THE FOLLOWING comes from the second page of Ms Jackie Collins’s novel Lovers and Gamblers:
‘Al’, suggested the blonde, shifting so that her well-developed mammaries hung invitingly over his mouth, ‘Al, baby, why don’t we fuck?’
Al grunted. Stick it into these two? They must be kidding.
‘Just keep at it,’ he pushed the redhead back into position.
This is the permissive age, in which things can be spelt out, but the old literary tradition of evasiveness, circumlocution, euphemism, what you will, dies hard. Ms Collins could have said ‘large breasts’ or ‘big tits’, according to the preferred register, but one brutal basic term in a sentence is enough. Moreover, if she had written this paragraph totally in Krafft-Ebing’s Latin, or in a Latinate English owing much to Krafft-Ebing’s example, we would still, with a dictionary if need be, be able to find out what is going on. Euphemism, like patriotism, is not enough. It never really deceives. That is why a book on it, or even a dictionary on it, has a ludic or charade quality about it, diverting but teaching nothing. What studies of euphemism are really about are the things we fear. Or, strictly, the reasons why we fear what we fear and how these fears can be allayed.
Robert Burchfield the lexicographer, the only professional linguist on D.J. Enright’s list of ‘distinguished contributors’ (distinguished for what?) to this symposium, takes the Indo-European root meaning bear – rksos, surviving in Sanskrit rksas, Greek arktos and Latin ursus. The form is acceptable in regions where there is no fear of bears, but the Russians evade the beast’s hug by calling it medved or honey-eater, the Lithuanians by terming it lokys, the licker, and those of us who speak Germanic tongues by naming it bera, bär, beer – the brown one. This is pure apotropaic magic, like calling an ugly fish a bonito or a weasel a donnola. The fear of fire, or the fear of the gods’ stealing it back again, seems to be perpetuated in focus and fuoco, where the container, not the contained, is nominated. We all know these things, and they are mainly of antiquarian interest. We fear different substances nowadays, but still go on playing the game of pretending not to be afraid.
People used to be taught to fear God; the contemporary churchgoer has learnt to fear being thought of as fearing God, and the translators of holy scripture and devisers of liturgies are there to help him. Peter Mullen, Vicar of Tockwith and Bilton with Bickerton in the diocese of York, calls the Alternative Service Book ‘a kind of long-running… euphemism for the real Prayer Book’. Holy Baptism is no longer holy – ‘the place of holy water in the mystical washing away of sin – but only pretty, a sentimental prelude to the booze-up and the cake, an opportunity for photographs: photographs that will evidence what?’ In the Nunc Dimittis ‘Lord, now lettest thow thy servant depart in peace’ has changed into ‘Lord, now let your servant go’, which, says Revd Mullen, ‘evokes the image of a schoolboy in distress of bladder, rather than of spirit’. The Jerusalem Bible translates Makarioi, blessed, as ‘happy’, so as to avoid too firm a commitment to a belief in life after death. The New English Bible’s fiery Paul is house-trained and urbane, and a clean-shaven Peter tells his flock not to worry too much about the Day of Judgment: ‘My dear friends, do not be bewildered by the fiery ordeal that is coming upon you, as though it were something extraordinary.’ A failure of nerve is Mullen’s diagnosis, a fear of imputations of credulousness, but also perhaps of a malignant reality (like cancer or the nuclear holocaust), a belief that God exists demonstrated in a kind of denial. Perhaps the traditional approach to our Maker, dysphemistic, relishing the old roarer and guardian of the furnace, denoted a healthy disbelief. It all depends on how much you accept that words relate to things.
We are all scared of death, though few are scared of it for a sound eschatological reason. Committed to their bodies, few people want to lose them, or perhaps the real fear is of that terminal asthma which contains the ghastly rhythms of dissolution. Our pathetic attempts to disinfect the reality with daisy-chain verbiage or learned orotundities is no new thing, but the true euphemistic evasions are to be seen more in the elaboration of the death industry than in mere words. It is all there in The Loved One, in the specialist offices of the thanatologist or psychopomp. (Across from where I live is a qualified thanatologue, who rubs his hands wherever he observes my progressive decrepitude – discreetly, however, being French.) Scared of death – meaning medicines, the predatory looks of our relative, the irony of preparing for a long sleep where we used to relish short ones – we ought not to be scared of being killed, but apparently we are. But do not such terms as ‘termination with extreme prejudice’ (a favourite of the Health Alteration Committee of the CIA) in fact prejudice our fatalism through the sheer transparency of the charade? It is all a game, like finding an acceptable shirk-word for prolonged unemployment (State-Paid Leisure or GARDENING – Grant of Aid in Recompense for Diminution of Employment Necessitated by the Incompetence of the National Government).
