Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  Several widespread Victorian assumptions about language are crystallized in this account. Marryat associates euphemisms with women, and with women of a particular social class—the middle. Such women, like the mistress of the seminary, see delicate language as a way to advertise their delicate sensibilities, which are themselves supposed to be an indication of social and moral worth. Marryat is also poking fun at these women who cannot bring themselves to say leg, and this is a perennial theme—Victorian euphemisms went hand in hand with a discourse that ridiculed them. There is scholarly debate about the number of people who really sewed inexpressibles for the limbs of their pianos, or whether Marryat’s seminarian was an exception or even his invention. But it is hard to deny that such coverings are the logical consequence of the thought process that led society to deem trousers and legs as beyond the pale. Marryat’s story reveals something about Victorian society, even if most people chose to show off, rather than cover up, the ornately carved legs of their mahogany furniture.

  Marryat’s account also makes clear that he sees limb as an American euphemism. He, “having been accustomed only to English society,” would use the more straightforward word leg. In fact, many nineteenth-century Brits thought that euphemism was a particularly American affectation. They pointed out that while Americans talked about their roosters and faucets, Brits still had cocks in their barnyards and bathrooms. While Americans picked at the bosom of a chicken, Brits tucked heartily into the breast. The Englishman Thomas Bowdler censored Shakespeare in 1807, but the American Noah Webster castrated the Bible itself in 1833, inserting “euphemisms, words and phrases which are not very offensive to delicacy, in the place of such as cannot, with propriety, be uttered before a promiscuous audience.” (Promiscuous may seem like an unfortunate adjective to choose when one’s project is to get rid of “language which cannot be uttered in company without a violation of decorum, or the rules of good breeding,” but in 1833 the word meant “wide and diverse,” not “sexually indiscriminate.” It attained its current meaning only in the late nineteenth century.) Even John Farmer and William Henley, authors of the magisterial 1890–1904 slang dictionary that contains thousands of euphemisms, accused Americans of being overly euphemistic. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s use of the word benders for legs prompts a series of recriminations from them: bender is “a euphemism employed by the squeamishly inclined for the leg. A similar piece of prudishness is displayed in an analogous use of ‘limb.’ With a notorious mock-modesty, American women decline to call a leg a leg; they call it a limb instead… . Sensible people everywhere, however, have little part in such prudery.”

  Why Americans say faucet.

  But there were plenty of people willing to bemoan the British affection for euphemism too, and plenty of examples to give them cause. In the 1874 edition of his Slang Dictionary, John Hotten took issue with British euphemism, condemning words such as inexpressibles—which were as British as meat pies and orderly queues—as “affected terms, having their origins in a most unpleasant squeamishness.” Henry Alford, dean of Canterbury, noted biblical scholar, and editor of John Donne, had much to say about the evils of euphemism in his Plea for the Queen’s English. “In the papers,” he complains—newspapers are in his view responsible for much of the euphemistic inundation—“a man does not now lose his mother: he sustains (this I saw in a country paper) bereavement of his maternal relative.” No one goes anywhere anymore—a man going home is set down as “an individual proceeding to his residence.” Nor does anyone eat when it is possible to partake, or live in rooms when the option is to occupy eligible apartments.

  Some of Alford’s complaints are not about euphemisms per se but about an overly inflated style, diction that has come to be known, probably to Alford’s shame, as “Victorian.” It is not particularly Victorian, either—Alexander Pope had already been calling fish “finny prey” and the “scaly tribe” in the early eighteenth century. When Alford complains about partake, he is objecting not to a euphemism for eat, but to an ameliorative term, a word with more or less the same meaning that is employed because it is more formal, more elevated—fancier. (Actually, as Alford points out, partake is not a synonym for eat. It means “to share in something,” whether food, a military expedition, or a joint visit to the privy.) Proceed was likewise an ameliorative term for go—it makes the ordinary act sound better. The line between euphemisms and ameliorative terms is thin and hard to keep to, however—both serve the same purpose of substituting for a word or disguising a topic that is too vulgar, or sometimes just too ordinary, for the context.

