Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (27 page)

These two metaphors reveal how, in a small way, obscene words came to be seen as telling the truth like oaths. (
In a 2005 study
, intrepid researchers showed that swearwords actually do “increase the believability of statements.” Testimony that contained words such as
God damn it, shitty, fucking
, and
asshole
was perceived by test subjects to be more credible than the same testimony minus the swearwords.) By the eighteenth century, obscene words had assumed both functions of oath swearing. They possessed the offensive and emotive charge for which people of the past had turned to oaths
by God. And they had, in a limited form, acquired oath’s ability to “guarantee” the truth. It would take until the late nineteenth century, however, before obscene words were actually referred to as “swearing.”

Gwendolen: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. (
The Importance of Being Earnest
, Oscar Wilde, 1895)

By the Victorian era, it is possible to find people who were so distant from the bluff, obscene truth-tellers of earlier centuries that they had never seen a spade, let alone discussed one. Gwendolen’s line from
The Importance of Being Earnest
is a joke, but, according to historian and literary critic Joss Marsh, it is true that by the mid-1800s, “
hardly anyone called a spade
a spade.” According to William Dean Howells, an American author whose most famous novel,
The Rise of Silas Lapham
, was published in 1885, “
Generally, people now call
a spade an agricultural implement.” And Henry Alford, theologian, critic, and poet, advised fellow authors to avoid euphemism in his 1863
A Plea for the Queen’s English
: “
Call a spade a spade
, not
a well-known oblong instrument of manual industry
.” Such delicate souls were not dedicated simply to avoiding vulgar words such as
spade
; obscene ones, and those body parts that inspired them, were under even stricter taboos.

History is silent as to whether
John Ruskin, the eminent Victorian art critic
, had ever met with a spade, but he had apparently never seen the naked body of a woman before his wedding night. He had by all accounts fallen in love with Effie Gray and fought hard to marry her over the objections of his family—hers was bankrupt. They married in 1848 and embarked on their honeymoon in Blair Atholl, Scotland. But when it was time to consummate the marriage, Ruskin balked. (He continued to balk for another six years, until Effie left him. She went on to marry the painter John Everett Millais
and have eight children.) Effie explains why in a letter to her parents, asking them to help her get her marriage annulled:

He alleged various reasons, Hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year told me the true reason (and to me this is as villainous as all the rest), that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening April 10th [their wedding night].

Ruskin offers the same reason in a statement he gave to his lawyers at the time of the annulment: “It may be thought strange that I
could
abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.” In order for the annulment to succeed, Effie had to undergo a virginity test; she was examined by doctors who found that “she is naturally and properly formed.” We can infer, too, that the father of her eight children wasn’t disgusted by her person. What did Ruskin find so abhorrent about her, and why? The prevailing theory blames her pubic hair. Ruskin was familiar with the idealized forms found in Greek and Roman statues of women, but they to a headless torso were hairless, or strategically veiled. According to Ruskin’s biographer Mary Lutyens, Effie was very likely the first naked woman he ever saw, and the fact that she had hair down there was a shock from which the aesthete couldn’t recover.
*
Ruskin’s reaction to his wife’s body offers a striking illustration of the degree to which sexual matters were repressed, at least in “proper” Victorian society. The faintest allusions to sexuality were so deeply forbidden and bodies were so swathed in fabric that it was possible for a man to reach the age of thirty and have no idea that his wife, like all women, had pubic hair.

The Venus de Milo, not Ruskin’s wife.

Ruskin is not an isolated case; other Victorians were strikingly ignorant of things improper. The eminent poet Robert Browning seems not to have recognized a common obscenity. In his 1841 poem
Pippa Passes
, he writes:

Then owls and bats

Cowls and
twats

Monks and nuns, in cloister’s moods,

Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.

Browning had encountered this word only once before, in a seventeenth-century satirical ballad. Reading these lines—“They talk’t of his having a Cardinalls Hat, / They’d send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat”—he assumed that
twat
referred to some item of nunly apparel, like a wimple, rather than a part of nunly anatomy. Other Victorians also failed to recognize
twat
as one of the oldest obscene words for “vagina.” None of the twenty-three or so Victorian editions of Browning’s dramatic poem omit it, even while editors of the era were busy expurgating naughty words like
harlot
and
damn’d
from the poems of Alexander Pope (1859), and
womb
and
prostitute
from those of Walt Whitman (1855).