It is in the genital area that, despite the new libertarianism, verbal evasion continues most notably to operate. This goes back so far that one wonders if there ever was a neutral vocabulary for the pudenda and their ambiguous functions – except perhaps for the word piss, which, in a sense, has always been too expressively onomatopoeic to be wholly offensive. It is in the Old Testament, where ‘people who piss against the wall’ seems to be used (though, naturally, not in the NEB) to mean people in general, men in the street: you define humanity in terms of what it most commonly and visibly does. Shit, which remains offensive, finds its etymology in an Anglo-Saxon verb specifically meaning to defecate diarrhoeally. It has a harmless cognate in words like schizophrenia: the concept of splitting – the sense that the lower body has turned into a floodgate – is essential to its expressiveness.
Of terms for the lower organs themselves, arse has existed for a long time; but there seem to be no firm native words for the organs of generation. Penis is a Latin loanword and a prissy one. John Florio, in his still useful Italian-English dictionary, gives ‘pricke’ for cazzo, but must have been doubtful about it. When Adam named things he left out of the Edenic glossary what was soon, anyway, to be occluded with fig-leaves. (The Italians, calling the female organ the fica, make Eve’s leaves wholly fitting.) The male organ has no name, and hence it is not strictly in order to talk of either euphemistic or dysphemistic terms for it. The word cunt has a long history of usage, but it has always been felt to be a dysphemism for something else. It does not have the right associations, except in Leopold Bloom’s description of the Middle East as ‘the dry shrunken cunt of the world’: three consonants strangle one vowel, the word seems hard and, yes, dry. But the female organ is muscular, which the male one is not, and there may be a deeper descriptive element in the word than we wish to accept. Meanwhile, the euphemisms and dysphemisms grow, are replaced, savoured, rejected, but there is no circle in which word and image meet.
One of the late Kenneth Tynan’s achievements was to use the word fuck for the first time on television. He kindly demonstrated its proper usage by composing a sentence: ‘A man fucks his wife.’ This may be termed the Lawrentian heresy, for a man does not, at least not regularly, do anything of the sort. Fuck, like its German cognate ficken, denotes sexual penetration but connotes aggression. It has nothing to do with making love or sleeping with, or any of the other euphemisms which centre on copulation, but Ms Collins’s ‘Why don’t we fuck?’, anaphrodisiastical as it is, is preferable to ‘Why don’t we copulate?’ But it is faute de mieux. A vast hopeless vocabulary tries to penetrate the vacuum, but to no avail; the vacuum is still there.
Dr Enright leaves Joseph Epstein, editor of The American Scholar, the chapter on ‘Sex and Euphemism’. It is a coy chapter, as it probably has to be, and it is wholly on the side of circumspection:
Suffice to say that in contemporary writing about sex, the stakes rise all the time. We are not talking, and haven’t been for some years, about your simple Sunday afternoon off the Grande Jatte fornication. Not only must sex in the contemporary novel grow more regular but it must become more rococo. Thus Mr Updike presents us with an activity known euphemistically as California sunshine…, Mr Roth has a woman in his most recent novel the contents of whose purse include ‘a nippleless bra, crotchless panties, a Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K-Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope’. Mr Mailer, relying on fundamentals, concentrates on heterosexual sodomy. Ah, me, the literary life.
Here one sees how easily the amateur philologist can move into the area of referents and forget words. It is the thing itself he is worrying about. Whatever kind of terminology the contemporary novelist employs, he is still being too open about sex. And not only the novelist. Epstein notes that in his journals of the 1920s Edmund Wilson used expressions like ‘I addressed myself to her bloomers’ but in the 1940s was ready to talk about his ‘large pink prong’. There is not really an increase in candour. But there is a decrease in discretion:
Would always run her tongue into my mouth when I kissed her before I had a chance to do it to her – and would do it so much and so fast that I hardly had a chance to get my own in. Would clasp her legs together very hard when I had my hand or my penis in her – seemed to have tremendous control of the muscles inside her vagina. Her frank and uninhibited animal appetite contrasted with her formal and gracious aristocratic manners.
