BEARS ARE SCARY ANIMALS. They are so scary that early northern Europeans referred to them by substitute names for fear that uttering their real name might beckon these ferocious beasts. Instead, they talked of the honey eater, the licker, or the grandfather. The word “bear” itself evolved from a euphemistic term that meant “the brown one.” It is the oldest known euphemism, first recorded a thousand years ago. Because the word that “bear” replaced was never recorded, it remains a mystery.
Animals figure prominently in the history of euphemizing. It was quite common throughout the world to give feared animals euphemistic names. This was something that late-nineteenth-century anthropologists often noted. Because members of the Wajagga tribe near Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa believed that nearby predators had been sent by the dead to attack them, they only talked of such animals elliptically. Lions were the lords from the underworld; elephants, the chieftains. Alternatively, in hopes of driving elephants away with ridicule, they would call them woman’s bag since this huge animal’s hide was wrinkled and cracked like market bags used by women. Some Malays called elephants the tall ones, tigers the striped ones, crocodiles the gap-toothed thingammy-bobs. The Oraons of India’s Chota Nagpur region warily referred to tigers as long-tailed things and to snakes as ropes.
Words originally were not considered distinct from what they named. Those who believed this thought that referring to something by name risked summoning that entity. To say “husband” or “wife” presented no problem (for the most part). Saying “tiger,” on the other hand, or “Zeus,” was another matter. Who wanted to beckon them? This ancient fear is echoed whenever we say, “Speak of the devil, and he’ll appear.”
Because early humans thought words had the power to alert whatever they named, including predators, enemies, and evil spirits, not using the actual words for such ominous entities seemed prudent. Substitute words provided a safe vehicle for talking about frightening, taboo, or sacred topics. Like modern euphemisms, they were a way to fend off things that gave our ancestors pause by not referring to them directly. When embarking on a long sea voyage, members of the Alfoor tribe near Papua New Guinea thought it wise to fool eavesdropping spirits about their intentions by using substitute words. In place of “straight ahead,” they’d say bird’s beak. Instead of “starboard” (to the right), sword. Rather than “larboard” (to the left), shield.
A capacity to speak indirectly in this way undoubtedly quickly followed our ability to create and use words. The better our ability to express ourselves, the more need we felt to avoid being direct when doing so might court danger, cause anxiety, or give offense. Hence euphemisms. Euphemisms are a key indicator of increasing complexity of speech. Saying what we mean takes a high order of intelligence. It takes an even higher order to not say what we mean, while still conveying our thought.
Euphemisms gestate best in the loam of our most primitive emotions: terror, lust, and revulsion. Imagine early men and women trying to come up with a way to discuss, say, shit. Like us, they most likely had an actual word for feces, but one they found unpleasant to use in everyday conversation because of the image it evoked, to say nothing of the smell. Presumably, therefore, they created a new word, one that didn’t portray the topic quite so directly: brown stuff, say, or mushrooms. (“I almost stepped on some mushrooms over there.”) A couple about to copulate might ask, “Shall we go behind that tree and relax?” An interloper who caught them in the act might later report that he’d seen this man and woman relaxing.
The need for euphemisms to talk not only about bears and evil spirits but also about each other must have become apparent early in human history. Without oblique language, how could we gossip? Then as now, each group developed its own euphemisms for touchy topics such as sex. The Trobriand islanders whom Bronislaw Malinowski studied early last century used the phrase sit at euphemistically for “copulate.” “They sit at the garden way” was their way of saying, “They copulate in or near the garden.” Members of the Mehinaku tribe of central Brazil call surreptitiously soliciting extramarital sex alligatoring. That’s because in their tribal mythology, alligators are both highly sexual and unusually canny. Mehinakuans who want to have a dalliance retire to a discreet jungle clearing known as the alligator place. “Shall we visit the alligator place?” might sound innocent to an outsider but not to the Mehinaku. To them, this is a question fraught with significance.
Unlike Christians’ belief in God’s essential goodness, our early ancestors believed that the deities they worshiped were not always benevolent. Many were closer in spirit to the evil wizard in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Lord Voldemort, who is generally referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named” or “You Know Who.” As with Voldemort, our ancestors thought that referring to deities by name might provoke their terrible wrath. If such dangerous spirits did not overhear themselves being discussed, they might leave us alone. Or so it was thought.
