The C Word
The Unmentionable Swear
Recently I was pontificating upon why we find certain words offensive…
Take for example the unmentionable swear…
If you delve into the origins of the C Word you will find that it’s utterance has not always had such a Taboo attached to it…
It is thought that the C word derives from the old Norse Kunta and the Latin cunnus – meaning both mysterious and wedge – hardly an offensive origin is it? Quite Sweet really. Whereas the more accepted term: Vagina derives from the Latin for a place to sheath one’s sword or ‘Gaping wound’… neither very nice or PC at all…
In olde English the word was as inoffensive as say “Front Bottom” or the beautifully phrased “lady garden” Indeed a popular and widely performed play of the 12th century contained the line “my leue lemman, In my cunte dou shalt crepe” which literally translates to “my lover, I suggest that you hide up my cunt…” Also that man Chaucer used a version of Cunt 13 times in Canterbury Tales – sometimes in a bawdy manor but also sometimes in a form that he used to mean Quaint. And were you aware that in Medieval times many towns in England had a Gropecunt lane? OK so this was where the hookers used to hang out… but still it shows a more gentle seaside postcard use of the word… (London, being a large place, needed a lot of whores had several Gropecunt lanes which you can still find today on Google Maps: one is off Shaftsbury avenue and has been renamed Grape Lane – and another in the Barbican area was renamed Grub St and then for some reason in the 19th century Milton St… (Maybe Mr Milton loved his hookers?)
So what went wrong for the poor unloved C word? Well it was them bloody Americans and their religious zeal who, starting with the Puritans, gave the C word a bad name… Suffering from such bad press it fell out of use for some time, only reappearing last century popularised by Americans who had misappropriated the world to mean all manor of autrocities that are quite frankly offensive to the original meaning of the word and perhaps even offensive to women themselves. Americans – what a bunch of cunts. x
Facebook Comments:
