Animal Terms

Animal terms figure notably in the history of swearing, although they were not a major feature of Anglo-Saxon literature. The major exception was wulf , used to refer to a cruel, rapacious, or evil person, often in the title “the Devil’s wolf.” Otherwise, the chosen animals themselves are not especially dangerous or repulsive, though some are poisonous, such as the snake, and others malodorous, such as the skunk and polecat. For some cultural reason the pig provides the richest verbal field, together with the variants sow and swine . (The same pattern is seen, interestingly, in the dominance of French cochon and German schweinhund.) Swine is the oldest term in the field, being recorded in Chaucer’s richest swearing resource, the Wife of Bath, who condemns “Metellius, the foule cherl, the swyn” ( Prologue l. 460). Unlike sow, swine continues to have resonance in swearing in the British Isles, especially among the older generation, while pig has become more a feature of U. S. swearing, having been especially fashionable among radical youth in the 1960s as an opprobrious term for the police.

Dogs also feature strongly in the field. Dog itself was much used in medieval times as a term of reproach, abuse, or contempt for what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “a worthless, despicable, surly or cowardly fellow.” It is so recorded from about 1325, but the opprobrious sense died out in the nineteenth century. Cur and bitch are terms of such power that they have their own entries, as does son of a bitch, now well established in American English. Contemptuous terms for horses, such as jade and hack , have also lost currency and power.

In English parlance rat is a term of deep contempt, meaning essentially one who has betrayed a party, a close confidant, or a lover. The original uses, dating from the late eighteenth century, referred to political deserters, alluding to the behavior of rats leaving a sinking ship. The currency has continued to the present, but is now frequently applied to personal relationships. The English press generally referred to Princess Diana’s former lover, Major James Hewitt, as “the love rat,” while the tabloid Sun newspaper castigated a journalist who had accused a dead scientist of lying, filling its front page with the headline “You rat!” (July 22, 2003).

In the category of snakes, the oldest term is worm , memorably applied in 1402 to the ecclesiastical reformer, John Wycliffe: “Sith [since] that wickide worme, Wiclyf be his name, began to sow the seede of cisme [schism] in the erthe” (Friar Daw in Political Poems II, l. 45). Viper is similarly recorded in association with treachery from 1596, snake from 1593, and reptile from 1749.

Other terms include cow, monkey, baboon, ape, skunk, polecat , and shrew , which has for centuries been used in a metaphorical fashion of both a disreputable man and an unpleasant woman, long after the animal term ceased to be familiar. Polecat was originally applied contemptuously to courtesans and prostitutes, most strikingly in this first instance from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (1597): “Out of my door, you witch, you rag, you baggage, polecat, you runnion [bitch], out! out!” (IV ii 195). It has since become generalized, as has skunk , first used metaphorically in 1840. The field shows a typical concentration of female terms.