In time, this belief was integrated into theology. Recall the relationship of our word “euphemism” with the Greek eupheme and related words. In ancient Greece, euphemizein meant “speak with fair words” and often referred to terms used in place of ones considered sacred. Its opposite was blasphemein, the root of “blaspheme,” meaning “to speak lightly or amiss of sacred things.” Many early euphemisms were a means to avoid being blasphemous.
Among the ancients, this wasn’t just a matter of piety. Greek and Roman deities were not always nice. Many were rather cranky, a bit testy, easily provoked. Hoping to curry favor with such mercurial gods, some Greeks called them the Kindly Ones or the Gracious Ones. In a similar spirit, the Irish later tried to appease nasty fairies by referring to them as good folk.
Not using the actual names of spiritual figures was considered a shrewd strategy for keeping those figures from knowing that they were on your mind. It also suggested reverence and awe. This tradition persisted into the Judeo-Christian era. It lives on in the frequent use of Christian terms such as the Almighty, our Creator, or Heavenly Father, instead of making direct reference to God, and in the Jewish tradition of recording his name as G-d or Yahweh.
Until quite recently, those who wished to wreak maximum verbal havoc uttered blasphemous expletives. Even under the most dire provocations—a stubbed toe, say, or a thumb banged with a hammer—our pious ancestors would not have dared take the Lord’s name in vain by calling out “Oh, God!” “goddamn!” or even “damn!” In Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta H.M.S. Pinafore, Captain Corcoran expresses a common attitude toward the last word in centuries past:
Though ‘Bother it’ I may
Occasionally say,
I never use a big, big D
Today, we marvel that such a word excited sufficient horror to call for euphemizing, but it did. Consider tinkers and their damns or dams. These itinerant utensil repairers were not known for having civil tongues. In fact, their constant swearing was so notorious that “not worth a tinker’s damn” became a common catchphrase. This saying posed problems for tender ears, however, so an alternative etymology emerged, explaining that “dam” referred to the mound of dough that tinkers built around a flawed utensil segment that they then flooded with solder. Since this dam could be used only once, something of no lasting value might be described as not worth a tinker’s dam.
In more reverent times, the penalty for using blasphemous words was far greater than a mouth washed out with soap. Christians particularly dreaded the prospect of an eternity spent with flames burning their ankles and the devil’s trident poking their behinds. To those who avoided using a term such as “hell,” the fiery depths were very real. Summoning the devil by calling out his name (“The devil!”) or that of his headquarters (“Hell!”) was serious business. Today “Go to hell!” is among the mildest of epithets. But at a time when the prospect of being consigned to an afterlife of eternal agony was so vivid and feared, it was a dire curse.
As a result, the market was robust for substitute expressions to avoid blasphemous ones. Early on, “God” was euphemized to gog, gosse, gom, and gad, to name just a few. “Lord” could be law, lawks, lawzy, lawdy, land, or losh. More obvious euphemisms such as gosh darn and heck and Jimminy Christmas were supplemented by others, such as zounds (for “God’s wounds”) and gadzooks (for “God’s hooks”). At the other end of the religious spectrum, deuce and dickens stood in for “devil,” and an uncomfortable place or that other place for “hell.”
Nearly a century ago, a University of California linguist collected hundreds of euphemistic American exclamations. Some showed remarkable ingenuity. “Jesus Christ” became Jeans Rice, grease us twice, cheese and rice, and various other dairy-based euphemisms, such as sweet cheesecake or cheese and crackers. Gee itself was a shortening of the name of God’s Son. “Christ” alone inspired cripes and crikey. “Damn” gave way to darn, dang, ding-bust (“I’ll be ding-busted”), jim jam (“I’ll be jim-jammed”), and jim swiggle (“I’ll be jim-swiggled”). “Hell” became Helen, Halifax, and hen. Or, as Canadians call the devil’s abode, h-e-double-hockey-sticks.
Innocuous expressions such as “Dear me!” and “Good gracious!” had the added benefit of giving users a moment to regroup. Saying something like “Holy mackerel!” or “Criminy!” gave speakers a split second to pivot from blasphemy to acceptability. Medieval Englishmen who started to say “By God!” could shift quickly to “By Jove!”; antebellum Americans to “By gum!” Best of all was “By Godfrey!” Even “I swear!” was routinely replaced by “I swan!” after the mid-eighteenth century. Those who were tempted to say “Good God!” could think twice and say “Good gravy!” Charlie Brown—a creation of devout Christian Charles Schulz—would never say “Good God!” He would say “Good grief!” however, and did—often.
