American Language (57 page)

But outside the fields of anatomy, physiology and pathology, in which concepts of the disgusting may reinforce concepts of the indecent, the prudery once so universal in the United States has been abating since the World War. In speech, if not in writing, words and phrases are used freely that were formerly under a strict ban, even in bordelloes. I have given some examples in the first part of this section. Even the unutterable four-letter words, as I have shown, have begun to edge back in thin disguises. A learned and extremely interesting discussion of the most infamous of them, with sidelights on the others, by Allen Walker Read, of the staff of the “Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles,” was published in
American Speech
in 1934.
²¹²
To find the hyper-delicacy of the Grant Era in full flower one must resort to the remoter and more backward parts of the country — for example, the Ozark region. Mr. Vance Randolph reports that among the Ozarkians,
bull, boar, buck, ram, jack
and
stallion
are still taboo, and that even such harmless compounds as
bullfrog
and
buckshot
are regarded askance. So are all words involving
cock, e.g., cock-eyed, cock-sure
and even the proper names,
Cox
and
Hitchcock
. A cock, to the hillmen, is either a
rooster
or a
crower
. A stallion is a
stable-horse
, a bastard is a
woodscolt
, and a bull is a
cow-brute
. Certain everyday words are avoided whenever possible,
e.g., stone, maiden, virgin, piece, bed, decent, bag, leg, stocking, tail, breast:
for one reason or another they suggest blushful ideas. “Even
love
,” says Mr. Randolph, “is considered more or less indecent, and the mountain people never use the term in its ordinary sense, but nearly always with some degrading or jocular connotation. If a hillman does admit that he
loved
a woman he means only that he caressed and embraced her — and he usually says that he
loved her up.
” But

Elsewhere in the Bible Belt the old taboos seem to be breaking down. In 1934 Dr. J. M. Steadman, Jr., of Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., undertook a study of the degree of prudery surviving among the students there incarcerated, most of them Georgians and probably a majority Methodists or Baptists. Altogether, 166 males and 195 females were examined, or 361 in all. Two of them proved their evangelical upbringing by listing the word
obscene
as itself “coarse or obscene,” and five added
rotten
, but the remarkable thing about the inquiry was the high degree of tolerance that it revealed. Thus, of the 361, only 24 banned
whore
as coarse or obscene, though two others thought it “of a sinister or unpleasant suggestion.” Some of the other votes were: against
ass
, 10; against
bull
, 5; against
knocked-up
, 2; against
pimp
, 2; against
garter
, 2; against
harlot
, 3; against
teat
or
tit
, 2. Rather curiously, the merely vulgar words got the highest adverse votes,
e.g., belch
, 25;
sweat
, 33;
puke
, 51;
guts
, 59;
stink
, 69;
belly
, 87. Unfortunately, Dr. Steadman allowed his subjects to make up their own lists, and so the more delicate of them omitted the worst words altogether; moreover, he himself expunged a few words in his report. Nevertheless, it shows a considerable advance in antinomianism in the heart of the Gospel country. “The fear of using words of an indecent meaning or suggestion,” he says, “is opposed, in different degrees for different students, by another powerful factor in the student’s language consciousness, the fear of appearing affected or
sissy
by avoiding the blunt, direct word for even repulsive acts or ideas.”
²¹⁴
The inclusion of euphemisms in some of the lists was of considerable significance. Thus,
nerts
got six adverse votes,
halitosis
got five,
to pet
got two,
to neck
got eight, and
hussy
got fourteen.
To burp
and
to lay
do not seem to have been
included; maybe they had not yet reached Georgia. Euphemisms, says Dr. Leonard Bloomfield in “Language,”
²¹⁵
“may in time become too closely associated with the meaning, and in turn become taboo. Our word
whore
, cognate with the Latin
carus
(dear), must have been at one time a polite substitute for some word now lost.”

An American visiting England discovers quickly that different words are under the ban on the two sides of the ocean.
Knocked-up
, which means pregnant in the United States and is avoided as vulgar even where
pregnant
itself would be tolerated, has only the harmless significance of exhausted in England.
Screw
, in England, means pay. But
bum
means the backside, and is thus taboo, though the English use
bum-bailiff
. An Englishman restricts the use of
bug
to the
Cimex lectularius
, or common
bedbug
, and hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls
insects
. An American of my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using
bug
for
insect
. The two were playing billiards one Summer evening in the Englishman’s house, and various flying things came through the window and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a
bug
with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house.
²¹⁶
Not so long ago
stomach
was in the English Index, and such euphemisms as
tummy
and
Little Mary
were used in its place, but of late it has recovered respectability.
Dirt
, to designate earth, and
closet
, in the sense of a cupboard, are seldom used by an Englishman. The former always suggests filth to him, and the latter has obtained the limited sense of
water-closet
. The more important English newspapers, compared to their American analogues, are very plain-spoken, but the popular sheets have a repertory of euphemisms to match those in use on this side of the ocean. The sheet of “Don’ts For Reporters and Sub-Editors” of the London
Daily Express
, for example, ordains that
was cited as corespondent
is to be used to avoid
adultery
, and that
betrayed
or
deceived
is to be used in place of
seduced
. Here are some other specimens, all dredged up from the
News of the World:

