Classical
Swearing: A Vade-Mecum
by
Barry Baldwin
“Man invented curse-words to give form and substance
to his malign wishes, and he invented swear-words to back
up his vows and establish his veracity.” - Burges
Johnson, The Lost Art of Profanity (1948)
You
might expect the Greeks who supposedly had a word for
everything (actually they didn’t: no noun for “orgasm”,
though one supposes they did have them) and the Romans
(likewise lacking a term for “suicide”, despite
all that falling on swords in Shakespeare) with their
reputation for plain speaking would not line up with the
American Indians, Japanese, Malayans, and Polynesians
who do not curse but rather with those many cultures in
which - as Geoffrey Hughes puts it in his book of that
name - “Swearing is fascinating in its protean diversity
and poetic creativity, while being simultaneously shocking
in its ugliness and cruelty. It draws upon such powerful
and incongruous resonators as religion, sex, madness,
excretion, and nationality, upon an extraordinary variety
of attitudes including the violent, the shocking, the
absurd, and the impossible.”
The
Jews had to be ordered in the Third Commandment to stop
blaspheming. Robert Graves remarks that “the chief
strength of the oath in Christian countries is that it
is forbidden by authority.” The great advantage
of polytheism is
that it gives you a generous choice of gods to invoke.
Thus, Greeks and Romans could swear from the top with
“By Zeus” or “By Jupiter”, or
by the god of choice - Apollo, Hermes, Venus, etc. - or
with laconic inclusivity “By All The Gods.”
One character in Plautus’ play Bacchides gets the
best of both maledictory worlds, taking four lines to
list fifteen individual deities before capping his inventory
with “And All The Other Gods As Well,” earning
from a bystander the awestruck compliment “Boy,
can he swear!” Jupiter, incidentally, slid into
English in 1570 via the euphemism “By Jove”,
though no Roman ever exclaimed “Jumping Jupiter”,
favourite ejaculation of baseball catcher Flannagan in
the movie It Happens Every Spring. A few of the Twelve
Olympians (themselves only allowed to swear by the infernal
river Styx) rarely had their names taken in vain: Ares/Mars
(odd that the war god should be avoided by such warlike
societies), Artemis/Diana and Athene/Minerva (because
both were virgins?), Hera/Juno (Mrs Zeus/Jupiter, also
his sister), and ephaestus/Vulcan the misshapen god of
technology (do they or don’t they swear by their
computers in Silicon Valley?). The Roman scholar Gellius
(2nd cent. AD) maintains Roman women never swear by Hercules
or men by Castor. Perhaps it was inappropriate for the
weaker sex to swear by the macho saint of strength - does
any modern woman invoke Arnold Schwarzenegger? Among men,
“By Hercules” was a very mild drawing-room
oath: Cicero admits it to his formal courtroom prose.
Castor’s name suited females, since it suggested
the Latin for “chaste” (casta ), but for that
very reason it was too sissy for the lads. One oath, Edepol
(“By Pollux”), was acceptably cross-gender,
but even here the sexes tended to go separate ways, women
preferring the truncated form Pol. This looks like an
ancient anticipation of H. L. Mencken’s “deaconic
swearing” or “bootleg profanity”, equivalent
to (say) “Golly” or “Goshdarn”
or “Gorblimey” or “Gadzooks”,
the hope being that the god will not recognise himself
in such substitutes. Perhaps this also applies to the
Greek “Go To The Crows” in lieu of “Go
To Hell;” a Roman variant, thanks to crucifixion,
was “Go Hang On The Cross.”
The
Cretans evidently went overboard in blasphemy. An ancient
commentator on Plato records that their king, Rhadamanthus,
outlawed divine oaths and substituted “By The Dog”,
“By The Goose”, and sundry other zoological
zappers. The first of these was famously the favourite
expostulation of Socrates, occasionally expanded to “By
The Dog Of Egypt.” Why, we don’t know. This
may have helped get him into trouble in 399 BC: one charge
against him was that he worshipped strange gods. No other
ancient is so associated with canine cursing. One presumes
many had their own private idioms, like the character
in Plautus’ The Little Carthaginian who invokes
the painters Apelles and Zeuxis - like saying “By
Picasso” or “By Hockney.”
The
comedians Aristophanes and Cratinus confirm the antiquity
of “By The Dog” and “By The Goose”.
Likewise, “Hound” as a curse entered English
around the year 1000 (a pseudo-millennial innovation?),
“Dog” c. 1325, while in all ancient British
war films Germans were forever crying Schweinehund. As
early as Homer, both men and women were routinely abused
as “Dogs”, and in Petronius’ comic novel
Satyricon (1st cent. AD - movie fans will know Fellini’s
version) a drunken wife apostrophises her husband as “Cur”.