Since our pious ancestors were so restrained when it came to swearing, it’s easy to conclude that they were verbally restrained in general. Nothing could be further from the truth. From ancient times on, lewd talk has been at least as common as it is today.
Terms such as “shit,” “arse,” and “teat” are among the oldest English words in continual use. Chaucer’s work was filled with expletives. In The Reeve’s Tale, Aleyn uses a verb for copulating common at that time when he says, “I have thries [thrice] in this shorte night / Swived the millers doghter bolt upright.” In The Miller’s Tale, Nicholas takes a direct approach to courting Allison: “And prively he caughte hire by the queinte.” (The Middle English term queinte was later shortened to “cunt.”) A few centuries later, playwright Ben Jonson freely used phrases such as “Shit o’ your head” and “Turd t’ your teeth.” A widow in the 1618 play Amends for Ladies by Nathaniel Field exclaims, “O man, what art thou when thy cock is up!”
One reason that William Shakespeare is such a pivotal figure in literary history was his ability to combine earthy speech with sly metaphor. “Pistol’s cock is up,” he wrote in Henry V, “And flashing fire will follow.” Shakespeare routinely couched bawdy episodes in elliptical terms for the sheer delight of entertaining audiences with his naughty wordplay. Shakespearean scholar Pauline Kiernan has tallied more than 180 synonyms for female genitals in the Bard’s plays, 200 for the male version, and 700 verbal variations on sex play. “Even ardent Shakespeare fans,” writes Kiernan in Filthy Shakespeare, “experience bum-numbing moments during long and apparently tedious exchanges of verbal banter that make little sense to us because we don’t realize that the harmless-sounding words are actually exuberant displays of sparkling coded sexual dialogue.” The results are classic examples of the mingling of code words, slang, and euphemism. When Angelo in Measure for Measure calls his lustful longing for a young nun “a strong and swelling evil,” “swelling” refers both to his growing feeling and his rising penis. Hamlet refers to the “country matters” that can be found between “maids’ legs.” When an elderly shepherd comes upon an abandoned baby in The Winter’s Tale, the old man surmises that it is the result of “some stair-work, some trunk work, some behind-door-work.” Kiernan translates this speculation about the baby’s origins into modern vernacular: “a shag behind the back stairs, a furtive fuck inside a trunk or a screw up against a wall.”
It’s difficult for us to comprehend how many words and expressions we think of as profane were commonly used in Shakespeare’s time. This is partly because such terms weren’t as taboo back then, partly because common folk in particular weren’t all that concerned about proper speech. To them, bad words were ones that offended the Lord, not earthy terms for body parts or body wastes or matters sexual. Before a growing middle class clamped down on speech considered coarse, the King James Version of the Bible (1611) freely incorporated such terms as “piss,” “teat,” “give suck,” and “whorish.” Even among devoutly Christian American colonists, talk we might consider lewd did not seem so to them. Puritans in Massachusetts wrote so candidly about sexual activity in their ranks that heavy censorship was required before such writing could be published in modern editions. At the end of the seventeenth century, an English travel writer observed of New Englanders, “notwithstanding their Sanctity they are very Prophane in their common Dialect.” A few decades later, an English clergyman wrote from Maryland that visitors like himself were not exempted from the “obscene Conceits and broad Expressions” of its residents. Yet this colony had a statute that provided for boring a hole through the tongue of first-time blasphemers, branding a B on the forehead of second offenders, and executing anyone who dared blaspheme a third time.
During his reign from 1603 to 1625, James I, himself no slouch in the swearing department, fined members of his court twelve pence for each curse they uttered there. An Act of Parliament in 1623 made it illegal to swear in general. Subsequent laws that proscribed speech considered blasphemous or seditious accelerated the need for judicious euphemisms. Oliver Cromwell retained the King James approach to swearing when warning his soldiers in 1642 that “Not a man swears but pays his twelve pence.” Repeat offenders risked having their tongues pierced with a hot iron. In 1694, Parliament passed an Act for More Effectual Suppressing Profane Cursing and Swearing.
