The Lord’s Prayer isn’t the only preserved record from the ancient history of English—liturgical, scientific, legal, and literary texts enshrined in the museums and archives of the Anglophone world contain within them the necessary rudiments to trace out the histories of not just the sacred words of our language but the profane ones as well.
Illustrative of how profanity changes is cock, a word as old as English itself. In ancient records, it can be found spelled variously as coc, cocc, or kok—as you can see, orthography was just as inconsistent during the Middle Ages as it is during the Texting Age. But from its earliest recorded use in AD 890–897, we know that in the first millennium, the word referred to one particular kind of cock, the kind that crows.2 Eleven hundred years later, the word has transformed. To contemporary American ears, of course, a cock is most likely something else, something not typically outfitted with a beak and feathers. The meaning of cock has changed radically.a
If Mark Twain had wanted to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a farce, he could have gotten a lot of mileage out of this. Think about the riotous malentendus when an uptight courtesan proclaims I’m hungry for a cock tonight or I woke up this morning to that damned cock again.
In the place of cock, contemporary American English speakers prefer to refer to the male of the species Gallus gallus domesticus using the word rooster. We can track this shift through the historical record of English. The Google NGram corpus provides a count of how frequently different words have been used over time, at least as recorded in the books that Google has scanned to date. The record gets less reliable the farther back you go, especially for relatively infrequent words, like cock, that only pop up now and then. But if you track cock over the past 150 years, you’ll quickly see that it has come to be used progressively less and less over the years. The chart you see on the next page plots time on the x-axis—from 1850 to the present. And on the y-axis is the frequency of cock among all words in books from that particular year. You can see that cock has been quite infrequent for centuries: only about one word in 100,000 is cock. Presumably, that’s because writers have other things to discuss than fowl and penises. But what’s important is the change over time. By 2000, cock was used only about a third as often as it was one hundred years before. And lest you think this is merely because male chickens have progressively fallen out of favor as a writing topic, compare the downward trend of the cock curve with the upward trajectory of rooster, below it. Rooster was basically unattested in 1860 and has since risen to a nearly cock-like level. People are using cock less and rooster more.
The decline of cock and the rise of rooster.
Wait a tick. Does the Google corpus really contain no recorded instances of the word rooster in 1860? Or in 1850? Or anywhere in between? Zero? How could this be? Rooster feels like a word as old as the language. Isn’t it?
We’ll get to that.
But first, to sum up what we know so far: cock was once an innocuous animal term. Now, however, with the twenty-first century in full swing, if you ask a rancher about his livestock, at least in the United States, he’s unlikely to say that he has three hundred pigs and five hundred cocks. The original sense of cock has shriveled up and been replaced by rooster, a word that seemingly appeared in the nineteenth century.
What’s special about profanity—what makes it distinct from other types of language and particularly important to study—is that all of these facts repeat themselves again and again in one profane word after another. When profanity evolves, it tends to follow certain recurring patterns that open a window onto how and why languages change.
# $ % !
Exhibit B is dick.
There are many famous Dicks. Here are the first that come to my mind: Dick Van Dyke, Dick Smothers, Dick Cheney, Dick Cavett, Dick Clark. If you’re twenty or younger, it’s possible that none of these names are familiar to you—you who have missed out on unique American cultural treasures like Mary Poppins and American Bandstand. If you don’t know these Dicks, it’s because they’re all old. Their respective birth years? 1925, 1938, 1941, 1936, and 1929. In fact, as it turns out, there are a lot of guys named Dick from the early half of the twentieth century and well before. The first attested use of Dick as a name appears in 1553,3 just eleven years before Shakespeare was born. The Bard himself might well have had Dicks as contemporaries. For a while, Dick was as common a name as Tom and Harry.
But you know who isn’t named Dick? Most anyone born after 1968. It’s impossible to get hard numbers on nicknames, ephemeral as they are. But we do have data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), which tracks the names given to babies born each year.4 As you can see from the graph on the next page, Dick was once a quite popular name to give to young boys. To be clear, these aren’t babies named Richard and nicknamed Dick. Oh no. These are babies whose birth certificate proudly displays their given first name as Dick. According to the SSA, there were eight hundred of them per year in the 1920s and 1930s. As you can see, Dick started petering out after reaching its high point in the early 1930s. Newborn babies were still being named Dick through the 1950s, but by the 1960s, Dick was clearly on its way out. And then, starting in 1970, no more Dicks. Instead, Ricks.
The similarity between cock and dick is striking. In both cases, at one time, the word is entirely anodyne. At a later point, it means something different and profane, and the role it originally played passes to a different word altogether—rooster or Rick. The list of profane words in English is largely a list of words with similarly humble, inoffensive origins. Bitch used to refer just to female dogs. A faggot used to be a bundle of sticks. Ass used to be a donkey. And so on.
For a language scientist, a trend like this screams out for a deeper look. How are these particular words selected to become profane? Where do the old meanings go? And where do the replacement words come from—words like rooster and Rick? So what follows is an outline of the career arc that cock and dick and many other taboo words have scratched out, from banality to profanity and eventually to obscurity.