This provokes him enough to thump her, perhaps an unsurprising
reaction: the lexicographer Hesychius says “dog”
was slang for “prick.” It was also the lowest
throw in Roman dice, so she could additionally be saying
“You Zero.” And dogs, especially puppies,
were allegedly adept at performing cunnilingus on their
mistresses, thereby adding another lexical level - I find
myself here humming Paul Anka’s Puppy Love. No sign,
though, of any classical anticipation of “Dog’s
Bollocks” for “Brilliant” as in contemporary
British slang. “Goose” doesn’t appear
to have any ancient double-entendre, unlike many animals
and birds (e.g. “sparrow” = “penis”),
though we can’t be quite sure; Shakespeare brought
this poultry specimen into Henry VI Part One (1591) to
designate a poxed whore.
The
same Petronian husband later calls his wife a “Viper”,
a common soubriquet for whores. In view of the borborological
Barry McKenzie, the less enduring creation of Dame Edna
Everage’s Aussie begetter Barry Humphries, and his
penile “Jake The Snake”, I should add that,
while the Greeks used this same metaphor, the Romans (strangely?)
did not. Earlier, this husband - it is not the ideal marriage
- had flung the missus over a settee, causing her to exclaim
Au Au, solemnly explained by a Roman grammarian as “the
usual cry of a very distressed woman” - pretty tame
by our Nineties standards.
Petronius,
although one of very few Roman authors (Plautus and Martial
are others) to give us the flavour of Latin as it was
spoken by “ordinary” people - this sadly huge
gap is only partly filled by the graffiti still visible
on the walls of Pompeii - tends to eschew “four-letter
words”, doubtless as unrealistic a procedure as
their absence from that doyen of British proletarian soap
operas Coronation Street, though who knows what secret
scatologies may lurk beyond such terminologies as “Flaming
Nora”, “Gordon Bennett”, and “Chuffed
To Little Mint Balls”? When a character says “the
cold sucks,” he takes refuge in Greek. Given this,
such permitted phrases as “piss hot and drink cold”,
“not worth your own piss”, “more like
a pisspot than a woman”, “like a mouse in
a pisspot”, and “he had Jupiter by the balls”
must have had little or no shock value.
Another
character unleashes a stream of abuse at fellow-guests.
Choice examples: “mutton-head”, “fruit”,
“fly-by-night vagabond”, “clay-pot”,
“wash-leather”, “curly-headed onion”,
“come-hither man”, “rat”, “puffball.”
Many are unique to him. Quite a few connote stupidity.
Compare these items from a list of sixty-three in Hughes:
“addlepate”, “airhead”, “berk”,
“fruitcake”, “pudding-head”, “spaz”,
“twit”, “zipalid”. As Hughes says,
“no reader would be uncertain by the end that this
list related to stupid people, but equally no reader would
be familiar with all these terms.” The same no doubt
applied to Petronius’ audience.
Ethnic
slurs are now officially taboo, though this does not mean
they are extinct in spoken conversation. Indeed, they
still hang around in print. Only the other day, in an
American crossword, one clue was “half breed”
and the answer “Méti”, an offensive
term to one segment of Canadian society. Greeks dismissed
everyone who couldn’t speak their language as idiots
who go “Ba-Ba”, hence “barbarian”.
Cappadocians were proverbially stupid. Romans dubbed Hellenes
“Greeklings.” The Latin equivalent of “Tell
it to the Marines” is “Let Apella the Jew
believe that.” Horace asks, “You want I should
fart in the faces of the circumcised Hebrews?” They
didn’t much go in for racism based on colour - though
remove one ‘G’ and a Latin word for “black”
gives us the N-word - but such expressions as “turn
black into white” and “scrub an Ethiopian
white” hint at its existence. The Elder Pliny mentions
a tribe ashamed of their black skins, albeit they painted
themselves red - not white. Still, being English, I must
give pride of place to St Jerome for his lambasting -
amid the solemn context of a Biblical commentary - the
theologian Pelagius as “You Scottish Porridge-Eater.”
