The World’s Worst Swear Words: Chapter 3
Swearing based on sexual activity
How a culture swears reveals a lot about its taboos. The Romans, despite running a vast multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, cursed primarily based on sex and the sexual organs: cunnus (cunt), futuo (fuck), mentula (cock), verpa (erect or circumcised cock), landica (clitoris), culus (arse), pedico (bugger), caco (shit), fello (fellate) and irrumo (variously translated as “face-fuck” or “mouth-rape”, believe it or not).
Turkish, the language of the former Ottoman Empire, uses an extensive smorgasbord of sexual curses targeting effeminacy and passivity in men. Verbal emasculation by accusing one another as the top or ibne meaning “gay” or “faggot/queer” and götveren “ass giver” is extremely rude and a man might threaten his enemy by saying “sana atlayayım mı?” (shall I mount you?). Alternatively, Turkish swearing also targets promiscuity in women. While English has — prostitute / hooker /slut / whore, Turkish slurs against sexually-liberated women tend to be more varied and creative — hayat kadını, orospu, fahişe, kaltak karı, kahpe, şırfıntı, kaldırın süpürgesi, aşk meleği and sürtük — all attacking virtue, virginity and fidelity.
Mandarin Chinese insults are either sexual or based on disrespecting family and ancestral lineage.
In contrast, modern English profanity is a mix of sex, scatology and ethnic slurs: for example, “cunt”, “fuck”, “cock”, “arse/ass”, “shit”, “piss”, “nigger” and “paki” (more common in the UK).
Arse
Sex sells. Even as far back as the late 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer was keenly aware of this, liberally sprinkling naughty bits throughout his works. Which is why we have, handed down to us in all its bawdy glory — The Miller’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales.
The titular Miller recounts the story of a beautiful young woman — Alisoun, the wife of a much older carpenter, and the two young men lustfully besotted with her. To make a long story short, one of the men — who prior to the main event in the story, had “caught hire by the queynte” (caught her by the “quaint” — a euphemism for “cunt”) — manages to trick her husband the Miller into sleeping for the night in a large tub suspended from the ceiling by ropes (let’s suspend our imaginations as well and just go along with it), before quickly heading back with Alisoun to her bedroom for a naughty tryst. Meanwhile, along comes the other randy young man, calling out to Alisoun from outside her house. Annoyed, she gets up from her bed completely naked and strides towards her window, promising him a kiss, but turns around and offers him her buttocks instead. The lusty fellow then happily kiste hir naked ers (kissed her naked arse) in the darkness. Reaching out to caress the back of her “head” his hands instead felte a thyng al rough and longe yherd (felt a thing all rough and long-haired). He realises to his disgust that Alisoun was playing a prank on him and has tricked him into kissing her arse (the rough and long-haired thing he felt was obviously her vulva and pubic hair)! Humiliated, the angry fellow leaves and plots revenge on Alisoun and her lover but this being The Canterbury Tales of course, everything leads to hilarious disaster in the end!
The use of the words ers and queynte (see CUNT) is interesting. It would seem that in the late 14th Century the word arse (or ers, as Chaucer spelled it at the time) was, although obviously used for comedic effect, not as vulgar as it is today. On the other hand, the word “cunt” had already begun to morph into a taboo word by that time and was in The Miller’s Tale at least, euphemistically disguised by Chaucer with queynte — a noun, literally meaning “a clever or curious device or ornament” or an “elegant, pleasing thing”. Feel free to use your imagination as to how the metaphoric connection could have possibly come about.
Ers/Arse has a long pedigree in the English language. Deriving from the Proto-Germanic *arsaz, simply meaning the “tail” or “rump” end of a animal. which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *hersos meaning “rump” or “back end” — it has cousins in many of the languages of Europe. Compare German Arsch and Dutch aars. Further afield, we have the ancient Greek ὄρρος (orros) meaning “tail, rump, base of the spine,” and the Armenian ոռ (or) meaning “buttock”.
