by Bill Bryson
Cold war, the term that justified these gargantuan outlays, has often been attributed to the newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. In fact, the expression was first used by the statesman Bernard Baruch at a speech in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947, though credit for its coinage belongs to his speech-writer, Herbert Bayard Swope.32 Out of the cold war came two other durable expressions – iron curtain and the domino theory. The domino theory – the idea that if one nation fell to Communism others would topple in its wake – was first used by the newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop in 1954, though it didn’t become popular until the Vietnam War a decade later. Iron curtain is commonly attributed to Winston Churchill in an address he made in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, but in fact the term had been in existence in the sense of an imaginary barrier since 1819, and had been used in political contexts since the 1920s.
The cold war, or more specifically the Cuban missile crisis, also brought to prominence hawk and dove, though again both had been around for some time. Dove had been the symbol of peace for centuries, and hawk, in the context of military belligerence, had been coined by Thomas Jefferson in 1798 in the expression War Hawk. What was new was the conjoining of the terms to indicate a person’s militaristic leanings.
On the field of battle, the Korean War pitched in with a number of terms, among them demilitarized zone and its abbreviated form, DMZ (originally signifying the disputed area along the 38th parallel dividing Korea into North and South), brainwash (a literal translation of the Mandarin hsi nao), chopper for a helicopter, honcho (from Japanese hancho, ‘squad leader’) and hooch (from Japanese uchi, ‘house’), which was at first used to describe the place where a soldier kept his mistress.
Several of these words were resurrected for the war in Vietnam a decade later, though that conflict also spawned many terms of its own, among them free-fire zone, clicks for kilometres, grunt for a soldier (first used dismissively by Marines, but taken on with affection by infantrymen), search-and-destroy mission, to buy the farm, meaning to die in combat, to frag (to kill a fellow soldier, usually an officer, with a hand grenade or fragmentation device; hence the term) and a broad variety of telling expressions for the Vietnamese: slope, gook, dink, zip, slant, slant-eye and Charlie, though many of these – like slant-eye and gook – were older terms recently revived. Charlie as an appellation for Vietcong arose because VC in radio code was Victor Charlie.
Among the more sinister terms to catch the world’s attention during the war in Vietnam were Agent Blue, Agent Orange, Agent Purple and Agent White (for types of defoliants – another new word – used to clear fields, destroy crops and generally demoralize and destabilize inhabitants of hostile territory), and napalm, from naphthene palmitate, which had much the same intent and effect. Though it first became widely known during the Vietnam War, napalm was in fact invented during World War II.
The military affection for clumsy acronyms found renewed inspiration in Vietnam with such concoctions as FREARF (for Forward Rearm and Refuel Point), SLAR (Side-Looking Airborne Radar), FLAR (Forward-Looking Airborne Radar) and ARVN (pronounced ‘arvin’) for the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. One of the more arresting, if least reported, of the Vietnam era acronyms was TESTICLES, a mnemonic for the qualities looked for in members of the Second Ranger Battalion, namely teamwork, enthusiasm, stamina, tenacity, initiative, courage, loyalty, excellence and a sense of humour.
But where the war in Vietnam really achieved semantic distinction was in the creation of a vast heap of euphemisms, oxymorons and other verbal manipulations designed to create an impression of benignity and order, so that we got pacification for eradication, strategic withdrawal for retreat, sanitizing operation for wholesale clearance, accidental delivery of armaments for bombing the wrong target, to terminate with extreme prejudice for a political assassination, and many, many others.
The Gulf War, despite its merciful brevity, was also linguistically productive. Among the new formations it inspired were clean bombing (i.e., with pinpoint precision), guest for a prisoner of war, headquarters puke for a junior officer whose responsibilities keep him safely away from the front, Nintendo effect (that is, to become desensitized to destruction through watching films of bombing raids that resemble video games of destruction), Airwing Alpo for inflight rations on fighter aircraft, the smart bomb, and mother of all, signifying ultimate, as in ‘mother of all tanks’, ‘mother of all wars’, etc.33
Finally, one of the most recent of military neologisms is also one of the most poignant: ethnic cleansing, signifying the removal or eradication of a portion of the indigenous population of an area. Apparently coined by Russian observers, it is a product of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and was first reported in English in the 9 July 1991 issue of The Times.
