Genitalia

In the history of swearing, the general focus has moved from the higher forces controlling human destiny to their polar opposite, the excretory and genital functions. Thus in medieval times religious swearing was dominant, whereas in recent centuries swearwords relating to copulation and excretion have come to the fore. The two principal terms falling under this category, namely cock and cunt , are interestingly different philologically in their origins, their semantic development, and the taboos that have come to surround them. Both have generated great numbers of synonyms used almost exclusively in male-to-male discourse. Cunt has always had a specific meaning, since its origins are not complicated by metaphorical extension, as is the case with cock . To simplify the discussion, cock and cunt have their own entries.

The clear separation of registers that now obtains between “coarse” taboo native terms such as those just mentioned, and “polite” general, anatomical, or technical language made up of classically derived terms like penis and vagina , did not exist in the past. Many medieval proverbs and plays contained extremely coarse language. More surprisingly, medieval medical texts used the core words now regarded as obscene or grossly impolite as terminology. Even in his translation of the Bible (1385), John Wycliffe uses the graphic term arse-ropes for intestines and balloks for testicles, which were also termed cods , now surviving only in codpiece . Also now obsolete is medieval coillons , surviving as cullion , a term of abuse (“that crafty cullion knave”) through to the seventeenth century. Its distant relative cojones has recently come into American English in the macho sense of English “balls.” Two obsolete terms for the penis, namely tarse (from Anglo-Saxon teors ) and yard (from Middle English yerde ), are similarly recorded in medical contexts.

Middle English taile denoted both the male and female genitalia, and the verbal noun tailing meant “intercourse.” Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, always frank on venereal matters, says simply, “A likerous [lecherous] mouth moot han [must have] a licorous tayl” ( Prologue l. 6048), while the Reeve laments that “we olde men” have “an hoor [hoary] head and a grene [vigorous] tayl” ( Prologue , l. 3878). These senses have continued in underground slang up to the present in phrases such as “a piece of tail” and “get some tail.” Less well known is scut , meaning as animal’s tail, first used (1596) in the bawdy phrase “My doe with the black scut” in the Merry Wives of Windsor (V v 20). By about 1705 it was being used of woman’s genitalia: “Come in, says he, you silly [simple] slut, I’ll lay the itching of your scut” ( Merry Songs and Ballads I, 177). Although the sexual sense died out in the eighteenth century, it was replaced by that of “a contemptible person” in the nineteenth. Penis itself, a Latin term also meaning “a tail,” entered the language only in 1693, several decades after the rarer Greek-derived term phallus , recorded from 1613. Other old terms for the male genitalia are purse for the scrotum, leading to the slang sense of spend , meaning “ejaculate,” first used in an embarrassing episode in Samuel Pepys’s Diary (September 7, 1662). Vagina , meaning a sheath, was borrowed from Latin in 1682. ( Genitalia itself is a Victorian formation, dating from the 1870s.) Unlike cunt , which has become both an obscenity and a term of serious insult, cock is less powerful on both fronts.