Related terms include “arsehole” (ARSE + HOLE) meaning a stupid or annoying person, “arsefuck(er)” from ARSE + FUCK (see FUCK) referring to anal intercourse, to arse around (to behave in a silly fashion, to waste time unnecessarily) and “badarse” (the British versions of the very American “badass” — “arse” has been replaced by “ass”) — not necessarily vulgar, but coarse slang for a tough or courageous person. To go “arse over tip” is old-fashioned but still used in the UK to mean to tumble or fall upside down. “Half-arsed” means something done incompetently, thus a “half-arsed attempt” is an attempt with little care or effort.
Some amusing archaic phrases with “arse” include: “To hang the arse” — “to be reluctant or tardy” dating from 1630s. “He would lend his arse and shite through his ribs” was an early 19th Century way to insult someone who lends money inconsiderately. “He would lose his arse if it was loose” was said of a careless person. And finally, during the Middle Ages someone’s “arse-winning” was his or her money obtained through prostitution.
Ass
I once knew a young mother who had sworn to never utter a single swear word in the presence of her one-year-old daughter until she reached eighteen. Her recourse in light of this linguistic jihad? To replace, among other things, “Fuck” with “Fudge”. Since then, “Fudging hell!” and “What the fudge!” often rang through the house for example, whenever her highly-industrious Persian cat Puffy (proudly channelling its wild predator ancestors from a million years past) dragged dead mice, sparrows and the odd gecko into the house.
Yet, replacing an offensive word with a harmless-sounding one — what’s known as a minced oath — has probably been around since our ancestors invented language. The French punaise (bedbug) is often uttered by genteel folk to replace putain (fuck), Spanish speakers often say me cago en diez (I shit on ten) but actually mean me cago en Dios (I shit on God) and Dutch speakers say voorbillen (front-butt) instead of vulva or kut (cunt).
The now-universal American use of “ass” (originally from Latin asinus meaning “donkey”) to replace “arse” is so common that American automatically assume anyone who says “arse” in place of “ass” must be British or Australian. Yet “arse” was once common in the United States right up to the nineteenth Century. The leading theory is that ass gradually took over arse in the United States as a polite replacement for “arse”. In the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, “ass” still means “donkey”.
According to another theory, 19th century American English as spoken along the East Coast was strongly non-rhotic (where the letter R is dropped at the ends of syllables just and it is in modern Southern British English) so “arse” when pronounced in this way sounded similar to “ass”.
An “asshole” is an irritating or contemptible person stemming originally from an expression of contempt (“the arsehole of the world” to describe a terrible place to live) dating from the 1800s.
Those with a sense of humour will note that Shakespeare might have been in on the cheeky arse-ass word play way back in 1594 when he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After all Nick Bottom gets transformed into an ass!
Balls
Our minds are constantly picking out familiar patterns from our environments. If we can make out a man, a woman or a rabbit in the moon on a clear night (for some reason, the precise thing one sees differs from culture to culture!) it is pretty obvious why ancient Anglo — Saxon men had taken note of the similarities between the shape of spherical objects with the shape of their own testicles. Hence the use of ball from Old English beall or Old Norse bollr (given the history of the United Kingdom, both origins are equally plausible) from proto-Germanic *balluz, in turn originating from the Proto-Indo-European *bhel (”to blow”, “to inflate”) and its corresponding nouns *bholn (”bubble”). Interestingly, the French boule (from Latin bulla — also derived from the Proto-Indo-European *bhel) is nowadays used to refer to a person’s buttocks. — Elle a un bon boule “She has a nice ass”.
“Balls” in modern English often turns up in expressions dealing with everything from bravado and machismo to utter nonsense.
A sentence like: “He must have a lot of balls to talk to his boss that way.” Or “He’s the guy with the big balls in that group!” emphasises the bravery, courage or outright brazenness of the person being spoken about. A sweeping statement like “Balls is all that it takes to succeed” simply means that daring and bravery are all that’s required to be successful.