Live births per year with the given names Dick and Rick, from 1880 to 2010.
Step one: a word extends its meaning
Before cock and dick became profane, they already existed as words but with different meanings. This is true of most profanity. I mentioned bitch, ass, and faggot earlier, but other examples abound. Jesus used to just be a nice name for a Jewish boy, for example.
The history of fuck appears similar, despite fanciful stories you may have heard to the contrary. There’s a claim floating around that fuck was created as an acronym—perhaps for something like For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge or Fornicate Under Command of the King. Acronyms are certainly a bountiful source for profanity—as demonstrated by recent examples like MILF and even GILF, THOT, and WTF. But the historical record leaves no reason to believe that fuck was born as an acronym. A key bit of evidence is that fuck has apparent cognate words in languages related to English. As far as we can tell, fuck is related to its German equivalent ficken, which is roughly synonymous with its English cousin (though less widely used and less profane), as well as Dutch fokken (“to breed”) and Icelandic fjúka (“to be tossed by wind”).5 This suggests that the word’s ancestor can be traced back thousands of years to a time before the languages that evolved into modern-day German and English diverged. So if fuck were formed as an acronym (and there’s no evidence it was), this would have happened thousands of years ago, and the particular words whose first letters it spelled out would have been totally different from words of contemporary English. Words like carnal, knowledge, command, and so on were not part of the common ancestor of English and German and so could not have been used to form an acronym.
So if not from an acronym, how did fuck become the go-to swearword of modern English? Because fuck is so old and has had its meaning for so long, it’s hard to know if it had a life prior to its profane one—we simply have very little in the way of preserved written texts that go back that far
. But there’s a bit of indirect evidence that in its ancient history it derives from an Indo-European root from thousands of years ago meaning something like “to strike,” “to stab,” or “to stuff.”6 That is, before it came to refer to copulation and before it became profane, it was likely a mundane Indo-European verb that described a simple and inoffensive physical action.
Precisely when it extended its meaning to specify a particularly lurid type of striking, stabbing, or stuffing is currently unknown, though this appears to have happened at least as long ago as the fourteenth century. Medievalist Paul Booth recently uncovered the earliest known record of the word to date, in legal documents from 1310 identifying a man as Roger Fuckebythenavel; parsed out, that makes Fucke by the navel. Booth explains that the name “could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit,’ i.e., a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it.”7 This suggests the word has been doing dirty work for at least seven hundred years.
This common pathway to profanity suggests that although the Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle tells us which semantic fields profane words are most likely to be drawn from, those words often have an even earlier history. Before they refer to genitalia or copulation, they have other lives, as words referring to farm animals or commonplace actions like hitting, for instance. So the first step toward profanity is actually to acquire a Holy-, Fucking-, Shit-, or Nigger-related meaning.
The ways they add these new meanings are largely typical for words. A common mechanism is metaphor: words commonly come to be used for something perceived to be similar to the original meaning. Consider why it is that we refer to the face of not just a person or animal but also of a clock. Although a clock face has no eyes, nose, or mouth, one may apprehend global visual resemblance to a human face. This explains why the word, first recorded referring to part of a human in AD 1300, was extended to clocks as well soon thereafter.8 In this case, the similarity between the two faces is superficial and visual. Cock is probably an example of this as well. As early as around AD 1400, we have records of cock referring not just to roosters but also to the male member. And the reason may well be superficial visual similarity between a rooster and a penis. Similarly, the name Dick gained an additional meaning in the 1870s. It’s not the one you’re thinking of. It came first to refer to a riding whip (how, we don’t know). From there, in the following decades, Dick was extended once again to a new meaning, this time referring to the male member (according to some sources, perhaps initially in military usage).9 The superficial visual similarity between the handle of a whip and the male member is probably responsible—though, importantly, it’s not sufficient. Many words denoting things longer than they are wide have not over the years come to refer to the male member. So chance is surely at play in this part of the process.
But metaphor doesn’t restrict itself to the surface. Words can also find themselves metaphorically extended to new meanings due to deeper, structural connections. We now use face in expressions like on the face of it, which can refer to things that don’t have any physical manifestation at all: On the face of it, this theory doesn’t have a leg to stand on! This kind of deeper metaphor has also generated some of our profane words. Consider bitch. Assuredly bitch was not extended from dogs to people due to superficial visual similarity. Although it’s now used to refer to a malicious or unpleasant person, particularly but not only a female one, its original foray into humanity was to denote a lewd or sensual woman. Again, there’s little visual similarity between a female dog and such a person. But extending bitch in this way might have constituted an appeal to perceive an abstract similarity between the behaviors of female dogs, particularly during estrus, and lascivious women.10
Metaphor might explain how the plausibly anodyne ancestor of fuck came to refer to sexual intercourse. Presumably I don’t need to explain the superficial visual similarities between stabbing, stuffing, or striking and certain aspects of intercourse. These ways that meanings get extended are in no way unique to profanity. What’s special about profane words like dick, cock, bitch, and fuck is that the meanings they gained were in an optimal position to become profane. They referred to copulation, genitalia, and so on.