18
Sex and Other Distractions
In 1951 the proprietor of the Hi Hat Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee, purchased a life-size photograph of a naked young woman lying on a fluffy rug, and proudly hung it behind his bar. Even by the relatively chaste standards of the day it was not a terribly revealing picture – only her posterior was exposed to view – and probably nothing more would have come of it except that one day an electrician arrived to do some work and recognized the woman in the photograph as his wife, which surprised him because she had never mentioned that she was doing nude modelling for a local photographer.
The electrician took the Hi Hat to court, and for a short while the matter became first a local and then a national sensation. With the eyes of America on him, Judge Andrew Doyle ruled that as art the photograph was perfectly acceptable, but that as a bar-room decoration it was ‘unquestionably obscene’. He – suggested apparently seriously – that one of the city’s art galleries might like to take it over. In other words, if displayed in a darkened bar where it would be seen by no one but grown-up drinkers, the picture was held to be salacious and corrupting. But if placed in a public forum where anyone of any age could view it, it could be regarded as a local treasure.1 And no one anywhere appears to have thought this odd.
I bring this up here to make the point that America’s attitudes towards questions of public and private morality have long been a trifle confused. For this, as for so much else, we can thank the Puritans. As early as 1607, puritanical had come to mean stern, rigid, narrowly moral, and the view has been steadily reinforced ever since by history texts and literary works like Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and Longfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish.
The Puritan age was, to be sure, one in which even the smallest transgressions – or even sometimes no transgressions at all – could be met with the severest of penalties. Adultery, illegitimacy and masturbation were all at times capital offences in New England. Almost any odd occurrence darkened Puritan suspicions and fired their zeal for swift retribution. In 1651, when the wife of a Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, complained that her husband sometimes threw ‘pease about the Howse and made me pick them up’, and occasionally in his sleep made ‘a gablings Noyse’,2 the town fathers saw at once that this was witchcraft and hanged him from the nearest gibbet.
Equally unlucky was George Spencer of New Haven, Connecticut. When a one-eyed pig was born in the town, the magistrates cast around for an explanation and lighted on the hapless Spencer, who also had but one eye. Questioned as to the possibility of bestiality, the frightened Spencer confessed, but then recanted. Under Connecticut law to convict Spencer of bestiality required the testimony of two witnesses. So keen were the magistrates to hang him that they admitted the pig as one witness and his retracted confession as another.3
But in many other ways colonial New England was not as simon pure (the expression comes from a play of 1718 by Susanna Cenlivre called A Bold Stroke for a Wife, and involving a character named Simon Pure) as we might think. Just half a century after the Mayflower Pilgrims landed on Massachusetts’s shores, Boston was ‘filled with prostitutes’, and other colonial centres were equally well equipped with opportunities for sexual licence. Desp
ite its modest size, Williamsburg, capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1779, contained three brothels (though curiously none of these have been incorporated into the sanitized replica community so popular with visitors today).4
Sex among the Puritans was considered as natural as eating, and was discussed about as casually, to the extent that ‘the writings of the Puritans required heavy editing before they were thought fit to print even in the mid-twentieth century’.5 Premarital intercourse was not just tolerated but effectively encouraged. Couples who intended to marry could take out something called a Pre-Contract – in effect, a licence to have sex. It was the Puritans, too, who refined the curious custom of bundling, or tarrying as it was just as often called, in which a courting pair were invited to climb into bed together. Though the practice appears to have originated in Wales, it was sufficiently little known in Britain to have become a source of perennial wonder for British visitors to New England up to the time of the American Revolution and somewhat beyond. As one seventeenth century observer explained it:
When a man is enamoured of a young woman, and wishes to marry her, he proposes the affair to her parents; if they have no objection they allow him to tarry the night with her, in order to make his court to her. After the young ones have sat up as long as they think proper, they get into bed together, also without pulling off their undergarments in order to prevent scandal. If the parties agree, it is all very well; the banns are published and they are married without delay. If not they part, and possibly never see each other again; unless, which is an accident that seldom happens, the forsaken fair proves pregnant, and then the man is obliged to marry her.
