the way, nipple isn’t a word used at a formal tea anyway. VERY vulgar!”
Then there’s the pecker. In Britain this synonym for the nose was featured in a hearty exhortation to be in good spirits: “Keep your pecker up!” Among Americans, for whom pecker is slang for “penis,” that’s an advisory to be ready for sex.
Sexual euphemisms can be no less dicey than anatomical ones along the trans-Atlantic linguistic divide. When my wife, Muriel, studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a classmate who was about to spend time in the United States startled her by inquiring, “If I ask the blokes over there to knock me up, will I go down well?” This young woman thought she was asking Muriel whether inviting young men to call on her would enhance her popularity. But, as Muriel explained, in American parlance, she was saying, “If I ask men to get me pregnant, will I do well at sex?”
The divergent meaning of any number of euphemisms poses problems for English speakers who visit each others’ countries. An American tourist who refers to something British as top shelf, meaning “first rate,” would startle natives for whom top shelf refers to pornographic material that news dealers keep high and out of sight.
Names of apparel items can also be problematic, as my friend Louise discovered toward the end of her London tea. “I regaled them with the story of the torrential rains that had fallen in San Diego that winter,” she recalls. “At one point, the water was so deep in the street that in order to get to my car, I was forced to take off my shoes, roll up my pants, and wade to it. By now, I was getting familiar with the crashing teacups routine and knew I’d said something wrong again. My sister immediately jumped in. ‘She means she rolled up her trousers.’ I had treated them to the image of me rolling up my underpants.”
“After my intent was clarified, one woman said, ‘Well, you do come from California.’ No wonder I was never invited back.”
Behind
When Lord Methuen was shot in the buttocks during the Boer War, a military communiqué said he’d been wounded in the fleshy part of the thigh so as not to suggest that the British field marshal had been facing backward when shot.
For a long time, “arse” was standard English for this body part. The fact that Samuel Johnson included this word in his 1755 dictionary raised few eyebrows. Johnson did delicately define “bum” as “the part on which we sit” (leading one critic to ask, “Do you mean a chair, Doctor?”). This definition may have inspired subsequent euphemisms for the behind such as sit upon, sit-me-down, and sit-me-down-upon that were once popular in Britain. Perhaps coincidentally, the word “chair” itself took on connotations in the nineteenth century and gave way to seat.
Although “ass” was initially a politer form of “arse,” both words fell victim to language cleansing to such an extent that the animal once known as an “ass” became a donkey to many. Instead of calling an obnoxious individual a “jackass,” one proper Englishwoman took to calling such a person a Johnny bum. According to Francis Grose, this woman “would not say Jack, because it was vulgar, nor ass because it was indecent.”
“Buttocks” has proved durable as the most respectable term for this body part. “Bum” occupies a verbal purgatory in England and Canada: not quite respectable nor outrageously offensive. As recently as the Depression era, however, Al Jolson’s 1933 film Hallelujah, I’m a Bum was retitled Hallelujah, I’m a Tramp in Britain.
Referring to the buttocks and the anus has always posed problems during polite conversation. In their survey of ticklish body parts, Allan and Burridge found that the anus (another Latinism) ranked second only to the vagina as the least mentionable anatomical feature. This is an area where foreignisms really earn their keep. Reviewing euphemisms for the buttocks (or “butt”) is like a short course in foreign languages. Consider derriere, heinie, and culo. Even the nursery word tooky comes from the Yiddish tokhes (from the Hebrew tachat, or “underneath”), also known as the tushie or tush. Such terms can be uttered with nary a twitch of the lip by English speakers who might studiously avoid saying “ass,” “arse,” “butt,” “bum,” “buns,” “can,” “rump,” “seat,” “tail,” “rear end,” or even “behind.” In a mid-1930s New York Times ad, Bonwit Teller responded to an inquiry from a woman who wanted to flatten her figure. “This question is posed most frequently by women who have large derrieres,” observed Bonwit.
Another synonym for the buttocks is keister. Ronald Reagan was particularly partial to this mock-foreign term that may derive from kiste, a German word for a “box” or a “chest.” A modern verb, to keister, means “to hide something in one’s rectum.” (“I keistered those joints and sailed right through customs.”)
