Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  We can see all this by looking at the Big Ten, beginning with the ones most similar to their English equivalents, and ending up with some strange and rather wonderful words.

  cunnus = a womans wyket*

  —Thomas Elyot, Dictionary, 1538

  The Greeks and Romans gave us models for our literature—the epic, the satire, the epigram, the ode—that we have used for hundreds of years. They gave us democracy. They gave us blueprints for buildings in which to house our democracy. They gave us the example of an empire that brought civilization to millions of people for hundreds of years. Historically, people have often felt that the Greeks were a bit strange—either too effeminate, too interested in boys, like the Athenians, or, like the Spartans, too militaristic, glorifying nothing but death in war and abandoning babies who looked weak to die of exposure. The Romans, on the other hand, strove for almost Protestant virtues—work hard, live modestly, and don’t indulge yourself to excess. Cunnus is a word that reminds us of this long-standing affinity, or, at any rate, it should.

  Cunnus and cunt mean the same thing, are equally shocking and offensive, and are used in similar ways in Latin and English. While it appears as if they are related etymologically, current thinking among linguists holds that they are not. The Old English cwithe (womb) or cynd (nature, essence), both of which probably relate to the proto-Germanic *kunton, seem more likely candidates for the English word’s origin.* This may be scholarly prejudice, stemming from a wish to see obscene words as Anglo-Saxon—as blunt, earthy words that hark back to the beginnings of our language. Latin usually gives us our proper medical terms for immodest parts of the body—vagina and penis, for example—not our primary obscenities.

  Latin would have had ample time, at least, to bequeath cunnus to us. The Romans invaded Britain in 55 BC, conquered it in AD 43, and ruled it for four hundred years. Usually when Rome took over a province, its native inhabitants quickly realized the benefits of speaking Latin and adopted it within a few generations. If the British were speaking Latin, there would seem to be no reason why that language couldn’t have given us cunt, just as it gave con to French, coño to Spanish, and cunnu to Sardinian. Cunt would then be even older than the Anglo-Saxon shit and arse, since the Germanic tribes invaded the island only as the Romans were beginning to leave it.

  But the British were different. The British elite learned Latin, but there is no evidence that ordinary and recalcitrant Britons ever adopted the language on a large scale. In Gaul, Italy, and Spain, people kept speaking Latin even after the Roman Empire collapsed—it had become their native language. When Rome left Britain to fend for itself around AD 400, in contrast, all traces of Latin quickly disappeared, replaced by the languages of the invading Germanic tribes. There is no record of cunt in English until the twelfth or thirteenth century, in Gropecuntelane, the name of a London street in the red-light district. (Some other proper names from these years have also come down to us. We have Gunoka Cuntles [1219] and Bele Wydecunthe [1328], suitable partners for Godwin Clawcuncte [1066] and Robert Clevecunt [1302]. If the Millers’ ancestors ground grain, and the Taylors’ sewed cloth, what did Godwin’s and Robert’s do—and whatever happened to some poor relative of cuntless Gunoka’s?) So, though cunnus and cunt look related, it is more probable that they are not. Whether cunt comes from Latin or from Old English, centuries elapsed between its supposed origin and its first appearance in English. Both words, however, fulfill the same role in their respective languages.

  Cunnus was frequently used as the vox propria—the most direct, most basic word for what it represents—and appears this way in graffiti from the city of Pompeii, which was preserved to an extraordinary degree when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. “Corus licks cunt” (Corus cunnum lingit) and “Jucundus licks the cunt of Rustica” (Iucundus cunum lingit Rusticae), for example, appear on Pompeian apartment buildings. You can find accusations (boasts?) like these on walls, stadium bleachers, and playground equipment across America today. Another graffito is more effusive: “It is much better to fuck a hairy cunt than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and stimulates the cock” (Futuitur cunnus pilossus multo melius quam glaber / eadem continet vaporem et eadem verrit mentulam). You might find something along these lines today too, except that it would probably be extolling the opposite, singing the praises of Brazilian waxes. In these examples, cunt is obscene—it would be shocking to see it scrawled on the walls of a building—but not insulting or derogatory. It is just the most direct word to use when talking about a most immodest subject.