  Even the pornography of the period embraced this elevated style. In 1749, John Cleland wrote his way out of debtor’s prison with a pornographic novel that contained not a single obscene word. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) is basically a series of sexual encounters between Fanny and various men, other women and various men, Fanny and various women, other women and various women, and, once, two men. A typical scene has Fanny taking revenge on her own unfaithful lover by seducing a young man with a huge “machine,” who is so “full of genial juices” that he can orgasm twice in a row:

  Not once unsheathed, he proceeded afresh to cleave and open himself an entire entry into me, which was not a little made easy to him by the balsamic injection with which he had just plentifully moistened the whole internals of the passage. Redoubling, then, the active energy of his thrusts, favoured by the fervid appetency of my motions, the soft oiled wards can no longer stand so effectual a picklock, but yield and open him an entrance.

  This passage is actually about Christ’s love for his Church. No, not really. It does use the biblical metaphor of sex as opening a locked door, though.

  A surprisingly large number of other authors went for “botanical porn,” which involved learned comparisons of the genitalia to plants. Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, was one such author, who produced the only very mildly titillating The Loves of the Plants in 1789. Other botanists were more explicit than Darwin, but always in the most refined of language. The author of a mid-eighteenth-century poem called Arbor Vitae (“The Tree of Life”) describes the tree this way:

  The tree of Life, then, is a succulent plant, consisting of one only stem, on the top of which is a pistillum or apex, sometime of a glandiform appearance, and not unlike a May-cherry, though at other seasons more resembling the Avellana or filbeard tree. Its fruits, contrary to most others, grow near the root; they are usually two in number, in size somewhat exceeding that of an ordinary nutmeg, and are both contained in one Siliqua, or purse, which together with the whole root of the plant, is commonly beset with innumerable fibrilla, or capillary tendrils.

  If you don’t recognize this as a description of the penis, you haven’t been paying attention. Fanny Hill and works of botanical erotica contain obscene subject matter—almost nothing but obscene subject matter, in fact—without offensive or low language. They are porn with pretensions, the product of an age with a craze for euphemisms, an era that prized delicate and learned diction whatever the occasion.

  Euphemism is the opposite of swearing. Swearwords work because they carry an emotional charge derived from their direct reference to taboo objects, orifices, and actions. Euphemisms exist to cover up those same taboos, to disguise or erase the things that prompt such strong feelings. These anti-obscenities, if you will, are formed by several processes, including indirection, Latinization, and employing French. A word such as inexpressibles works as a euphemism because it completely disguises the thing to which it refers—it hides its referent, as do confinement, situation, and condition (“interesting” or otherwise), which were popular Victorian euphemisms for pregnancy. Latin, with its irreproachable reputation as the dead language of the well educated, also gave rise to many euphemisms. In the Renaissance, a man could freely piss in public; now he had to micturate (c. 1842) behind closed doors. Other bodily functions got Latinized as well, and so we have defecate (to shit), osculate (to kiss), expectorate (to spit),
and perspire (to sweat). Of perspiration, the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1791 records: “It is well known that for some time past, neither man, woman nor child … has been subject to that gross kind of exudation which was formerly known by the name of sweat; … now every mortal, except carters, coal-heavers and Irish Cahir-men … merely perspires.” Linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge call Latinate terms such as these orthophemisms rather than euphemisms. Orthophemisms are “more formal and more direct (or literal)” than euphemisms. Defecate, because it literally means “to shit,” is an orthophemism; poo is a euphemism, and shit is a dysphemism, the taboo word the others were created to avoid. According to Allan and Burridge, both euphemism and orthophemism arise from the same urge: “they are used to avoid the speaker being embarrassed and/or ill thought of and, at the same time, to avoid embarrassing and/or offending the hearer or some third party. This coincides with the speaker being polite.”