Offensive body language was part and parcel of ancient
insult. The commonest Roman gesture was to wiggle the
middle finger at an enemy. This digit was called “the
finger of shame.” It may have to do with Greeks
on the island of Siphnos, whose supposed predilection
for sticking fingers up a partner’s anus produced
the verb “to Siphnosize”; I recall Ringo Starr’s
lament in Help: “I’ve ‘ad some luvly
times wiv this finger.” To scratch your own head
with a single finger connoted effeminacy - both Julius
Caesar and Pompey the Great were thus ridiculed. Hughes
cannot trace sticking out your tongue further back than
Elizabethan times, but it too was a Roman habit. A Roman
also invented “Mooning” when one Marcus Servilius
exposed his bare bum to a crowd he was haranguing on election
day. The Byzantine emperor Andronicus took it a stage
further with his public buttock barings and mimed defecations.
In Petronius, a slave “not satisfied with cursing”
kept lifting up his leg and farting. Breaking wind was
considered a good omen, though, in certain religious rites
- I must here subjoin a British drollery: “Sir,
you have farted in front of my wife.” “Sir,
I am sorry, I didn’t know it was her turn.”
You
might not expect the (officially, at least) pious Byzantines
to have contributed much to the history of swearing. You
would be wrong. Their capital, Constantinople, sets the
pace. One of its downtown thoroughfares was called Hooker
Street, thus anticipating the Gropecunt Lane of mediaeval
Oxford (since downgraded to Magpie Lane). Effing and blinding
turns up not only in lampoon and satire, but in works
of scholarship. This is a trend from which dreary modern
academic writing would much benefit. One lonely example,
a letter (Nov. 21, 1985) in the London Review of Books
in which a Professor Hawkes told a Professor Hough to
“piss off,” only whets the appetite. Did Hawkes
realise how Byzantine he was being? Commentators’
marginal notes to the satirist Lucian contain no less
than thirty-nine terms of abuse, ranging from “moron”
to “boy-buggerer”. The 12th century scholar
Tzetzes writes off an academic rival as “bull-father,
moonstruck son of a goat” and many other things.
Even A. E. Housman never ventured this far in his famously
scurrillous tirades at rival editors. The favourite Byzantine
cursing technique was to build up a dizzyingly-long compound
of insulting adjectives, a trick inherited from Aristophanes.
These often ran for many lines and sentences. I could
fill an entire essay with examples. St. Symeon Metaphrastes
did not blush to dub an enemy “you enema-nurtured
shit-eater.” Leo the Philosopher trounced a student
as “O stammer-speaking, very stammering, always
stammering mouth” - hard to get away with that in
namby-pamby modern pedagogy. Another Leo is among countless
sins “a fabricator of filthy books, a cheating innkeeper,
a sodomiser of strumpets.” Whether they knew it
or not, the Antipodean quoted in Bill Hornadge’s
The Australian Slanguage (1980) for his “you rotten,
bloody, poofter, commo, mongrel, bastard,” and Kevin
Kline to John Cleese in A Fish Called Wanda, “you
pompous, stuck-up, snot-nosed, English, giant twerp, scumbag,
fuck-face, dick-head, arsehole” are being entirely
Byzantine. It seems right that, according to the Penguin
Book Of Insults (1981), when Theodore Roosevelt wished
to abuse Woodrow Wilson, the best/worst thing he could
come up with was “you Byzantine logothete.”
Byzantium
extends into the Middle Ages. Over in England, the ritual
of competitive insults known as “Flyting”
was popular from Bede to Shakespeare. Hughes, providing
generous examples, traces this to the extempore “skaldic
verse” of Old Norse. He could have gone back much
further. Flyting was a classical procedure. Horace treats
us to some extracts from one such verbal slugfest between
two professional comedians on a trip across Italy. They
are low on wit, high on taunts at physical defects. Virgil
presents one shepherd accusing another of bestiality.
He would have been tickled by a recent discussion on the
World Wide Words electronic newsletter (distributed by
Michael Quinion, UK) of whether England or Australia gave
birth to the expression “sheep-shagger” (cue
for a third Austin Powers movie?).
Sensitive
readers had better stop here, for I have reached the classical
antecedents of what in America are called the “Big
Six” - “cock”, “cunt”, “fart”,
“fuck”, “piss”, “shit.”
When comedian George Carlin satirised this lexical sextet
(plus some related terms) in a 1975 radio monologue “Filthy
Words”, a citizen’s complaint was upheld by
the US Supreme Court. Not altogether a bad thing, if you
agree with the adage “Censorship is the mother of
linguistic invention.”
Both
this and Carlin’s routine were anticipated by Cicero.
Writing to a friend, he discusses with copious examples
the linguistic pruderies of Roman Mrs Grundys, hyper-sensitive
Stoics who objected not only to “dirty” words
but to combinations of innocent ones that produced them.