On the other extreme we have “That’s a load of balls.” Meaning “that’s all nonsense”. Finally, “don’t make a balls of it” in the UK and Ireland usually means “don’t botch it up!” Or as the say across the pond — “don’t screw it up!”.
For our amusement, it might be interesting to know that English-speakers traditionally had rather charming euphemisms to refer to the testicles. Throughout the centuries the various other names Englishmen used to refer to their delicates included whirlygigs, bawbles, nutmegs, tallywags, tarrywags, thingumbobs and twiddle-diddles.
“She kicked her assailant in the twiddle-diddles” just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, right?
Bellend
From the words: “bell” and “end”. It is common in the United Kingdom (but has so far not yet spread to North America and beyond) and refers to the tip of the penis or glans, most probably due to the physical resemblance of the glans to a bell. Like other penis-related insults in the English, bellend (or bell-end), can be directed to a person as an insult, implying stupidity or idiocy.
When a pervert flasher whispers “Do you want to see my bellend?”, it is pretty obvious what he means but when a woman tells her date, “You’re dancing like a bellend, are you drunk?” she’s implying that he’s behaving like an idiot.
Bollocks
“Bollocks”, or rather, its older form ballocks is ancient enough to merit an appearance in, of all places, the Holy Bible. One of the earliest references is Wycliffe’s Bible (1382), Leviticus xxii, 24: “Al beeste, that … kitt and taken awey the ballokes is, ye shulen not offre to the Lord …” (“…any beast that is cut and taken away the bollocks, you shall not offer to the Lord, meaning castrated animals are not suitable as sacrifices”). It was originally a very innocent word referring to the testicles, innocent enough, in fact, to make frequent appearances in medieval English translations of the bible.
Like “balls” (see BALLS), it evolved from Germanic *balluz or *ball-, in turn deriving from the Proto-Indo-European base *bhel-, “to inflate” or “to swell”. This base also forms the root of many other words in other Indo-European languages, including Late Latin phallus (borrowed from Greek) and Irish Gaelic ball meaning “organ”, “member”, “part”, “article” and “element”.
From the 17th to the 19th century, “bollocks” or “ballocks” was used as a slang term for a clergyman (for some reason, many European cultures have rather rude things to say about priests and other church officials). “Bollocks” took on the meaning of “nonsense” or “bullshit” because clergymen were notorious for talking nonsense during their sermons. The following entry is from Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose (1811) BALLOCKS. The testicles of a man or beast; also a vulgar nick name for a parson. “His brains are in his ballocks” — a cant saying to designate a fool.
The current use of “talking bollocks” to mean “talking nonsense” (less common in North America than in the United Kingdom), together with the corresponding noun form “bollockspeak” has a long pedigree indeed!
A “bollocks” in the UK is a failure, similar to a screw-up and a cock-up. In a sentence like, “We lost the contract because Johnson bollocksed it up again”, “to bollocks it up” means to botch up or make a complete mess out of something. To “receive a bollocking” usually denotes receiving a scolding for something which one has not done, or has done wrong, for instance: “I didn’t do my homework and got a right bollocking off Mr Smith”, or “Oh dear, the surgeon got a bollocking for botching up Effie’s face lift”. A kick in the bollocks is a disappointment, Boy George talked about his mother working her bollocks off (meaning to work excessively hard) and “bollock naked” is stark naked. Finally, “I’m bollocksed!” could also mean “I’m exhausted” or hungover.
Bugger
Few know that the word “bugger” has religious origins. Bugger was passed down to us from the Latin Bulgarus via Old French bougre and used to refer to a sect of Christian heretics originating in Bulgaria in the 11th century, also known as the Bogomils. These heretics reportedly engaged in unorthodox sexual practices including anal intercourse, hence the original meaning of “to bugger” — “to sodomise”.