The first use of
twat
recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary
is from a 1656 translation of Martial, the epigram that begins “Catching me with a boy, wife, you upbraid me harshly and point out that you too have an arse” and ends “Don’t give masculine names to your things, wife. Think you have two cunts.” Robert Fletcher translates the last lines as “
Give not male names then to such things
as thine, / But think thou hast two Twats o wife of mine.” The word was in
common use during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but the
OED
has no record of it from 1727 to 1919. It could be, then, that the
twat
came back, after a period of abeyance, in the twentieth century. Browning would then appear less of a sheltered innocent, unfamiliar with an everyday obscenity. There is tantalizing evidence that
twat
did remain in use during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, though it more or less disappears from written records.
It appears in Thomas Wright’s
1857
Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English
(defined as “pudendum f.”).
And in 1888, a concerned reader
wrote to the journal
The Academy
about a “distressing blunder” he had noticed in Browning’s poem. His note is a masterpiece of indirection—nowhere in it does he mention what the blunder actually is. He simply wants to point out that “the word in question is probably still in provincial use, and may be found in its place in Wright’s Dictionary.” The editor of
The Academy
has seen fit to add that, “Like many other provincialisms, it is also in use in London.” From this correspondence, at any rate, it seems that
twat
was still in use as an obscenity in the Victorian period, that Browning didn’t know what it meant when he employed it, and that everyone concerned decided that the situation was really much too delicate to discuss—better to leave things alone and not call attention to it.

Browning failed to recognize a well-known obscenity, as Ruskin failed to realize that his wife would have hair where the Venus de Milo doesn’t. How is it possible that two such intelligent, well-traveled, well-read men had two such areas of ignorance? The nineteenth century saw the apogee of the rise of civility that began in the Renaissance. Throughout the eighteenth century, it had become more and more taboo to reveal certain body parts and actions in polite society or to mention them in polite conversation. Even to hint that they existed became a terrible faux pas. All this linguistic and vestmental concealment had its desired effect in Ruskin and Browning—it covered up
twat
and the rest of the female body so thoroughly that they disappeared altogether for our two eminent Victorians. This is not to say
that Victorian men never swore, or never saw naked women before they married—this is in fact very much
not
the case, as we will see a bit later. Ruskin especially was perhaps unusually naive, having asked his parents to move in with him at college. But it is true that the Victorian cultural climate was one in which sex and excrement were very rarely mentioned in polite society, where, in fact, people hesitated even to point vaguely in their direction. It was the great age of euphemism.

Euphemisms

To the Victorians they were
inexpressibles
(1793),
indescribables
(1794),
etceteras
(1794),
unmentionables
(1823),
ineffables
(1823),
indispensables
(1828),
innominables
(1834–43),
inexplicables
(1836), and
continuations
(mid-nineteenth century). What were they? Perhaps this citation from the
OED
will help: “Shoes off, ineffables tucked up” (1867). No? What about this one: “Liston, in a pair of unmentionables coming half-way down his legs” (1823). Yes, they are
trousers, “an article of dress
not to be mentioned in polite circles,” as
The Century Cyclopedia
of 1889 cautions. (Ironically,
etcetera
had in centuries past been a euphemism for words much more unmentionable than
trousers
. In Randall Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary,
con
(cunt) is defined as “a womans
etc
.” And in
Romeo and Juliet
, it substitutes for the word
arse
in one of Mercutio’s double entendres—“O that she were / An open
et caetera
, thou a pop’rin peare!”)
*

What was so wrong with saying
trousers
? First of all, when you took them off, you were naked. And their shape revealed a man’s legs, and a man’s having legs implied that he very likely had other body parts up there, and …
please
, remember yourself. The women! The children!
Leg
was another word that was not supposed to be
used in polite society.
Limb
was the preferred term, which was further euphemized to
lower extremity
. Captain Frederick Marryat, an English sea captain turned writer, had much to say about
limbs
versus
legs
in his 1839
Diary in America
. (He had traveled to the United States to “examine what were the effects of a democratic form of government and climate upon a people which, with all its foreign admixture, may still be considered as English,” and to get away from his wife. As his contemporaries noted, in practice he found it difficult to make observations about the democratic form of the climate.)

When at Niagara Falls
, I was escorting a young lady with whom I was on friendly terms. She had been standing on a piece of rock, the better to view the scene, when she slipped down, and was evidently hurt by the fall; she had in fact grazed her shin. As she limped a little in walking home, I said, “Did you hurt your leg much.” She turned from me, evidently much shocked, or much offended; and not being aware that I had committed any very heinous offence, I begged to know what was the reason of her displeasure. After some hesitation, she said that as she knew me well, she would tell me that the word
leg
was never mentioned before ladies. I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to my having been accustomed only to
English
society, and added, that as such articles must occasionally be referred to, even in the most polite circles of America, perhaps she would inform me by what name I might mention them without shocking the company. Her reply was, that the word
limb
was used; “nay,” continued she, “I am not so particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a table, or limb of a piano-forte.”

From Marryat’s account too comes evidence that at least some Victorians covered up the limbs of their furniture. He continues his narration:

A few months afterwards I was obliged to acknowledge that the young lady was correct when she asserted that some people were more particular even than she was. I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four
limbs
. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters, might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!