In fact, more underclothes were yanked off than the chronicler dared to consider, and pregnancy was far more than ‘an accident that seldom happens’. Up to a third of bundling couples found themselves presented with a permanent souvenir of the occasion. Nor did it necessarily mark the advent of a serious phase of a relationship. By 1782, bundling was so casually regarded, according to one account, that it was ‘but a courtesy’ for a visitor to ask the young lady of the house if she cared to retire with him.
Although never expressly countenanced, fornication was so common in Puritan New England that at least one parish had forms printed up in which the guilty parties could confess by filling in their names and paying a small fine. By the 1770s about half of all New England women were pregnant at marriage.7 In Appalachia and other back-country regions, according to one calculation, 94 per cent of brides were pregnant when they went to the altar.8
Not until the closing quarter of the eighteenth century did official attitudes to sex begin to take on an actively repressive tinge with the appearance of the first blue laws. The term originated in Connecticut in 1781 because, it is often said, the state’s laws concerning personal morality were printed on blue paper,9 though other sources say that it was the church laws that were given the blue treatment.10 Whichever was the case, no one knows why blue was thought an apt colour for such laws. More pertinently, I can find no evidence of anyone’s ever having seen a law printed on blue paper. It may simply be our curious tendency to equate blueness with extreme moral rectitude, as in the expressions blue nose and blue stocking. Blue nose is said to have begun as a jocular nineteenth-century New England term for the fishermen of Nova Scotia, whose lives on the frigid waters of the north Atlantic left them with permanently discoloured hooters. More prosaically, it may simply refer to a type of potato associated with that maritime province. In either case, how the term then came to be attached to a person of puritanical bent is anyone’s guess. (Very possibly the two are not connected.)
Blue stocking, for a woman of pedantry and attendant lofty mien, is more easily explained. It comes from the Blue Stocking Society, a name derisively applied to a group of intellectuals who began meeting at Montagu House in London in about 1750. Although the congregation was mostly female, the inspiration for the pejorative name appears to have been a male member, one Benjamin Stillingfleet, who wore blue worsted stockings instead of the customary black silk hose, a mode of dress so novel as to be considered both comical and slightly risqué. And speaking of risqué, why off-colour jokes are called blue is another mystery, but it may be connected to the eighteenth-century slang use of blue meaning to blush.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century users of English, Puritan and non-Puritan alike, had none of the problems with expressive terms like belly, fart and give titty (for to suckle) that would so trouble their Victorian descendants. Even the King James Bible contained such subsequently indecorous terms as piss, dung and bowels.11 But as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, people suddenly became acutely – and eventually almost hysterically – sensitive about terms related to sex and the body. No one knows exactly when or why this morbid delicacy erupted. Like most fashions, it just happened. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler, an Edinburgh physician, offered the world an expurgated version of Shakespeare’s works suitable for the whole family, and in so doing gave the world the verb to bowdlerize. Bowdler’s emendations were nothing if not thorough. Even the most glancing reminder of the human procreative capacity – King Lear’s ‘every inch a king’, for example – was ruthlessly struck out. His sanitized Shakespeare was such a success that he immediately embarked on a similar treatment of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which had been completed only a quarter of a century before but already needed careful scrubbing. But Bowdler’s fastidious editing didn’t inaugurate the change of mood. It merely reflected it.