  The Romans also harnessed the word’s power in the service of insult and degradation. Martial, a master of abusive quips, wrote a poem about an old woman who plucks her pubic hair. (The Romans appear to have been of two minds about depilation. On the one hand, “it is better to fuck a hairy cunt,” but on the other, women often plucked their pubic hair or singed it with an oil lamp. The very rich and very decadent might even employ a picatrix, a young female slave whose job was to arrange her mistress’s pubic hair.) Martial asks rhetorically:

  Why do you pluck your aged cunt, Ligeia? Why stir up the ashes in your tomb? Such elegances befit girls; but you cannot even be reckoned an old woman anymore. Believe me, Ligeia, that is a pretty thing for Hector’s wife to do, not his mother. You are mistaken if you think this is a cunt when it no longer has anything to do with a cock. So, Ligeia, for very shame don’t pluck the beard of a dead lion.

  The poet is mocking elderly women who don’t act their age, who still feel sexual urges and act on them. The Romans felt that excessive sexual desire revealed a lack of self-control, even a lack of moral fitness. A woman Ligeia’s age should no longer feel desire, or, if she is still under the sway of passions she should have conquered years ago, she should certainly never act on them. She needs to stop fixing herself up for sex—to stop thinking about it entirely. In using cunt instead of some more delicate euphemism such as female parts (partes muliebres), genitals (genitalia), or even parts of shame (pudenda), Martial stresses the indignity, even the disgustingness, of Ligeia’s practice.

  And, like today, sometimes people two thousand years ago just had to let loose. On the wall of a Pompeian inn, someone has scratched:

  Here I bugger Rufus, dear to … :

  despair, you girls.

  Arrogant cunt, farewell!

  The writer has been turned off the female sex—he’ll sleep with boys or men from now on, to the great sadness of women everywhere. The last line implies that one woman in particular was responsible for his disillusionment, and he takes his leave of her by calling her a cunt. (He might also, of course, be renouncing the Platonic idea of Cunt, but I like to think that some particular woman has driven him into the arms of Rufus and quasi-immortality.) He uses cunnus as an insult, as a fighting word. His reaction—that he will go off and sleep with boys from now on—would be a bit unusual in our culture, but we’ll get to that later.

  caco = to goe to the stoole

  meio = to pisse, to make water or urine

  —Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium, 1587

  Words for excretion are very similar in Latin and in English. Caco (to shit) was the standard obscene term for defecation, and, like shit, was a little less taboo than the sexual obscenities. As an agrarian society, Rome had lots of nouns for different kinds of shit, most of which were vulgar but not obscene—the kind of thing farmers could talk about, but which you wouldn’t mention in front of the emperor. Merda is the most vulgar, the closest Latin equivalent to the noun shit. If you wanted to say “This food is crap!” you would use merda, as Martial does in an epigram. He describes a beautiful tart passed around at a dinner, but after a certain Sabidius blows on it, “no one could touch it—it was shit” (nemo potuit tangere: merda fuit). Stercus was more like our excrement, while fimus referred specifically to cow dung. And laetamen was a specialized word for manure, excrement used as fertilizer.

  Caco was not as bad as words such as cunnus or futuo partly because Roman taboos against defec
ation were not as strong as those against sexual behavior. Cacare was thought to be an act best done in private, but necessity meant that most Romans, even highborn citizens, shat in quasi-public places at least some of the time. The houses of the wealthy might have had private privies, but most apartment blocks had a single latrine for multiple dwellings, with several seats but no walls, curtains, or other dividers between them. (Privy and private share the same root, the Latin privatus. The etymology implies that what happens there is something that should be concealed, like one’s “privy member,” one’s penis.) There were also gigantic public latrines, called foricae, with up to a hundred seats. As the Roman Empire expanded, public latrines were seen as a mark of civilization, bringing sanitation to the masses. They were usually connected to a system of sewers that would carry the waste out of the city, solving the problem (in theory) of people tossing excrement into the streets. Latrines could be very grand, with marble seats, paintings on the walls, and a channel of running water near people’s feet to catch any urine that wasn’t aimed quite properly. The channel also served as a place to rinse out the little sponges on sticks that Romans used instead of toilet paper. Some foricae were a bit more like the public restrooms of today—small, dark, and stinky. Whether grand or less so, a multiseat latrine would not provide much physical privacy, but a modicum of it was created in other ways. For example, it was considered rude to talk too much to people nearby—Martial makes fun of a man who chats people up in the latrines all day, trying to finagle a dinner invitation. The seats themselves were hidden from public view, so that passers-by on the street couldn’t look in through doors or windows. It must have been much like modern urinals, where, I am informed, certain codes of behavior protect men’s modesty—don’t talk, don’t linger, and, most especially, don’t look at another man’s penis—except that in the foricae, men and women might occupy the seats together, and they were defecating.