  French also contributed a number of popular euphemisms, including accouchement for having a baby, lingerie for underwear, and chemise for shift, a word that itself had replaced the even more indecent smock (which is a long dress or shirt that served as an undergarment). The poet Leigh Hunt recorded his difficulties in finding a title for his version of a medieval story about a knight who fights in a lady’s chemise to prove his valor. He attempted to call it “The Three Knights and the Smock” or “The Battle of the Shift,” but public outcry forced him to expunge any mention of the offending clothing. He marveled that he could not even employ the word chemise—“not even this word, it seems, is to be mentioned, nor the garment itself alluded to, by any decent writer!” Hunt eventually called the 1831 poem “The Gentle Armour.” As late as 1907, shift was a powerfully taboo word. When an actress spoke it onstage during the premiere of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, the audience began to riot. The play is about life in an isolated village in Ireland, and premiered in Dublin at the National Theater; in these circumstances, the use of shift was seen as an insult to Irish Catholic womanhood. A decent woman would not be mentioning her unmentionables at all, let alone using the vulgar word shift.

  Let’s focus now on one taboo area to show the great range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century euphemisms, and how our three drivers—misdirection, Latin, and French—team up in creating them. Consider the toilet. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, house of office was still in common use, thanks perhaps to its entirely mystifying literal sense. House was also involved in a number of related euphemisms, such as necessary house, house of commons, or just commons—a haven of democracy to which everyone had to resort, rich or poor, male or female, old or young.* There was also the less frequently employed mine uncle’s (house). Chamber pots were still employed for relieving oneself in the middle of the night, or when suffering a disinclination to proceed to the privy, and continued to be called chamber pots, or just chambers. This shortening occasions a joke in the Victorian collection of erotica The Stag Party (ca. 1888, edited by the American author of children’s verse Eugene Field, most famous for Wynken, Blynken, and Nod):

  The newly wedded country gent was registering at the Grand Pacific. The urbane clerk suggested the bridal chamber. Groom did not seem to take. The clerk again repeats his question, “Don’t you want a bridal chamber?” Countryman—Wall, you might send one up for her, I guess, but I can piss out the window.

  A mid-nineteenth-century chamber pot, complete with poetry and brown frog.

  The clerk, of course is suggesting the bridal room; the groom assumes he means the bridal chamber pot. Such a pot was also called a jerry, probably short for jeroboam, a large bowl, goblet, or wine bottle. Commode was also a popular euphemism, being French. A commode was originally any kind of elaborate and delicate piece of furniture with drawers and compartments. (It was also eighteenth-century slang for a woman’s headdress, which at the time would have been a huge tower of real and false hair, feathers, ribbons, and powder—certainly also elaborate and delicate.) Its meaning narrowed to indicate a piece of furniture that could enclose chamber pots, hiding them from view, until finally it came to designate the pot itself. And po was in use by 1880—pot sounds so much decenter in French.

  In the late eighteenth century, improvements in plumbing technology led to the wider adoption of flush toilets and a concomitant change in nomenclature. (John Harington, if you remember, had invented a flushing toilet in 1597 and wrote a mock heroic poem about it.) Flushing toilets, and the rooms they were in, began to be called water closets. Running water and ideas of cleanliness and hygiene later gave rise to washroom and bathroom, a masterpiece of misdirection, for, as British people love to point out to Americans, there is very often no bath involved. Loo, a common British word for bathroom, might also derive from the water component of the water closet. In Scotland, it had been polite to cry “Gardy-loo” when emptying your chamber pot out the window, a corruption of gardez l’eau—“watch out for the water.” Loo might also be a corruption of the French for “place,” lieu, as in place of easement. One final candidate etymology has loo coming from bourdalou, a portable chamber pot for ladies. The seventeenth-century French preacher Louis Bourdaloue was so popular that people would assemble hours in advance of his sermons. Ladies brought their bourdalous, which they could use under their skirts, so that they didn’t have to lose their seats by getting up to find the privy. (Bourdaloue often preached at Versailles, so the ladies very likely would have had trouble finding a privy anyway. The palace was plagued by people defecating in the corners of rooms and urinating into potted plants, fireplaces, staircases, etc., perhaps out of carelessness, perhaps from a lack of privy-cy.)

  Latin makes its contribution to toilet words with lavatory, latrine, and urinal. Lavatory is like washroom—in the Middle Ages it had referred to a vessel for washing the hands, and came to indicate the room in which you wash your hands, because you’ve just used the toilet. Latrine, like lavatory from the Latin for “wash,” has always referred to a privy or set of privies in a camp, barracks, or hospital. Urinal was a glass used by medieval physicians to collect urine for examination, and also by the fifteenth century a plain chamber pot. By the mid-nineteenth century it had attained the meaning it has today—a fixture attached to a wall, used by men for urinating (or a room containing such fixtures).