For instance: avoid the noun intercapedo (“interval”)
because its last four letters spell pedo (“fart”);
don’t say illam dicam (“I should mention her”)
because that is pronounced landicam (“clitoris”);
bini (“two each”) will upset Greek speakers
since binein is their word for “fuck.” Cicero,
in his own writings a master of invective without ever
using “four-letter words”, adopts an air of
sweet reason towards the whole business.
I
can only scratch the surface in this little essay. The
mere fact there is enough material to fill fat modern
books (listed below) tells its own tale. By a convention
that we don’t fully understand, the “worst”
words were eschewed in Graeco-Roman literature, save stage
comedy and satire. They don’t appear in erotic writing
- no ancient Henry Miller. For Rome (no equivalent for
Greece), we also have the graffiti - ranging from semi-literate
scrawl to sophisticated poetic parodies - on the walls
of Pompeii, where one bit of scribble provides the best
comment on the rest: “I wonder, O Wall, thou stayest
in place/Such a weight of bad writing thou hast on thy
face.”
In
Latin both the F- and C- words are primary obscenities
of equal weight, unlike English - “cunt” is
still avoided on the BBC even by those who have no qualms
about “fuck.” Though they look similar, lexicographers
don’t think the words futuo and cunnus are the direct
ancestors of the English ones - if they were, why did
“cunt” not enter English until c. 1230 and
“fuck” only in 1503?
A
kerfuffle has been caused by The Lonely Planet Phrase
Book (1999), which claims that most Brits cannot make
a single sentence without participial use of the F-word.
Be that as it may - it contradicts Robert Graves’
belief that swearing there was in decline and would continue
to be, an opinion that defied the national reputation
for coprolalia that goes back at least to the days of
Joan of Arc - no such claim could have been made about
the Romans (or Greeks). Strangely or otherwise, these
words are not used as expletives. “Fucking Hell”
in Latin would be futuens orcus , but no such locution
exists. There is no logical reason why a Roman could not
have said it, but its absence from Pompeian graffiti seems
decisive. Nor, at any written level, do they address each
other as fututor (“you fucker”) - but did
Roman yobs never shout Futue Off at each other on Saturday
nights? It’s the same with cunnus, except for a
single Pompeian graffito which aims it at a male homosexual.
Quite why this is so remains a mystery. Romans were not
squeamish about calling each other “bugger”,
“cocksucker”, “cunt-licker”, “prick”,
and “sodomite”, while Martial rattles on about
such matters as “cunt-farts” (poppysmata cunni)
and the quality and price of a blow-job are frequently
animadverted upon in the graffiti. The most concentrated
shower of filth comes in the Priapea, a collection of
anonymous short poems in which Priapus, a well-hung erect
Worzel Gummidge or scarecrow, reminiscent of the phallic
Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset, threatens boys and girls
who invade his gardens with every manner of penetrative
sexual revenge - they are all translated by W. H. Parker
(1988). “I’ll ram you through your own arsehole”
is a typical delicacy of phrase, while “you scabby
bitch, more poxed than a queer,” suggests that a
modern Priapus would be labelling AIDS “the gay
disease.” At one moment he says, “to put it
in good old plain-speaking Latin, I’ll stick it
up your arse.” So, why did this Roman directness
have such limits?
The
ancients were also un-British in not calling each other
“wankers.” Masturbari and masturbator have
no direct synonyms, and there is a distinct shortage of
expressions comparable to “toss off” or “beat
your meat”, though Aristophanes does have the god
Dionysus “scratching my chickpea.”
“You
arsehole” is another modern locution they avoided.
The basic Latin word culus has left a rich legacy in the
Romance languages. It was sometimes interchangeable with
cunnus, which may seem odd, but the same is true of “prat”
and “tail” in English where “frig”
connotes both masturbation and intercourse and “fanny”
is backside in America, vagina in Britain. Ancient slang
is thus frequently useful for illustrating modern, one
reason for this essay. Tackling the question of how “nunnery”
can mean “brothel” in Hamlet, Hughes just
quotes the comment “the harlottes at Rome were called
nonariae “ by Ranulph Higden (1432-50). So they
were, but nonaria (one of a huge number of Latin words
for prostitute) simply means “ninth hour girl”,
this being the time at which they could legally begin
to ply their trade. Likewise, Hughes spends two puzzled
pages on the vernacular uses of “fig” in English,
unaware that in Latin it was a derisive term for haemorrhoids
caused by excessive indulgence in passive sodomy. There
are many other helpful classical precedents for modern
offensiveness, e.g. “bag” for old woman or
prostitute, “ring” for anus (little heard
now, but common when I was a boy), “crack”
for vagina, “rosebud” for vagina (did William
Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles know this?), “having
the rags on” for menstruating.