Even before Bowdler began scratching away at the classics people were carefully avoiding emotive terms like legs, blouse and thigh. By the time Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare appeared, belly buttons had become tummy buttons, breast had become bosom, and underwear had become nether garments or small clothes (and later unmentionables).
Though the practice began in Britain, it found its full flowering in America, where soon the list of proscribed words extended to the hundreds. Any word with an unseemly syllable in it like ‘cock’ or ‘tit’ became absolutely unutterable, so that words like titter, titbit, cockerel and cockatoo – all still unobjectionable in Britain – either disappeared from the American vocabulary or were altered to a more sanitised form like tidbit, rooster or roach. There is at least one recorded instance of coxswain being changed to roosterswain. Even bulls became male cows. Before the century was half over, the list of unspeakable words in the United States had been extended to almost any anatomical feature or article of apparel associated with any part of the human form outside the head, hands and ankles. Stockings, for instance, was deemed ‘extremely indelicate’ by Bartlett in 1850; he suggested long socks or hose as more comely alternatives. Even toes became humiliating possessions, never to be mentioned in polite company. One simply spoke of the feet. After a time feet too became un-endurably shameful, so that people didn’t mention anything below the ankles at all. It is a wonder that discourse didn’t cease altogether.
Anxiety stalked every realm of life. It may be apocryphal that some families dressed their piano legs in little skirts to avoid moral distress to visitors, but it is certainly true that chamber-pots came with a crocheted cover to serve as a baffle so that anyone passing without would not hear the unseemly tinkle of the person passing within.12 It wasn’t just the noise that was baffled. Visitors from abroad found the neurotic lengths to which euphemism were carried deeply mystifying. It was not enough in America merely to avoid mentioning an object. A word had to be found that would not even hint at its actual function. Unable to bring themselves to say chamber-pot or even commode, Americans began to refer to the vessel as a looking glass, with obvious scope for confusion, not to say frustration, for anyone who sought the former and was given the latter.
Foreign visitors almost unfailingly ran aground in the shallow waters of American sensibilities. Frances Trollope noted the case of a German who stopped a roomful of conversation, and found himself being brusquely hustled from the house, for innocently pronouncing the word corset in
mixed company. Elsewhere she discussed how a rakish young man tried to tease from a seamstress the name of the article of attire she was working on. Blushing hotly, the young lady announced that it was a frock, but when the young man pointed out that there wasn’t nearly enough material for a frock she asserted it was an apron. Pressed further, she claimed it was a pillowcase. Eventually, she fled the room in shame and tears, unable to name the object. It was in fact a blouse, but to have uttered the word to a man would have been ‘a symptom of absolute depravity’.
For women in particular, this rhetorical fastidiousness was not just absurd but dangerous. For much of the nineteenth century, ankles denoted the whole of a woman’s body below the waist, while stomach did similar service for everything between the waist and head. It thus became impossible to inform a doctor of almost any serious medical complaint. Page Smith notes a typical case in which a young woman with a growth on her breast could only describe it to her physician as a pain in her stomach.13
Physical examinations were almost unknown. Gynaecological investigations in particular were made only as a last resort, and then usually in a darkened room under a sheet. One doctor in Philadelphia boasted that ‘women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored’.14 Death, in other words, was to be preferred to immodesty. Given the depths of medical ignorance, it was probably just as well that the medical men kept their hands to themselves. Such was the lack of knowledge in regard to female physiology that until the closing years of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the touch of a menstruating woman could turn a ham rancid. (The British Medical Journal ran a lively correspondence on the matter in 1878.)15 Nor was it just male doctors who were profoundly innocent. As late as 1901, in a book entitled What a Young Wife Ought to Know, Dr Emma Drake was informing her readers that during pregnancy they might experience uncomfortable feelings of arousal. This, she explained frankly, was ‘due to some unnatural condition and should be considered a disease’.16