  Finally we go back to French for the most common toilet word, toilet itself. It originated in the French word toilette, meaning “little cloth.” The toilette covered the dressing table while makeup was applied and hair was coiffed; eventually it came to stand for the articles on the dressing table used in grooming, then the process of getting dressed. From there, it came to refer to the room in which the getting dressed happened, which was often furnished with a bath. Hence, as can be seen in the OED, toilet came to indicate a bathroom, a lavatory, and then the ceramic pedestal itself.

  In American English, the euphemism treadmill has turned for toilet, and it has now become a vulgar word instead of a decorous one used to disguise an unpleasant fact of life. Polite Americans would be hard-pressed to ask “Where’s the toilet?” as is commonly heard in Britain. In Britain, though, toilet is vulgar in the original sense of the term—it has class connotations, employed by people of the middle class on down. Loo is the word used by upper-class Brits. In a reflection on social class that he composed for the Times of London, the Earl of Onslow admitted that “I find it almost impossible to force the word toilet between my lips.” (He found it impossible to spell as well, going for the French toilette.) And when Prince William and Kate Middleton broke up briefly in 2007, the British press blamed it on Kate’s mother’s use of the word toilet, creating a scandal called, not surprisingly, “Toiletgate.” The prince could never marry a girl whose mother said “toilet” (and did other irredeemably middle-class things such as chew gum and say “Pardon?” instead of “What?” or “Sorry?”). Toiletgate fizzled out, of course—the prince married his commoner, and Mrs. Middleton probably now makes sure she uses the facilities
before she goes out.

  These are, believe it or not, just a few of the more popular euphemisms for toilet that were in use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how misdirection, Latin, and French allowed English-speakers to create new, polite words that allowed them to discuss things they were not supposed to mention. To be fair, there were also dysphemistic names for toilets, words intended to make a thing sound worse than it is. Shit-house first appeared in 1795, according to the OED, while bog-house was popular in the eighteenth century, ceding ground to the shortened form bog in the nineteenth. (There was also a brief flowering of boggard in the seventeenth century.) The bog- words evidently derive not from bog in the sense of “wet, swampy ground” but from a verb meaning “to exonerate the bowels; also trans. to defile with excrement” (another one of those “to spray someone or something with shit” verbs, which we no longer seem to need today). In its definition, the OED makes clear that bog in this sense is not a polite word—it is “a low word, scarcely found in literature, however common in coarse colloquial language.” John started to compete with jakes as the masculine name of choice for the facilities in the eighteenth century—a 1735 list of rules for students at Harvard College includes the biblical dictum that “No freshman shall mingo [piss] against the College wall or go into the fellows’ cuzjohn.” “Cuzjohn” is “cousin John”; the word is still in use as just plain john and remains mostly an Americanism.

  Crapper, another dysphemistic use, is almost unique in the realm of bad words in that it is the subject of an etymological legend that turns out to be (mostly) true. The story is that a man named Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet, and that it is called “the crapper” in his honor. There was indeed a Thomas Crapper (1836–1910), and while he did not invent the flush toilet, he did manufacture them and patent many improvements to the design, always printing his name boldly in his bowls and on his cisterns. Crap itself is an old word, first appearing in the fifteenth century and indicating “the husk of grain, chaff.” By the Victorian era, it had developed its contemporary meaning of bowel exoneration, the process or product, but was used mostly in America. Simon Kirby, managing director of Thomas Crapper & Co. Ltd.—which is still in business today—explains how the vulgar American word and the venerable English plumber collided to give us “the crapper”: “During World War I, American servicemen stationed in London were so amused that the ancient and vulgar word for faeces was printed on so many water closets, that they began to call the W.C. a ‘crapper.’ Though crude, the soubriquet made sense and it stuck… . In etymological circles, this process is called ‘back formation,’ which sounds rather like a sewer problem!”