“Bugger”, despite its heretical history is now an all-purposive expletive in the United Kingdom. In many English speaking regions (Australia and New Zealand, in particular) it can be used as a mild curse to an offensive person while in the US, particularly in the Midwest and South, it is an inoffensive slang noun meaning “small critter.”
Butt
“Butt” for “buttocks” is considered less vulgar than “arse/ass”, but still not as polite as saying “bottom” or “rear end”.
Its origins are Germanic, related to Middle Dutch and Dutch bot, Low German butt “blunt, dull,” Old Norse bauta, all from Proto-Germanic *buttan, from Proto-Indo-European root *bhau- “to strike”. It’s quite amusing to know that “butt” might originally have meant “something to strike at”. Its meaning could also have probably been mixed with Old French bot “extremity, end,” which also is a borrowing from Germanic. The idea of striking is also the source of the verb “to butt” as in “they butted heads all day”.
“Butt” meaning “target of a joke” or “object of ridicule” derives from an earlier sense — “target for shooting practice, turf-covered mound against which an archery target was set”. The Old French but “aim, goal, end, target of an arrow” ultimately from Germanic, was the source of this loanword. Modern French has rather elegantly split the word into separate semantic domains using gender, with the masculine but meaning “aim”, “goal” or “result one wants to achieve” while the feminine butte has taken on the sense of “small hill”, “mound”, “hillock”, “knoll” or “heap”.
In Medieval times, butt also meant “flatfish”, descending again from Proto-Germanic *butt-, and from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhau- “to strike.” Thus, a butt-woman during the Middle Ages was a fish-wife.
Chode
“Chode” jumped into mainstream linguistic consciousness in 1993 thanks to Beavis and Butt-Head, particularly when Beavis called Butt-Head a “choadsmoker”, i.e., a “cocksucker”. The show relished in other uses of “chode”, leaving many fans puzzled about what the term actually meant. Theories regarding the precise meaning of that word ranged from perineum (the area between the anus and genitalia), slangily known as the taint, gooch, or grundle, to the whole shaft of the penis itself. And, like a lot of other slang words for taboo body parts (“dick”, “ass”, “cunt”), “chode” quickly evolved to become an insult meaning “idiot” in the 1990s, rather like the American “dickhead”.
“Chode” is actually a relic from the British Raj, when the Hindi verb chodna चोदना (”to fuck”) and its various inflected forms became well-known to British officers stationed in India.
Cock
Referring to a man’s penis, the word “cock”, or rather its older version, pillicock first appears in the hilarious and often melancholic Kildare Poems, an Anglo-Irish book written around the middle of the 14th Century either in Kildare in Eastern Ireland or in Waterford in the Southeast.
Y ne mai more of loue done
mi pilkoc pisseþ on mi schone
vch schenlon me bischrew
Mine hed is hore & al for-fare
i hewid as a grei mare
Mi bodi wexit lewe
When i bi-hold on mi schennen
m’in dimmiþ al for dwynnen
Mi frendis waxiþ fewe
I may no longer make love,
my pillicock (penis) pisses on my shoe,
every rascal beshrews me!
My head is grey and all misshapen,
I am coloured like a grey mare,
I have begun to stoop.
When I look at my shins
my eyes grow dim,
because they are so diminished.
My friends become fewer…
The unhappy writer is complaining about the less-than-pleasant aspects of aging including how mi pilkoc pisseþ on mi schone (my pillicock pisses on my shoes!). The use of the word cock in one form or another as a vulgar word for “penis” has thus been with us since the 14th century.
If we dissect the word pillicock (perhaps “dissect’ might be too strong a word in this context!) we can clearly see that it contains two parts: the normal English word for “a male chicken” or “cock” with the addition of the somewhat mysterious “pilli-” part, most likely borrowed from Old Norse. A cock was originally just a male chicken and comes down to us from Proto-Germanic *kukkaz, perhaps mimicking a cock’s crow. Its sister-words can be found all over in the various Germanic languages and was even borrowed into Old French as coc, eventually becoming the coq in the fancy coq au vin that stares out at us from French menus.