Epstein finds this distasteful – ‘sex written without euphemism – and it is quite devoid of tenderness, is in fact chilling, even loathsome’. Agreed, but it has nothing to do with the eschewal of the euphemism: there is not one word there that shocks. What shocks is the reduction of the marital act of love to a set of mechanistic movements. The depiction of love-making (I am not using a euphemism) has the primary task of finding a figurative language for intense emotions which are, so to speak, set in parallel to the excitation of the nerves. The writer is now free to set it all down, let it all hang or stick out, but his freedom is a very dubious one. What is really going on in bed or on the floor is an experience that requires a high poetic talent for its expression, and no amount of verbal emancipation can confer that.
Are Americans more bemused by the magic of words than the British? Simon Hoggart, whom Enright invited to write on the euphemism in politics, does not think that it plays much of a role in the British system:
Abuse of the language is, of course, as common at Westminster as it is in any other national legislature, but more often it takes the form of hyperbole, evasion, vagueness and plain untruth. The principal reason for this is the adversarial nature of British politics. Every time someone tries to slide a euphemism into the language, his opponents promptly match it with the corresponding dysphemism.
This says something about the comparative locations of British and American authority. Hoggart cites an extract from Hansard, in which Mr Rooker, a Labour MP, asks the Conservative minister Norman Fowler: ‘Are the Government still looking to see where in the system they can make the cuts? Will the Rt Hon Gentleman spell it out for us?’ the Rt Hon Gentleman replies: ‘We are examining a number of areas inside the social security system to see if savings can be made.’ ‘Cuts’ and ‘savings’ mean the same thing, but the harmonics are different. ‘Cuts’ suggests the savage slicing of a knife, ‘savings’ the virtues of thrift and responsibility. The real word, which we do not know, lies somewhere between the opposed benches.
It is clear that euphemism and dysphemism are sides of a single coin which forms part of the currency evasion. Enright, in his admirable introduction, says that a good deal of the book he has edited is given to dysphemism, a fair example of which he provides in a footnote: ‘Rather than complain that the coffee is weak, tell your hostess that it’s like love in a canoe, i.e. ‘fuckin’ near water’.’ The provenance is Californian. And he rightly points out that the discrediting of the euphemism in our age had led not to a neutrality of diction but to a swing towards the opposite:
We find ourselves in a strange and (some will say) sadly ironic situation. Literature, ‘creative writing’ we used to call it, once elevated or ennobled or strengthened. With the help of dysphemism, it has now been turned upside-down: motives are customarily mean, the hero is a pathetic neurotic or well-meaning wreck, love is replaced by fornication, the evil may come to a bad end but the good certainly will. You might well suppose that fiction, as we hopefully call it still, is out to destroy the human race by rubbing its nose in its own filth, while only governments, political ideologues, military experts, business men and sometimes psychologists still consider the race worth saving. Why else would social scientists regard the backward as (even so) ‘exceptional’, and advertisers continually compliment us on our love of excellence, and the military come up at vast expense with a device called ‘The Peacemaker’?
The truth, of course, is that neutrality can be a property of grammar, while semantemes have always been soaked in some emotional fluid or other. In the army, I remember, the dysphemism was the norm, and in my north-western childhood there was no fairness of speech (‘Have you got a shithouse that won’t work?’ asked the plumber, and the housewife replied: ‘Aye, but he’s out drawing t’dole’). The food of the lower classes joined that of the public schools in being loathsomely appellated (dead baby in its own blood, and so on). One of the phenomena of our age ignored in these essays is what is termed foodhype, in which stale eggs are paraded as not merely dawn-new but still echoing with the triumphant cluck of the layer under the freshly risen Illinois (or wherever) sun. The euphemism of the menu takes none of us in, even early in the morning: we prefer fair words to the other kind, even when they lie. We cannot subsist without white lies; black lies are another matter.
A final point. The delusion still persists that the Victorian age invented the euphemism, and that before 1837 both speech and literature rang with a fine frankness; moreover, mealy-mouthedness was a unique property of the puritanised Anglo-Saxons. The truth is that the Victorians merely took to the limit (drumsticks for chicken legs, turkey bosom for turkey breast, and so on) a squeamishness about words that is built into the human character. The Romans put people to silence, and, of the newly silent, said that he vixit. The Malays have earthy words for micturition and defecation (kenching and berak, for instance) but are happier talking about buang ayer kechil and buang ayer besar – throwing little and big water. Examiners in the language, as I recall, would set little problems of translation with ‘At this ceremony the princes throw water at the princesses’. Word-evasion is such a universal characteristic that it hardly seems worthwhile issuing books about it. All they tell us is that human fear continues but the objects of fear change. And that takes us outside the realm of mere words.
Times Literary Supplement, 12 April 1985
Review of Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism
ed. D.J. Enright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)