As more people moved into the middle class, social insecurity mounted—about language especially. Upwardly mobile residents of England and its colonies turned to primers for guidance. Books on proper speech were especially popular. In America’s first grammar, a William and Mary professor wrote in 1721, “None of good Manners use nasty Expressions, and foul vulgar Terms, which are nauseous, and odious.”
In the prelude to the Victorian era, fear of blasphemy gradually gave way to fear of impropriety. Sex, body parts, and bodily functions became subjects of mounting verbal concern. Anxiety about taking the Lord’s name in vain was rivaled by apprehension about using inappropriate language. This was especially true among those who regarded themselves as genteel or wished to be seen that way. By using proper verbal evasions—what linguists call “minced oaths”—status-conscious speakers of English distanced themselves from the vulgar mob. In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne depicted a mid-eighteenth-century gentleman who when provoked consulted a list of mild oaths that he considered acceptable substitutes for profane ones.
Pioneering dictionary compilers such as Samuel Johnson left out words they considered inappropriate. Although Johnson included “piss,” “turd,” “arse,” and “fart” in his 1755 opus, he omitted other terms such as “shit,” “penis,” “vagina,” “cunt,” and “fuck.” When a proper London lady congratulated him for keeping such words out of his dictionary, the lexicographer responded, “Then you have been looking for them?”
Beginning in Dr. Johnson’s time and throughout the next century, bourgeois Englishwomen in particular grew increasingly prudish. As the Industrial Revolution left more and more women at home with time on their hands, developing good manners became both their occupation and preoccupation. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens satirized this sensibility with the character Mrs. General, whom the newly affluent Dorrits hire to teach them how to be more refined. A truly refined mind, she tells them, is one that appears to be “ignorant of the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and pleasant.”
“Refinement” was the word of the hour among the upwardly mobile. Freshly minted members of the middle class were keen to demonstrate how respectably they could speak. Fastidious concern about propriety fueled a constant demand for more euphemisms, especially in the areas of sex, secretions, and anatomy. When it came to the body, it wasn’t just talk of reproductive organs that raised eyebrows. Reference to any part at all became questionable. In 1810 novelist Susan Ferrier wrote a letter to a male friend in which she referred to cutting corns off her feet. For this breach of decorum, Ferrier later observed, she was subjected to “the scorn of the virtuous and the detestation of the pure in heart,” adding, “I must have had some ingenuity, if I could extract either immorality or indecency from a corn! But so it was. I was reprobated… as one of the abandoned of my sex.”
To those who laid the foundations for the Victorian era, language was seen as something that needed to be purified, cleansed of any terms that might inspire improper thoughts. Mastery of euphemisms became no less a part of womanly arts than the ability to make crumpets and gracefully pour tea. “What did she say?” asks the narrator of Jane Austen’s 1816 novel, Emma. “Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.” Linguist Kerry Linfoot-Ham has determined that Emma is filled with oblique references to erotic activity. They include “a little movement of more than common friendliness” (seductiveness), “go away in the evening attended by her pleasant husband” (going off to have sex), and “flutter of pleasure” (sexual excitement itself ). One character’s pregnancy was referred to simply as “her situation.”
Among women of Austen’s class, language grew increasingly circumspect. Considered too vulgar for tender ears, “sick” was replaced by ill. “Sweat” became perspiration, and “spit” was euphemized to expectorate. At an extreme, a profanity such as “cunt” was referred to as the monosyllable.
One reason for the heavy use of euphemism in literary works at this time was that books were so commonly read aloud within families. This was what motivated a retired English physician named Thomas Bowdler to edit a collection of Shakespeare’s plays for tender ears. In The Family Shakespeare, “Out damn’d spot” was revised to “Out crimson spot”; Romeo and Juliet were a chaste young couple; and Ophelia’s suicide became an accidental drowning. Bowdler was sure that the Bard himself would have approved. In recognition of his efforts, we still call censorship of all kinds “bowdlerization.” Dr. Bowdler later had a go at the Bible.
