Bawdy

Bawdy , meaning “naughty, sexually suggestive or obscene talk or behavior,” derives from bawd , a medieval term for a procurer, later a procuress of prostitutes. The term, recorded from the early sixteenth century, is essentially rooted in the underworld and its coded speech, double-entendres or sexual puns, current in bawdy houses or brothels. Hawkers of indecent literature were then termed bawdy baskets , while a bawdy banquet meant “whoremongering.” Bawdry was an earlier, now obsolete relative, defined by Dr. Johnson (1755) as “Obscenity; unchaste language.” Previously Roger Ascham had criticized Malory’s Morte Darthur as containing “open manslaughter and bold bawdry.”

The general term for this bawdy underground language, which thrived in Elizabethan times and was surprisingly elaborate, was cant . One of the first guides to cant, Robert Greene’s racy A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591), glosses various key terms in this fashion:

The bawd, if it be a woman, a pander
The bawd, if it be a man, an apple-squire
The whore, a commodity
The whore-house, a trugging-place .
(in Salgado 1972, 176)

Cant has survived, but it now has a quite different meaning, namely “hypocritically self-righteous speech or pious platitudes.” Although bawdy has retained its original meaning, the term is becoming obsolescent.