“Prick”
was a Roman favourite. Catullus calls an enemy “you
fucked-up mentula “ (the basic word) in one poem.
In another, he tells how the orator Calvus was heckled
by an audience member shouting “you loud-mouthed
prick” (diserte salaputium). A graffito, complete
with drawing of penis, dubs Pompey “not a man but
a prick” (sopio). Another ancient rhyparologist
orders “eat shit, you pricks” - shades of
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, famous for coining
“fuddle-duddle” as his term for “fuck
off” (mouthed at opposition MPs in parliamentary
debate), who once told striking postal workers in French
(mangez de la merde) to consume excrement. At quite a
different semantic level, the emperor Augustus called
Horace “cleanest of cocks” in a friendly way,
perhaps comparable to amicable British uses of this word.
One also expects that the Roman called Mutto (Mr Prick)
mentioned in a Cicero speech had to endure a lot of repetitive
jokes on his name. Penis and testicles go together, not
just anatomically. It must have been a godsend for Roman
lawyers that testis means both “witness” and
“testicle” - likewise for wits in general
that anus is both “bum” and “old woman”
- albeit Cicero (notorious for his cutting wit) doesn’t
much go in for it: too infantile, perhaps. But he will
talk about “Rome having its balls (coleos) cut off”
in a treatise on oratory. A speaker in Petronius laments
“if only we had the balls,” while the contemporary
poet Persius groans “if only we had a drop of our
fathers’ spunk.” Natural functions play their
part. While Romans didn’t say “Piss off”
or “piece of piss” (British demotic for an
easy task), they had such expressions as “piss in
your own child’s bosom” and “shit on
your own balls.” Priapus typically goes further:
“what a pile of shit your prick is.” Cicero
calls the Senate “shit” (stercus) and the
electorate the “dung-heap (faex) of Romulus.”
Catullus alliteratively dubs an enemy’s historical
writings as “shitty sheets of scrap-paper”
(cacata charta); Martial dismisses a rival’s poems
as “fit for a shit.” In modern English style,
the poet Lucilius complains about “piss-poor”
(mictilis) food,” Martial about a cake that was
“pure shit” (merda). The latter characteristically
pulls several of these scatological threads together in
this witty shitty ditty: “When you fuck, you shit
when you come/Whadda ya do when a man’s up your
bum?”
Taking a cue from Jeffrey Richards’ (a history don)
review of Hughes in the London Sunday Times, we may chart
various stages in English bad language. Anglo-Saxon swearing
had magical connotations; this yielded to blasphemy in
the pious Middle Ages. Secular indecency took over in
the Renaissance and Reformation. Elizabethans, led by
Henry VIII and Good Queen Bess, loved to mock their enemies’
physical oddities. Puritanism compelled new ways to circumlocutory
blasphemy. Relative decorum prevailed in the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries, epitomised by Johnson’s
omission of most crude words (although “fart”
and “piss” were admitted) from his Dictionary
and Thomas Bowdler’s sanitised Shakespeare - a trend
offset by such Victorian pornography as The Pearl (“clitoris”)
and the anonymous sexual memoir My Secret Life. Robert
Graves thought that his predicted decline in swearing
might be upset by “a new shock to our system”
- this came in the shape of the Sixties. In our Nineties,
the decline of class distinctions, religion, and sexual
taboos has dimished blasphemy and insults based on social
status and physiological swearing, leaving racial epithets
and references to physical disabilities as the only ones
beyond the pale. All such patterns are liable to interruption.
Only today, I read in the Spectator (July 31, 1999) this
injunction from columnist A. A. Gill to a rival scribe:
“Go fuck yourself, you smelly dago Lesbian cunt.”
While we can say that the bawdy of Aristophanes coincides
with the apogee of Athenian democracy and that Plautus
in the Roman Republic is less gross than many “decadent”
imperial writers, it is impossible to impose these patterns
on to Greek and Roman swearing, and perhaps they would
not even have understood them. Still, Cicero’s aforementioned
letter on what is and is not proper in Latin might at
least suggest recognition of Taylor’s final point,
“profanity is in a bad way,” looking forward
to the next shock in the national nervous system. Overall,
despite the huge gaps in our knowledge, we are probably
as safe in applying to ancient swearing as to modern the
remark of Jonathan Swift, himself no mean coprologist,
“oaths are the children of fashion.”
©
2006 by Barry Baldwin
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