  Latin had two words for urine, lotium and urina. Urina was a polite, medical term in Latin, and, of course, becomes our equally polite urine. Lotium was originally a metaphor, meaning “liquid for washing.” That’s because the Romans washed their clothes in it. People called fullers (fullones) left jars around the city for people to pee into, and collected them. They poured diluted urine into big vats, dropped the clothes in, and stomped on them to get the dirt out and whiten them. Clothes had to undergo quite a bit of rinsing to get rid of the smell. Anyone with experience in these matters today—parents of young children, pet owners—might wonder, though, whether the great Roman orators didn’t always smell faintly of piss.

  The basic Latin terms for urination, meio and mingo, were not really bad words at all. They were not polite, but they were by no means obscene. The Roman taboo against peeing in public was very weak—men would piss anywhere and everywhere, and even women probably squatted down outside over the fullers’ pots. Even more so than with caco, it is hard to get upset about someone saying piss when you see people doing it all the time.

  In these words we feel our kinship with the Romans. They bring to the fore that we have similar ideas about the best ways to insult people, about what’s satisfying to scrawl on a bathroom wall, about what is and isn’t taboo. (Despite the fact that all-temperature Piss is no longer an option when we shop for laundry detergent.) The Roman model of bad language is like ours, based on taboos about body parts, their excretions, and certain of their acts.

  Other swearwords commonly heard on the streets of ancient Rome, however, reveal bigger differences.

  futuo = to doe the act of generation

  —John Rider, Riders Dictionarie, 1626

  At first glance, futuo is quite similar to its English equivalent, fuck. On the walls of the lupanar—the brothel—in Pompeii, a number of men have recorded “Here I have fucked many girls” (Hic ego puellas multas futui) or “I came here and fucked, then went home” (Hic ego cum veni futui / deinde redei domi). It is not generally used aggressively, though, as it so often is in English. Latin had other words that were more insulting in themselves. It was much stronger abuse to threaten irrumatio, call someone a cinaedus (a faggot or pansy, the passive partner in male-male sex), or accuse someone of cunnum lingere, so perhaps Romans didn’t really need futuo as a term of aggression.

  When fututor is used in Latin, it does not always have the negative connotation it carries in English. It simply means “one who fucks.” Sometimes it is even a word of high praise, as this graffito, written outside the entrance of a Pompeian house, suggests: “Fortunatus, you sweet soul, you total fucker. Written by one who knows” (Fortunate, animula dulcis, perfututor. / Scribit qui novit). Did Fortunatus live there, and was he happy to have his prowess announced to passers-by?

  As the most direct and shocking Latin word for sexual intercourse, however, futuo could, like cunnus, be useful in insults and abuse. Octavian, also known as Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, wrote an epigram that employs it to denigrate his enemies:

  Because Antony fucks Glaphyra, Fulvia decided to punish me by making me fuck her in turn. I should fuck Fulvia? What if Manius begged me to bugger him? Would I do it? I think not, if I had any sense. “Either fuck or fight,” she says. Ah, but my cock is dearer to me than life itself. Let the trumpets sound.

  Augustus wrote this poem to justify his conduct in the Perusine War (41–40 BC), a brief conflict he fought against rebel soldiers led by Fulvia, Mark Antony’s wife. It is a masterly epigram, accomplishing many things at once. It blames Fulvia for starting the war, eliding the rebels’ real complaints—lack of pay and land Augustus had promised them. Instead, he portrays Fulvia as an irrational woman, angry that her husband is sleeping with the prostitute Glaphyra, and seeking to punish him by committing adultery herself. She demands that Augustus offer his services, threatening him, and the rest of Rome, if he refuses. He completes his poetic character assassination by explaining that he can’t oblige Fulvia—she is too repellent, or perhaps diseased, to fuck. To preserve the health and dignity of his mentula (penis), Augustus is forced to fight. Martial, who was certainly a qualified judge of obscene, abusive epigrams, praises how Augustus is not afraid “to speak with Roman plainness” (Romana simplicitate loqui). Politicians today only wish they could “go negative” like this.

  This epigram highlights the connection between sex and violence so often found in obscene words and slang. In Latin, and to a smaller extent in English, the penis is a weapon—telum (spear), hasta (javelin)—and sex is depicted as brutal, in slang such as caedo (to cut), battuo (to beat), or the English banging, drilling, nailing, and so on. The Latin word vagina, in fact, originally referred to the sheath of a sword. This connection between sex and violence was quite literal in the Perusine War. The opposing sides lobbed sling bullets at one another engraved with messages such as “Fulvia’s clitoris” and “Octavian sucks cock.”

  A final difference between futuo and the English f-word is that in Latin, women couldn’t fuck. Futuo referred only to the man’s participation in the act. Women could be fucked, as one likely prostitute wrote on the walls of the Pompeian brothel: Fututa sum hic (I have been fucked here). Though the woman’s part of fututio is referred to in the passive voice, that doesn’t mean that Roman women just lay there. Latin has a unique verb for what women do—criso, which might be translated as “wriggling.” It is also obscene, though not as much so as futuo, and far less common. The Romans preferred to talk and joke about the male role in the action.

  landica = an andiron*

  —Thomas Holyoake, A Large Dictionary in Three Parts, 1676

  Some Roman women were capable of fututio, though not “normal” ones. They were the lesbians, called tribades, who were thought to have a massively overdeveloped clitoris that they used like a penis. (Lesbian comes from the Greek word lesbiazein, “to do it Lesbos style.” In ancient times, however, the inhabitants of Lesbos were known not for girl-on-girl action but for fellatio.) Lesbian as we know it today came into use in English only around the turn of the twenti
eth century. Before then, tribade was still the ordinary word for a woman who “practices unnatural vice,” as the Oxford English Dictionary put it until 1989. Martial attacks one such tribas, Bassa, recounting how he had thought that she was a woman of great moral probity because she was never in the company of men, only other women. To his horror, he discovers that she is indeed unchaste, and in a way he hadn’t expected:

  So I confess I thought you a Lucretia; but Bassa, for shame, you were a fucker [fututor]. You dare to join two cunts and your monstrous organ feigns masculinity.†

  Martial describes what she does by using the active form of futuo—she is a fututor, just like a man, her clitoris substituting for a penis.

  The Latin word for the clitoris is, as we have seen, landica, and it was one of the worst in the language—almost too bad even for epigrams. We know it mostly from graffiti such as “Eupl[i]a, loose, of large clitoris” (Eupla laxa landicosa). This is not praise of said Euplia. A cunnus laxus was sexually undesirable, and might even hint at character flaws—loose cunnus, loose morals. And “of large clitoris” links her with the lesbians. Landica was such a bad word in part because of its primacy in the perverted (according to the Romans) relations of the tribades. Martial’s epigram shares this ancient disgust—Bassa “dares” to join cunts, as if this is in violation of the natural order, and her clitoris is “monstrous,” not simply “big.” It is horrific that women have sex like men. (It is also, as various scholars of Roman sexuality note, most likely a misrepresentation of what Roman lesbians actually did with each other.)

  But there are other reasons landica is so obscene, ones that, to modern eyes, reflect more positively on the ancient Romans. People swear about what they care about, and the Romans cared about the clitoris. They thought that both male and female partners in intercourse had to achieve orgasm for conception to occur, a wrong, but gallant, idea. Medical writings show that they knew where the clitoris was, and what it did—that stimulating it would help bring about those orgasms thought to be necessary for the creation of sons, soldiers, empire.