Finally, there is the euphemistic address which begins every letter. In the United States, says Mrs. Emily Post,
²¹⁷
“the most formal beginning of a social letter is
My dear Mrs. Smith
” but “in England
Dear Mrs. Smith
is more formal.” Archibald Marshall, the English novelist, says that when he first visited the United States
My dear
struck him “as effusive coming from strangers,” and
Dear
“seemed slightly chilling from intimate friends,” but that on reflection he concluded “that our usage must have precisely the same effect upon Americans.”
²¹⁸
But in this matter the rules are not rigid, and though the more conservative English seldom use the American forms, the English forms are not uncommonly encountered in this country.
²¹⁹

Perhaps the most curious disparity between the vocabulary of the two tongues is presented by
bloody
. This word is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as indecent, with overtures of the blasphemous. The sensation produced in London when George Bernard Shaw put it into the mouth of the elegant Mrs. Patrick Campbell in his play, “Pygmalion,” will be remembered. “The interest in the first English performance,” said the New York
Times
,
²²⁰
“centered in the heroine’s utterance of this banned word. It was waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly, and presumably, when the shock subsided, interest dwindled.” But in New York, of course, it failed to cause any stir. Just why it is viewed so shudderingly by the English is one of the mysteries of the
language. It came in during the latter half of the Seventeenth Century, and remained innocuous for nearly a hundred years. Various amateur etymologists have sought to account for its present evil fame by giving it loathsome derivations, sometimes theological and sometimes catamenial, but the professional etymologists all agree that these derivations are invalid, though when it comes to providing a better one they unhappily disagree. Some hold that
bloody
was born of the rich young
bloods
who broke windows, upset sedan-chairs and beat up watchmen in the reign of Anne. Others argue that it goes back to the infancy of the Germanic languages, and is a brother to the German
blut
, often used in such combinations as
blutarm
, meaning bloody poor. And yet others think it is a degenerate form of either ’s
blood
or
by
’r
Lady
, both of them favorite oaths in Shakespeare’s day, and then thought of as quite harmless. But none of these derivations justifies the present infamy of the word. Richard Henry Dana, who loved saline speech, put it into “Two Years Before the Mast” in 1840, but it failed to catch on in this country. In the Motherland, however, it has continued a lush life under cover, and the more it is denounced by the delicate, the more it is cherished by the vulgar. It is in constant use as a counterword, and has become a general intensive with no ponderable meaning — in Dean W. R. Inge’s phrase, simply a sort of notice that a noun may be expected to follow.
²²¹

In England frequent efforts have been made to put down profanity, as distinct from obscenity. There was one so long ago as the first quarter of the Seventeenth Century, and B. A. P. Van Dam, in his study of the text of “Hamlet,” shows that it even went to the length of bowdlerizing Shakespeare. The early versions of “Hamlet,” published during the Bard’s lifetime, were liberally besprinkled with the oaths of the time, but in the First Folio, printed seven years after his death, many of them were greatly toned down. Thus
God
was changed to
Heauen (i.e.
, Heaven), ’5
wounds
(God’s wounds) was changed to
come
, and’s bloud (God’s blood) to
why
. ’
S
wounds
and ’
s
bloud were regarded as innocuous when Shakespeare wrote them: like
bloody
, they had lost all literal significance. By 1623 both were under the ban. Later on
’s wounds
enjoyed a revival in the shape of
zounds
, to flourish for a century and a half and then disappear.
By 1823, according to an anonymous author of the time, quoted by George H. McKnight in “Modern English in the Making,”
²²²
the only oath surviving in English circles having “any pretension to fashion” was
by Jove
. But on lower levels
bloody
was already making its way. In the United States, probably because of the decay of the legal concept of blasphemy, there has been little organized opposition to profanity. The New England Puritans attempted to punish it, but only half-heartedly; for, as one of the earliest English travelers in America, Ned Ward, reported in 1699, they were themselves, “notwithstanding their sanctity,… very prophane in their common dialect.” In the more southerly colonies there must have been an even more lavish use of cuss-words. The Rev. Jonathan Boucher wrote home from Maryland on August 7, 1759, that visitors there were forced “to hear obscene conceits and broad expressions, and from this there are times w’n no sex, no rank, no conduct can exempt you,” and on September 12, 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a Scottish physician then lodged in a New Jersey inn, recorded in his diary: