by Melissa Mohr
In other ways, though, Elyot’s definition of obscenity is different from our own. Words for excrement are not on his forbidden list, because they have little chance of arousing any sinful desires. He defines the verb caco, for example, as “to shit.” Urina is “urine or piss,” while vomo is explained as “to vomit or parbrake.” These words are not dangerous because they do not arouse lust and so lead to moral corruption, and instead the principle of copia reasserts itself. Caco is “to shit,” but cacaturio is the more decorous “to desire to go to stool.” Urina is either the blunt “piss” or the more polite “urine.” With scatology, it appears important to master words of different registers—these might be useful to add to the rhetorician’s rich store of vocabulary.
Other lexicographers abandoned didactic responsibility, or rather, refused to worry about their readers’ moral education. John Florio, who published his Italian-English dictionary A Worlde of Wordes in 1598, and John Palsgrave, whose Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (The Clarification of the French Language) appeared in 1530, wanted instead to present their vernacular languages as they were really spoken, in all their morally dubious glory. In a preface, Palsgrave boasts that one could actually learn to speak French from his dictionary. Perusing these dictionaries, it quickly becomes apparent that obscene words must have played a vital part in early modern communication. Florio includes several terms that signify in some form or another “a mans privie member.” There is the simple cazzo, the privie member itself. There is cazzaria, “a treatise or discourse of pricks,”* cazzo ritto, “a stiffe standing pricke,” cazzuto, “a man that hath a pricke,” and several more cognates. One of these words is intriguingly unlike its fellows—cazzica, “an interjection of admiration and affirming, what? gods me, god forbid, tush.” Florio here chose to translate a word that derives from “penis” with a vain oath on God’s name. Even in the Renaissance, it was still common to use oaths where we today—and the Italians of four hundred years ago—would use an obscenity. Florio and Palsgrave are writing at the birth of English obscenity, not yet its ascendancy.
The Worlde of Words includes cunt too, in potta, “a womans privie parts, a cunt, a quaint” and pottaccia, “a filthie great cunt.”† Florio also freely uses fuck in his definitions of the Italian fottere. He assigns the verb itself the meanings “to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy,” while fottitrice is “a woman fucker, swiver, sarder, or iaper” and fottitore the male equivalent. Palsgrave never prints the f-word in English, but translates foutre with sard and swive. He helpfully gives examples of how to use these words in conversation, such as “I will not swive her and she would pray me”—“I wouldn’t fuck her if she begged me.” Even worse, by the principle of didactic responsibility, might be his definition of ie fringue: “I frig with the arse as a queene doth when she is in japing,” that is, “I rub with the ass as a prostitute does while she is fucking.” I challenge you to read that without wading a little bit deeper into the ooze of sin.
Florio may have the most fucks, but his are not the earliest examples of the word. That honor goes to a piece of marginalia in a manuscript of Cicero, “O d fuckin Abbot,” from 1528. An anonymous monk was reading through the monastery copy of De Officiis when he felt compelled to express his anger at his abbot. (We can be sure when this was because he helpfully recorded the date in another comment.) It is difficult to know whether the annotator intended fucking to mean “having sex,” as in “that guy is doing too much fucking for someone who is supposed to be celibate,” or whether he used it as an intensifier; if the latter, it anticipates the first recorded use by more than three hundred years. Either is possible, really—John Burton, the abbot in question, was a man of questionable monastic morals. It is interesting as well that while the annotator has no problem spelling out fucking (except for the g), he refuses to write out a word that is most likely damned. To this monk, damnation is the real obscenity, the one that can be hinted at but not expressed in full.
There are at least two instances of fuck dated before that of our monk, but scholars sometimes deny them the glory of first use because one is Scottish and one appears in code, with a Latin verb conjugation. The Scots poet William Dunbar (more of him later) penned these lines sometime before his death, in 1513:
He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit,
As with the glaikis he wer ovirgane.
Yit be his feirris he wald have fukkit …
[He embraced fast [tight], he kissed and groped,
As if he were overcome with desire.
Yet [it seemed from] his behavior he would have fucked.]
The coded example is also from a poem, dated 1475–1500, this one attacking the Carmelite friars of the town of Ely. It is macaronic, that is, written partly in English and partly in Latin, with the dirty bits “concealed” in the most basic of ciphers:
Non sunt in cœli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.
…
Fratres cum knyvys goth about and txxkxzv nfookt xxzxkt.
For each letter of code, you simply substitute the previous letter of the alphabet, and you get, making allowances for late medieval spelling, “fuccant wivys of heli”—“They [the monks] are not in heaven, because they fuck the wives of Ely.” The third line unciphers to “swivyt mennis wyvis”—“Brothers with knives go about and swive men’s wives.” To this author, swive was apparently as bad a word as its synonym, also requiring at least the pretense of concealment. It is unclear whether the words are censored because swive and fuck are thought to be obscene, worse in themselves than the other words in the poem, or because the sexual sins of which the author accuses the monks are so horrible they cannot be stated outright. What is clear is that you didn’t want to mess with any Carmelite friar looking for oppljf.
There are many theories on the etymology of fuck. It is popularly supposed to be an acronym. When England’s population was decimated by the plague in olden times, the story goes, the king pondered how to get his subjects to reproduce. He issued proclamations demanding that they “fornicate under command of the king,” or F.U.C.K. for short. This is not true, nor is pretty much any story that explains the origin of a swearword as an acronym. Naff, for example, is not an acronym of “not available for fucking.” More familiar to Brits than to Americans, naff was a word in the gay slang language Polari in the 1960s, meaning “tacky.” Princess Anne caused controversy when she told photographers to “naff off” in 1982. Shit, actually one of the oldest words in the English language, has produced perhaps the best of these stories: Before the American Revolution, people used to ship manure back and forth across the Atlantic for fertilizer. When the manure in the hold of the ship came into contact with seawater, it would start to ferment, producing methane gas. When an unfortunate sailor would go belowdecks with a lantern, the ship would explode. As a result, bundles of manure began to be labeled “Ship High in Transit,” so that sailors would know to store them high enough that they wouldn’t get wet and blow up.
If it’s not an acronym, what is the etymology of fuck? The real answer is rather less interesting. It is a word of Germanic origin, related to Dutch, German, and Swedish words for “to strike” and “to move back and forth.” It is also clearly not one of our good old Anglo-Saxon words, like shit, having come into use only in the late fifteenth century.
Florio and Palsgrave included words such as fuck, arse, and swive in their dictionaries because people used them in everyday life, despite the growing sixteenth-century sense that these words were obscene—worse, morally, than the other words around them. This increased use is reflected in court records of the period. Medieval insults that made it into suits of defamation and slander, as we saw in the previous chapter, overwhelmingly featured the words false, harlot, and whore, and various combinations thereof—“False whore-mongering harlot!” In the sixteenth century, the insults began to employ more of the words we would use today. In 1555, John Warneford and John a Bridges were at loggerheads over a piece of property, when John B. brought
a defamation suit claiming that John W. had called him a “crooked nose[d] knave” and declared “shit upon his Crooked nose.” When in 1597 Roger Jackson wanted to vilify William Hobson by suggesting he was an adulterer, he didn’t use adulterer or false; he went straight to “he fuckes and sardes bothe Alen Sugdons wife of Stanley and her doghter.” And in 1629 John Slocombe complained that George Bailey was going around telling people that he had shown him his “pricke” and told him “this pricke hath fuckt Ioan Pecke many times.” Bailey was also spreading the rumor that Slocombe “did pisse or make water in the widdowe Tylles backside.” This is less kinky than it sounds: Slocombe had apparently peed in her garden.
Some of this newfound obscenity probably reflects a change in the way speech was recorded in the various court rolls. In the Middle Ages, the records were often entirely in Latin and French, with the actual English words at issue included only occasionally. By the sixteenth century, the records were in English or in a mixture of English and Latin, so there was much more scope for insults to be written down at length. But these court records also reflect a move from oaths to obscenities as the language of emotive power. People didn’t need to accuse each other of “fucking” in the Middle Ages, because the word fuck wasn’t any worse than lie with, have to do with, or adulteravit. By the sixteenth century, fucking was becoming a more powerful word, so people began to employ it more and more frequently when they wanted to wound.
A genre of poetry called flyting exemplifies this new use of obscene words to injure and insult. Flyting was very much like the freestyle battles of today, in which rappers compete to insult each other in the most creative ways. While freestyle battling is a “street” art form, practiced mostly by disenfranchised youth, flyting was entertainment for the nobility. The most famous practitioner, William Dunbar, of the early fukkit, was a Franciscan friar, and even Scottish kings tried their hand. A typical example is this exchange between Friar Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, a court poet.
Kennedy to Dunbar:
Skaldit skaitbird and commoun skamelar,
Wanfukkit funling that Natour maid ane yrle …
[Diseased vulture and common parasite,
Weakly conceived foundling that Nature made a dwarf …]
Dunbar to Kennedy:
Forworthin wirling, I warne thee, it is wittin
How, skyttand skarth, thow hes the hurle behind.
Wan wraiglane wasp, ma wormis hes thow beschittin
Nor thair is gers on grund or leif on lind.
[Deformed wretch, I warn you, it is known,
How, you shitting hermaphrodite, you have diarrhea behind.
Sad wriggling wasp, you have beshit more worms
Than there is grass on ground or leaf on linden tree.]
The sixteenth century is a turning point in the history of swearing in English, as epitomized by Florio’s cazzica, “an interjection of admiration and affirming, what? gods me, god forbid, tush.” Where an Italian would employ an obscenity, an English person, Florio indicates, would still use a vain oath. But from this point on, the balance will tip heavily in favor of obscenity, until four hundred years later we get motherfucker, an interjection of admiration and affirming.
You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself
In the sixteenth century, obscene language was developing both as a moral phenomenon and as a social one. The moral aspect came from the Middle Ages and ultimately from the Bible, but the seductive force that used to be spread across an entire sinful sentence was becoming concentrated in a few lascivious little words for certain body parts and actions. The social aspect developed in the web of relationships at the new, nonfeudal court, where speech and writing were tools employed by courtiers as they jockeyed for the favor of the monarch on whom they were more and more dependent. This period saw a great “advance in the frontiers of shame,” as Norbert Elias puts it. Sixteenth-century people were ashamed of more things than their medieval forebears, and ashamed in front of more people. It became more and more important to conceal these various shameful body parts and actions, in public life and in polite language.
Innovations in sixteenth-century architecture allowed for what scholars talk about as the “invention” of privacy, necessary for this increased delicacy of shame. Of course, solitude wasn’t a Renaissance invention—people in the Middle Ages sometimes found themselves alone, though not as often as we do—but it was only after the proliferation of spaces in which people could reliably be alone that something like our notion of privacy developed, the feeling that there were certain things that belonged solely to an individual and that must not be shared with or shown before other people. Even confession, the most secret of all the sacraments, was not private, in our sense of the word, for much of the Middle Ages. You might have told your sins to the priest and God alone, but the priest very likely would have imposed on you a public penance—wearing sackcloth, missing Communion—to be performed in front of the entire community. The whole parish would thus have known about the “private” sins you confessed to the priest. Reading too was very often not private but a group activity: a poet reciting his poems to entertain the court, a lady reading from a book to entertain her friends, a monk reading from the Bible to his brethren in their monastery. Books were so rare, heavy, and expensive that no one ever curled up in an armchair to read to him- or herself. (Also, there were, as far as historians can tell, no comfortable chairs for most of the Middle Ages—you sat on either long benches or large, unpadded wooden chairs.) Even in the sixteenth century, people were suspicious of privacy—who knew what you could get up to all by your lonesome, with only the devil for company? In the Middle Ages, then, there was little that was private as we think of it, and even if people occasionally found themselves alone in the woods, this was not necessarily seen as a desirable thing.