Step two: dissemination
In order for a word with a new meaning to become profane, that change has to catch on. Let’s say that someone introduces a change into a language—for instance, someone starts using cock to refer to the male member. In order for it to have the string of consequences we now know that change had, other people have to start using it too. The thing is that most changes don’t catch on. For instance, consider a word that I myself invented, hummerbird. This word is meant to refer to someone who flits from sexual partner to sexual partner performing oral sex.b I hope you find some use for the word. But if you do, you’ll be basically on your own, because it has most certainly not caught on. No matter how useful you and I find hummerbird, no matter how frequently we use it, unless other people start using it too, the change will be lost as soon as you and I stop. You might know people who make up new words and then try to get other people to use them. Those people usually fail—almost all changes introduced into a language die off before they ever catch on. Urbandictionary.com is a graveyard for words people thought up that were going to be their big claim to fame, only to be entombed in the obscurity of two upvotes and three downvotes forevermore.
It has come to my attention that certain birders, particularly in Texas, already use the word hummer bird to refer to hummingbirds. Influential though the birding community may be, I don’t believe it’s responsible for obstructing my innovation from catching on.
Occasionally, though, a change gains traction. Someone said the word taint, and the English-speaking world was forever changed. Why? It’s worth trying to understand what makes a change more or less likely to diffuse through a community. Do new words contain intrinsic properties that make people want to reuse them? And how do words spread? Who has to use them for other people to decide they want to use them too? How, for example, did cock manage to spread its wings after losing its feathers?
We know a little about how this works. The success of a new word or a new use for an old word depends on at least three things. First, the intrinsic properties of the word itself matter.11 All innovations are not equal. Some words are shorter, easier to pronounce, or easier to remember than others, which may contribute to their eventual success. With English profanity in particular, as we’ve seen, there’s also a sound pattern (one syllable, with a consonant at the end) that makes words sound like swearwords. So a word with this particular phonological property is more likely to succeed, all things being equal, than one that doesn’t.
Another intrinsic aspect that appears important is how transparent (versus opaque) the word is. There’s a sweet spot for potentially profane innovations. A word is transparent if you can easily figure out what it means from how it sounds; conversely, opaque words are inscrutable. Opaque words are hard to remember and as a consequence may be less likely to spread. So if you started calling the perineum the baint, which is completely opaque, you probably wouldn’t find adolescents using the word in five years. If you called it something totally transparent, like interorgan region, it wouldn’t likely make much of a splash. But there’s a middle ground between transparency and opacity. Words can be “motivated.” For example, taint has been quite successful. And that might be due to the fact that it lives in the Goldilocks region of motivatedness. It’s not obvious to an outside observer why the perineum would be called the taint, even if taint does have another negative meaning (a stain or black mark). But if you’re an insider who knows the perhaps apocryphal origin story,c then it takes on a whole new life. It’s motivated.
Ostensibly, the taint is so named because “Taint your ass, taint your balls.” I can’t verify this account—it’s equally plausible that this is a post hoc folk etymology and that the
original motivation for the word really comes from the other meaning of taint (“uncleanness”). Either way, Goldilocks should be happy.
A word that’s totally opaque faces a long, uphill climb to acceptance. At the same time, a word that’s completely transparent may fail to bestow cachet on people who know it. But taint is right in the middle of these two extremes. The same is true of MILF or butterface and plausibly, at their origins, bitch, cock, fuck, and others. Motivated words may be more likely to catch on than transparent ones because they require a little additional knowledge to interpret. They’re like a secret code that only insiders have the key to cracking. Opaque words are equally novel to everyone, while motivated words are, in a way, transparent to insiders only.
And that leads us to the second reason word changes may spread. Often changes in language catch on precisely because of the social functions they serve—in the case of profanity, allowing people to feel and identify themselves as part of specific social in-groups. Said another way, if a teenager’s parents could figure out right away what the child meant by hummerbird, it would take the fun out of it. So she might not use it. In other words, just as life forms thrive when they find a suitable environmental niche to exploit, so words thrive in fertile linguistic niches.
For any new word or new way of using an old word, we can ask, what niche does this innovation satisfy? Let’s look at an example of a successful innovation, the tear someone a new one pattern from the last chapter. This relatively new invention describes the very frequent and frequently talked about situation in which one person verbally or physically attacks another. Interpersonal conflict is one of our favorite things to talk about. So there’s demand for language to describe it. Now, it’s true that there are other ways to talk about conflict. For instance, focusing just on verbal conflict, you can chew someone out, bite someone’s head off, give someone an earful, and so on. But tear someone a new one expresses this meaning in a courser, more vulgar way. Other successful recent innovations like MILF and THOT also claim semantic territory that was previously underpopulated.
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