Cunt
Scouring through medieval English names can be extremely amusing for the modern researcher. A chap in 14th century England was named Robert Clevecunt (“cleave cunt”). Another person (a woman, in fact!) was named Bele Wydecunthe (“wide cunt”). There are records from the 11th to the 14th centuries of people surnamed Cuntles, Clawecuncte (“claw-cunt”) and Fillecunt (“fill-cunt”). Shocking to the modern reader, the word “cunt”, referring to a woman’s private parts was in fact far more commonly accepted in ancient times than it is now. The first recorded appearance of the word is in the form of the street name, Gropecuntlane, in the towns of Oxford and Bristol.
A deed from 1240, written in Latin and recently auctioned at Dominic Winter Auctioneers contains the phrase “Gropecuntelana apud Bristollum” (Gropecunt Lane at Bristol) as the location of the property. In later centuries Gropecunt Lane would be renamed Hallier’s Lane and is nowadays still extant, bearing the name Nelson Street.
The question is, why on Earth would a lane be named “Gropecunt”? We have to remember that medieval English streets were often named based on function. Church Street was where the church was, Fish Street was for the fishmongers, Bread or Baker Street was where one went to buy bread. Likewise, for Silver Street or Gold Street or Blacksmith Road. Swinegate was the site where pigs were brought to be slaughtered and sold. Get the idea? “Grope Cunt Lane” was thus the place set aside for organised prostitution. As lanes bearing variations of the name Gropecunt were common throughout England before changing sensibilities resulted in their replacement by more innocuous ones (Gropecunt Lane in Oxford, for example, is now Magpie Lane) we can assume that prostitution was widely accepted in earlier centuries. Indeed, Gropecunt Lanes were often situated in the busies parts of town and London even had several of them!
Amusingly, in 1393 the authorities in London ordered all prostitutes to move to Cokkes Lane (now known as — most ironically — Cock Lane).
Over the course of the Middle English period (1150–1500) “cunt” became increasingly taboo. In the late 15th century, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath boasts, “And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me, / I hadde the beste quoniam myghte be (and truly, as my husbands told me, I had the best quoniam (a euphemism for cunt) as might be” (she had had husbands of various ages and boasted that they found her cunt irresistible). Cunt does not appear in the works of Shakespeare, for example, nor in the works of other great writers and dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Other euphemisms appearing throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance include queynte (also making an appearance in The Canterbury Tales) and quim — in the movie The Avengers, Loki refers to Black Widow as a “mewling quim”! Perhaps the 21st century writers were unaware that “mewling quim” is an archaic euphemism for “whimpering cunt”!
By the late 18th century, “cunt” had become a crass, vulgar word. Barmaids and other women of low status, upon being sexually propositioned by off-duty soldiers were said to yell, “I will not make a lobster kettle of my cunt!” This colourful expression was in reference to the red uniforms worn by British soldiers of the period (resembling the colour of boiled lobster shells) and a promiscuous woman sleeping with many soldiers coming into port was said to have made a lobster kettle of her cunt. Similarly, a churchman who picks up arms and becomes a soldier is said “to boil his lobster” since a lobster’s shell changes from bluish black to red after boiling.
Into the 19th century and early 20th Centuries, “cunt” would finally gain its current forbidden status, disappearing from dictionaries until the publication of the Penguin English Dictionary in 1965 in the United Kingdom and the Third Edition of Webster (1961) in the United States. It was also during this period that it also became an insult aimed at contemptible, despicable and idiotic people.
Feminists would note that “cunt” is, as an expletive and slur, much more powerful than “cock”. “You cunt!” is far, far more insulting and degrading to an English-speaker than “You cock!”.
Etymologically of rather mysterious origins, cunt shares a common origin with Old Norse kunta and Middle Dutch kunte, and it might have been influenced by the Latin cuneus, “wedge” which in turn gave rise to French con and Italian conno.