In the Renaissance, people started building houses with more rooms. They needed more rooms, because suddenly they were accumulating more stuff. In a region of England called the Arden, to take just one small area, people amassed possessions at an astounding rate in the years between 1570 and 1674. Historian Victor Skipp calculates that possessions increased 289 percent among the wealthy, 310 percent among the “middling sort,” and even 247 percent among the poorer classes during these years.* To see what this looked like in practice, Skipp compares the goods possessed by two farmers with approximately the same size landholding in 1560 and in 1587. Edward Kempsale, the first farmer, lived in a house with two rooms, and his household goods at his death consisted of six plates, three sheets, one coverlet, and two tablecloths. Thomas Gyll, in contrast, lived in a house with four rooms, and left more than twenty-eight pieces of pewter, five silver spoons, thirteen and a half pairs of sheets, six coverlets, and four tablecloths, as well as pillows, pillowcases, and table napkins. Master Gyll could build extra rooms to store and display his pewter and his thirteen and a half pairs of sheets thanks to a technological innovation—the fireplace. Around 1330, fireplaces were developed that would not collapse under the intense heat generated by a confined fire. The central open fire of the hall could be replaced with a fireplace and chimney; you could then add rooms above the hall, which previously had been impossible because the smoke needed to go out through a hole in the roof. These rooms could be given their own fireplaces, and could then be used even in the winter. Bill Bryson, shrewd observer of human nature, summarizes what happened next: “Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves… . The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it.” Houses began to have bedrooms, studies, dining rooms, and parlors—they began, slowly, to look more like houses as we know them today.
The notion of privacy evolved slowly, even with these extra rooms. People who used to sleep together in the straw of the great hall would now bed down in a bedroom, but they still likely would be sleeping with others. A (female) servant often slept on the floor of the room Samuel Pepys sh
ared with his wife in the late seventeenth century; some of the servants found this arrangement perfectly normal, others, perhaps more attuned to the idea of privacy (or perhaps just more wary of Mr. Pepys), thought it odd. Privies were also spaces in which privacy could be achieved, as their name suggests. There were two kinds of places one might leave a sirreverence—the privies or garderobes, which were small rooms that hung out over the walls of a castle or house and allowed waste to drop into a moat or river or onto the ground below, and closestools, which were chamber pots enclosed and somewhat disguised by a piece of furniture. These were usually placed in a bedroom or dining room but could still be at least notionally private, surrounded by a curtain. (Sirreverence comes from “save-reverence,” which people used to say before or after mentioning something likely to offend. The apology came to stand for the thing it excused, and so sirreverence came to mean “turd,” as in these lines from Shakespeare’s early rival Robert Greene: “His head, and his necke, were all besmeared with the soft sirreverence, so as he stunke worse than a Jakes Farmer,” a person who cleans out privies for a living.) Garderobe looks as if it should refer to a place to put clothes—it is Norman French for “wardrobe”—but came to be applied to privies because they were often built off wardrobes. Privies were also called, in ascending order of politeness, jakes or sinkes, latrines, places of easement, and houses of office. Jakes especially was vulgar and impolite; in his Metamorphosis of Ajax, Harington relates the story of a flustered lady-in-waiting who introduces Jaques Wingfield as “M. Privy Wingfield.” Privies were sometimes truly private one-seaters, where a person could read, think, sleep, or even, as King James I was rumored to have done, have sex. Often, however, they were still communal multiseaters, though much less grand than those of ancient Roman times, maxing out at around seven or eight seats. While it is possible to imagine eight people staring resolutely into space while they used the facilities, these were more likely social spaces. In the late seventeenth century, the family at Chilthorne Domer, a manor in Somerset, would congregate daily in their six-seater.