Deleting bad words from the Bible was a practice of long standing, one the American lexicographer Noah Webster took to new heights. Even though the King James Version had been considered appropriately reverent during two centuries of use, Webster concluded that some of its language was unsuited to the more refined discourse of his time. In Ruth 1:11, Naomi’s question, “Are there yet any more sons in my womb?” was changed to “Shall I bear more sons?” Biblical mothers would no longer “give sucke” to their babies in Webster’s Bible, though they would nurse their young ones. The line “they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss” in Isaiah 36:12 was refined to read “they may devour their vilest excretions.” Even seemingly inoffensive phrases such as “the river shall stink” in Exodus 7:18 gave way to “the river shall be offensive in smell.”
A combination of religious fervor and upward mobility, with its attendant verbal insecurity, made the early-nineteenth century what H. L. Mencken called a “Golden Age of Euphemism.” As language grew more “refined,” entire new areas of discourse became candidates for verbal evasion. This trend did not go unnoticed. Nathaniel Ames, who spent years at sea after being expelled from Harvard in 1814, was less dismayed by the guttural talk of his fellow seamen than by the flowery circumlocutions he encountered on shore. There Ames heard squinting referred to as optical indecision, indigestion called dyspepsy, and a woman who shamelessly flirted with every man in sight described as very free in her manners. Ames was also put off by the growing use of euphemistic foreign expressions. “Our mother tongue is fast assuming a dress like that of a state’s prison convict,” he wrote, “one leg of its inexpressibles being made of Greek, and the other of French, while the waistbands are made of Latin.”
“Inexpressibles”? Surely Ames would not use this mealymouthed euphemism for “trousers” that was common in his time. Yet he did. Even plain-speaking Nathaniel Ames wasn’t willing to flout the nineteenth-century taboo against using this word or “breeches,” for fear that doing so might make ladies swoon. In John Baldwin Buckstone’s 1835 play “Dream at Sea,” one character reprimands another for referring to breeches. “Hush,” he is told, “you should say inexpressibles. That’s the way genteel people talk.”
During the first half of the nineteenth century, a wide range of other euphemisms for trousers were auditioned: irrepressibles, indescribables, ineffables, unutterables, nether garments, continuations, don’t name ’ems, and mustn’t mention ’ems, to mention just a few. In Sketches by Boz (1836), Charles Dickens wrote that one character wore “light inexplicables without a spot.” In The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), a servant named Trotter “gave four distinct slaps on the pocket of his mulberry indescribable.” Six years later, in American Notes (1842), Dickens said of a growing boy, “it had been found necessary to make an addition to the legs of his inexpressibles.”
If direct reference to trousers was taboo in Dickens’s time, mention of stockings was considered downright degenerate. Hose was the preferred synonym in antebellum America, though long socks would do in a pinch. And what of underwear? Fear was rampant that saying the word “panty” might evoke an image of this portal garment, and who knew where that might lead? Better one should say undergarment, underthing, unmentionable, or smalls (short for small clothes).
When women wore corsets, there was always the troubling prospect that this word might enter men’s minds and emerge from their mouths. While visiting Cincinnati in the early 1830s, a German tourist was reprimanded for saying “corset” in mixed company. Foundation, he was informed, was the preferred synonym. (In England, it was stays.) During her own sojourn in Cincinnati a few years later, Frances Trollope, mother of English novelist Anthony Trollope, found that “many words to which I had never heard an objectionable meaning attached, were totally interdicted, and the strangest paraphrastic sentences substituted.”
Like Mrs. Trollope, visitors from abroad often commented on the unusually stilted language Americans used at this time. Alexis de Tocqueville thought the guarded discourse he heard so often when touring the United States might be due to the fact that men and women mingled freely there, forcing both sexes to choose their words carefully. In other words, the very social freedom and egalitarianism that Americans prized made them feel a need to self-censor when in mixed company. The fact that Americans routinely saw themselves as on their way to affluence (if not there already) made them feel it was crucial to use the right words, ones they thought would help them on their journey.
This presented a problem to foreign visitors, even ones who spoke English. Which words needed to be avoided and which ones were appropriate wasn’t always clear. Shortly after Tocqueville returned to France, the English naval captain Frederick Marryat got in trouble one summer day in 1837 by innocently asking a young American friend whether she’d hurt her leg after taking a tumble while they visited Niagara Falls. The outraged woman informed Captain Marryat that this word was not used in her country. When the aristocratic Englishman begged her pardon and asked what word was used for this body part, she responded “limb.”
The need to avoid saying “leg” at this time led to remarkable euphemistic creativity. In addition to the pedestrian limbs (a shortening of nether limbs), mid-nineteenth-century synonyms for “leg” included understandings and underpinners. In his 1849 novella Kavanaugh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow excerpted this rule from the prospectus of a fashionable girls’ boarding school: “Young ladies are not allowed to cross their benders in school.” A few years later, author Richard Meade Bache talked with an American woman who stammered about before averring that women in New England tended to have well-formed extremities (i.e., arms and legs).
In this ticklish verbal climate, even the extremities of poultry had to be approached with care. At a hotel, Bache overheard another woman ask a waiter to bring her a chicken’s trotter (leg again). During the same era, an English visitor to America was puzzled when asked by a woman at a dinner table if he’d please give her “the first and second joint of a chicken” (i.e., the leg). As Winston Churchill later discovered, polite guests at American tables knew that asking a poultry-serving hostess for white meat instead of “breast meat,” dark meat instead of “a thigh,” and a drumstick in place of “a leg,” saved embarrassment all around. Prior to his tour of the United States, Captain Marryat witnessed a similar fastidiousness in the West Indies, which he parlayed into a passage in his 1834 novel Peter Simple. The protagonist of that book is seated beside a local woman at a dinner in Barbados. “Fate had placed me opposite to a fine turkey,” he reports. “I asked my partner if I should have the pleasure of helping her to a piece of the breast. She looked at me indignantly, and said, ‘Curse your impudence, sar. I wonder where you larn manners. Sar, I take a lilly turkey bosom, if you please. Talk of breast to a lady, sar;—really quite horrid.’ ”
Poultry presented all manner of verbal pitfalls at this time. “Cock” in particular posed serious problems. This word was short for “cockerel,” a male chicken. But “cock” was also short for “watercock,” the spigot of a barrel, leading it to become slang for “penis.” Unfortunately, that tainted term was embedded in many others. In the United States especially, previously innocent terms such as “cockeyed” and “cocksure” could no longer be used when both sexes were present. Under this regimen, “weathercocks” became weathervanes; “haycocks,” haystacks; and “apricocks,” apricots. Those burdened with last names such as “Hitchcock” and “Leacock” began to feel under siege. In response, an American family named “Alcocke” changed their name to Alcox. Fearing that this might not be adequate, before siring a daughter named Louisa May in 1832, Bronson Alcox became Bronson Alcott.
In the United States, male chickens became crowers, then roosters. This was not without controversy. “The word rooster is an Americanism,” noted Richard Meade Bache, “which, the sooner we forget, the better. Does not the hen of the same species roost also?” One compiler of Americanisms quoted an English critic who defined “rooster” as “a ladyism for cock.” An English visitor to the United States professed to have heard a rooster-and-ox story (i.e., “a cock-and-bull tale”). A mid-nineteenth-century spoof written by Canadian humorist Thomas Haliburton featured a Massachusetts woman who described her brother as a “rooster swain” in the navy. When a man she knew pressed her for the meaning of that rank, the young woman responded, “a rooster swain, if you must know, you wicked critter you, is a cockswain; a word you know’d well enough warn’t fit for a lady to speak.”
Along with male chickens, bulls posed problems for proper speakers. In this case, it was the mental images conjured by this snorting, raging, rapacious animal that aroused concern. Presumably, not referring to bulls directly would censor those images. This led to a wide range of euphemisms, male cow being the most popular. Other acceptable synonyms included cow-critter, cow-brute, cow man, seed ox, toro, and roarer. Also permissible were he-cow and gentleman-cow. Many of those reciting Longfellow’s 1841 poem “Wreck of the Hesperus” sacrificed rhyme for refinement when they revised the last three words of one line—“like the horns of an angry bull”—in this fashion:
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked as soft as carded wool;
But the cruel rocks they gored her side,
Like the horns of a gentleman cow.
The transition from piety to propriety reached its peak during the Victorian era. Reverence was in decline at this time, prudishness on the rise. Laws banning blasphemy in Britain broadened to proscribe obscenity and “indecency.” British judges in such cases focused less on sacrilegious expressions per se than on the words used to express them. To avoid being charged with blasphemy, wrote a British legal scholar in the late-Victorian era, authors were advised to “abstain from ribaldry and licentious approach.” In her book Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, Joss Marsh makes a compelling case that issues of class lay at the heart of this transition. Terms banned as indecent were ones commonly heard on British streets, if not in its drawing rooms. To Marsh, this illustrated a “fear of words endemic in a culture addicted to euphemisms.”
Euphemistic speech became an important means by which the newly affluent distinguished themselves from the vulgar masses. When a proper Victorian lady murmured to her pharmacist that she needed some curl paper, he reached beneath the counter and handed her a box containing sheets of what we would call toilet or lavatory paper. Should a sneeze erupt from this woman’s nostrils, she might apologize for her nose spasm. Instead of reading the King James Bible with all its crude words, she could turn with relief to a new translation that was filled with euphemisms.
Despite the devout Christianity being promoted at this time, it was fastidious concern with proper deportment that really drove evasive speech among Victorians. “The prudery of evasion was more indebted to middle-class gentility than to the Puritan revival,” concludes historian Walter Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind. A euphemism-rich vocabulary developed by Victorians is the sound track of their era. Respectable Englishmen and -women no longer “went to bed”; they retired. Wives didn’t “get pregnant”; they were en famille. What produced their pregnancy was only referred to in the most oblique terms. Victorians’ lives may not have been purer than those of their ancestors, observed author-editor William Makepeace Thackeray, but their mouths certainly were. Thackeray himself, who considered his era more “squeamish” than moral, rejected a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning because it included the word harlot. Yet harlot was originally a euphemism for “whore.”
In the privacy of his own notes, Thomas Carlyle called a famous French courtesan “that old wh-re.” When his nephew Andrew Carlyle edited these notes for publication in 1858, “wh-re” proved too bold and was changed to “female.” Following Nathaniel Hawthorne’s death in 1864, his wife, Sophia, combed through her husband’s journals to clean them up for public consumption, deleting every mention of “whores” and “pimps.” Hawthorne’s expression “of that kidney” became “of that class.” The author’s widow also fastidiously replaced the word “leg” with “limb” wherever it appeared.
This type of bowdlerizing reflected continued concern about referring directly to certain body parts. The articles of clothing that covered them remained problematic too, particularly those closest to the skin. As late as 1908, an English author referred to two young women wearing gowns so short that they displayed “certain heavily-frilled cotton investitures of the lower limbs” (i.e., petticoats). Linen was a common euphemism for underwear among Victorians, echoed in today’s concern about “washing one’s dirty linen in public.” “Lingerie” first appeared in the late-nineteenth century, a word borrowed from the French that only gradually became suggestive.
As historians of the era keep reminding us, the Victorians were far lustier than we imagine or they would have had us believe. An underground trade in erotica was robust at that time. Queen Victoria herself enjoyed collecting, and even drawing, pictures of naked men. Some forty-two thousand children were born out of wedlock in England and Wales in 1851 alone. A mid-nineteenth-century doctor estimated that one in twelve unmarried Englishwomen had “strayed from the path of virtue.” For the historical record, however, the Victorians’ words spoke louder than their actions.
The list of words that proper Victorians thought required euphemisms was especially long when it came to sex. Any term that conveyed even a breath of sexuality was subject to revision or deletion. During English legal proceedings, rape was referred to as “taking improper liberties” or “feloniously ravishing.” Other kinds of sexual imposition—including molestation of children—came under the heading of “acting in an indecent manner.” “Certain” was an important multipurpose word in divorce-related testimony and might refer to a certain organ, a certain unnatural vice, a certain posture, or a certain condition (i.e., pregnancy).
The monumental Oxford English Dictionary was published serially during this period, commanding attention not just for the words included but also for those left out. As a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language later noted of this classic work, “They excluded some infamous four-letter words, moving directly from fucivorous to fuco’d, for example, although they entered other ‘Anglo-Saxonisms’, such as those between shisham and shiver, alleging however that these words are ‘not now in decent use’, the same judgment made of fart.”
Even though Victorian attitudes waned after World War I, they found refuge among censors of movies. These modern-day Bowdlers accessed a well-stocked pantry of euphemisms for alternatives to the smut they saw creeping into scripts. Pennsylvania’s censors demanded that a “loose woman” in D. W. Griffith’s 1920 film Way Down East be called an “adventuress.” A year later, the same censors concluded that having a character exclaim “It’s a boy!” in a film suggested too boldly that a baby had just been born. They proposed instead, “The boy is better” (leading one film critic to call this “the first case of pre-natal screen colic” on record).