The common use of bottom as a euphemism for “arse” has caused much anguish among the world’s Bottomleys, Ramsbottoms, Winterbottoms, Higginbottoms, and Hickinbottoms, leading some of them to take refuge in respelled versions such as Higginbotham and Hickinbotham. (The “bottom” in those names actually drew on an earlier use of that word for “bottomlands.”) In a yarn recounted by Robert Graves, an English prankster invited a group of notables with bottom-based names to a formal dinner, one at which rump steak was served, then watched in delight as the name of each guest was announced before he made an early exit.
One reason that body parts are so ticklish to talk about has nothing to do with their anatomical delicacy or even their sexual functions and everything to do with the liquids and gases that emerge from them. In an evolutionary anomaly, body parts such as the behind and the genitalia are used both for sex and secretion. This makes them doubly difficult to discuss. If anything, the elimination of body wastes is even more embarrassing to talk about than sex. As a result, it is one of our leading sources of euphemisms.
5
Secretions and Excretions
AFTER HARRY TRUMAN became our thirty-third president, a woman was said to have pleaded with his wife, Bess, to clean up her husband’s language. He’d recently called someone’s comment “a bunch of horse manure.” The First Lady reportedly smiled and responded, “You don’t know how many years it took to tone it down to that.”
No less than in the arenas of sex and anatomy, when referring to bodily functions we protect ourselves with well-armored euphemisms. Any substance emerging from the body is fair game: gases, liquids, solids. Latin-based words come to the rescue when we need to discuss such phenomena: “urine,” “feces,” “perspire,” “expectorate,” “regurgitate,” to name just a few. Medical terms such as “micturate” and “specimen” draw on Latin. So do “excrete” and “excrement,” both based on excrementum, which means “what is sifted out.” “Defecate” is another Latinism, one that referred broadly to eliminating impurities, until more than a century ago when it began to emphasize the elimination of human waste. On the eve of this transition, in 1867, James Russell Lowell wrote about the tendency among Britons to restrict language and “defecate it of all emotion.”
Words used for bodily functions reflect social standing. Refined people never “spit” but do sometimes expectorate—saliva or sputum, not “spittle.” Their noses don’t harbor “snot” and certainly not “boogers” but might contain mucus. They don’t “belch” but do burp on occasion. Better mouths never “throw up” and certainly wouldn’t “upchuck,” “retch,” “barf,” “spew,” “puke,” “hurl,” or “hug the throne” but at times do regurgitate, purge, or, in a pinch, vomit. Or, when feeling nauseous, fastidious speakers might simply be sick. Should that happen on an airplane, they’re grateful for what used to be known as “vomit bags” and are now called sickness bags, ones available for use by those who experience motion discomf
ort.
It used to be said that “Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow.” As this chestnut suggests, there was once some question about whether refined women perspired at all. Questioning an advisory to wear wool to absorb perspiration, a Victorian era commentator wrote, “But surely a gentlewoman rarely does anything to cause such an unpleasant thing!” Some held the verbal line, however. Imagine Winston Churchill in 1940 offering Britons nothing more than “blood, toil, tears, and perspiration.” Or worse yet, “blood, toil, tears, and wetness.”
Why such delicacy?
It seems obvious that a disgusting topic such as body waste cries out for euphemizing. Yet bodily wastes are not revolting to animals, nor to children fascinated by their boogers, saliva, and farts. Infants are no more offended by shit than pets are (as any parent and dog owner can attest). One study of three-year-olds found that most actually liked the smell of their own feces. Few adults do. Most find this an extremely revolting substance. Reviewers of the 2006 movie Black Book were less appalled by episodes in which hundreds of innocents are slaughtered, including a boatload of defenseless Jews trying to flee occupied Holland for Belgium, than by one scene in which a cauldron of human waste is dumped on the head of a Dutch woman accused of collaborating with the Nazis.
There’s no inherent reason that adults should find manure more disgusting than chocolate fudge, or vomit more off-putting than hollandaise sauce. Yet we do. And euphemisms ensue. There is an intimate relationship between disgust and euphemizing. We use euphemisms for any substance that nauseates us, as if sanitizing the word might purify the substance. Scholars of disgust (there are some) have found that the more revolting we find something, the more likely we are to discuss it indirectly. The evasive words we use when referring to such subjects become verbal spotlights. As William Ian Miller writes in The Anatomy of Disgust, “Euphemism shows that we are in the presence of taboo and the danger and disgust that attend it.”