In 1922 leading moviemakers hired onetime chairman of the Republican National Committee Will Hays to help them toe the verbal line. Even though the advent of talkies complicated his work, this snaggle-toothed Indianan was up to the job. His office made the producers of one movie muffle “damned” in its sound track. According to Gerald Gardner, author of The Censorship Papers, because “Oh God!” was considered too blasphemous for moviegoers’ ears, “a generation of screenwriters ground their teeth as they typed ‘Oh boy!’ ” Alternatively, they came up with nonsense euphemisms such as “Godfrey Daniels!” for W. C. Fields and “Jumping butterballs!” for the Marx Brothers.
By 1933, Hays reported that his office had required that some twelve hundred changes be made in scripts and story treatments during that year alone. Words banned by the Motion Picture Production Code included not just “hell” and “damn” but also “virgin,” “fairy,” “goose,” “Gawd,” “madam,” “pansy,” “tart,” “razzberry,” “S.O.B,” “son-of-a,” and “nuts.” For W. C. Fields’s film The Bank Dick, the Hays Office suggested that “black pussy”—referring to a cat—be replaced by black pussycat. They demanded that the word “slut” be deleted from For Whom the Bell Tolls. When Dooley Wilson played “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, the script called for Humphrey Bogart to say “What the (pause) are you playing?” Even a pause implying the word “hell” was considered questionable, however, and the Hays Office asked that movie’s producers to revise this line.
“The fight against filth kept us busy,” Hays wrote in his memoirs. “The dozens of ways of injecting sex into films led to a veritable game of hide-and-seek, in which we tried our best to keep producers advised on the cutting out of unfit words or scenes before they reached the screen.”
Hays’s particular bête noire was Mae West. Some thought that the Production Code was created with her in mind. Far from being outraged, the sultry actress and screenwriter seemed to enjoy the challenge of jousting with Hays and his minions. “Censorship made me,” she once said. Like a low-rent Shakespeare, West sprinkled her movies with as many suggestive remarks as she thought she could get away with and some she knew would never pass muster, as red herrings. This led to a constant game of cat and mouse with Production Code censors. Under pressure from the Hays Office, a song lyric in I’m No Angel— “Takes a good man to make me”—was changed to “Takes a good man to break me.” The line “I like sophisticated men to take me home” became “I like sophisticated men to take me out.” Hays’s assistants blue-penciled “tart,” “jeez,” “punk,” and “Lawdy” from that film’s script. They also wanted one of West’s best-remembered lines—“When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better”—to be made less suggestive. Thankfully, they didn’t succeed.
A watershed moment in pitched battles fought between the Hays Office and movie producers took place during the screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind. After reviewing the script for this film, they demanded that a brothel owner become a saloon keeper. Words related to her erstwhile profession such as “chippie,” “courtesan,” “floozy,” “mistress,” “slut,” “tart,” and “whore” had to be deleted. The Hays Office was also disturbed by the many references to another woman’s pregnancy, even though she was married. But no problem proved more vexing than Rhett Butler’s exit line in the movie’s closing scene, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Hays’s censors objected, of course. In response, MGM suggested some alternatives: “I don’t give a hoot,” “I just don’t care,” “It’s all the same to me,” “It is of no consequence,” and “My indifference is boundless.” To placate Hays, the studio actually filmed an alternate take in which Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara, “My dear, I don’t care.” It was as if Lady Macbeth had said “Out darned spot!” Fortunately, MGM stood its ground and won.
Discussing what the Hays Office would or wouldn’t allow on the silver screen became a popular American pastime. According to a widespread but unfounded rumor, the Hays Office would not permit any couple to be in bed on screen unless the man had one foot on the floor. That inspired an enduring euphemism for heavy petting without consummation: one foot on the floor. A 2009 magazine profile of the writer-director Rebecca Miller noted that she was suspended from her boarding school “after letting a boy take both feet off the floor while sitting on her bed.”
As this suggests, on the euphemistic carousel, one topic is a perennial source of verbal evasion, independent of time and place. You may suspect which one I mean. If any subject has transcended all eras and provided a constant source of new euphemisms it is, how shall we say, coital activity.