Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Swearing: A F**king Long History

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Have you ever wondered where the &%@! swear words come from? Well today, Kate is going Betwixt the Sheets to find out.Linguist legend Deborah Cameron is back on the podcast to tell us more about the history of some of your favourite curse words. From the f-word and the c-word, to nicknames for nether regions; we're looking at the etymology of these words, and discovering when they were deemed offensive by society. Saxon origins, medieval myths and internet abbreviations - you'll never think of swear words in the same way again. Read more about Deborah's work here.This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Blooper Twliber twixters, it's me. Fri-Kate, Gistler. How the fuck for you? Why am I swearing before I've even given you your fair-doos warning? Well, it's because you really need one this time because we are talking about the history of swear words.

So, fucking buckle up. Here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things covering a range of adult subjects in an adulty way. And you should be an adult too. And if you're not an adult, You need to f*** off right now. For the rest of you, I am ready to do this if you are.

It will come as absolutely no surprise to any of you after that little lot that I do like to swear. I do, you know, it's an art form when you can do it well. And to be honest, I think that it's a sure sign that you're actually a rather wonderful person. Do you happen to have a favourite swear word? Oh, lovely betwixta. You'll go to in moments of anguish, joy and despair. is it? Which one I think my favourite is cunt, you know? It's just so much fun to use that one. It's always a fun question to ask. And when I was chatting to none other than Miriam Margulies

recently, I asked her what her favourite swear word was. Can't face. I don't know why it works so well, but it's lasted through the centuries, more than my cunt has anyway. That is a humdinger, Miriam, thank you for giving us so much to think about. You'll hear much more from her in a few weeks' time. Honestly, she's an absolute legend. A fucking legend. And another guest that we had on a past episode when we were talking about the history of the word cunt

was the utterly glorious and incomparable Cathy Burke. The word cunt isn't something I've ever associated with my fanny. Growing up in North London, and I never really knew it came from talking about fannies. I just knew it as a word that people called each other, either in anger or in jest, i.e., hello, you silly cunt, or you're a doth cunt, aren't you?

The word cunt, it could be very aggressive. So I think the only time I've used it, meaning to call somebody an absolute cunt, is when I'm tweeting or talking about someone like who I do think is an absolute cunt. I just think it's a fab word. I think it could be used in many different ways. I would certainly call a cunt,

but I wouldn't call my auntie one. Lots of love, you silly cunt. Honestly, I could just listen to Cathy talk about the word cunt all day long. Do scroll back in your betwixt podcast feed to hear that episode. Well, have you come up with your favorite yet? If you're lacking inspiration, then you are in the right place. Today, we are going to be looking into the history of swear words. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with a Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. By now, I trust that you have come up with a short list of your favourite swear words. Fuck, shit, bastard, cunt, fucking cuntie bollocks, they're all useful in their own unique way. But what are the origins of some of these words and how has their meaning changed over time? Today we're joined by friend of the show and linguistic expert Professor Deborah Cameron

to delve into the history of some of our most taboo words. And welcome back to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Deborah Cameron. How are you doing? Just fine. I had so much fun talking to you last time about the history of the word cunt. And it was a hugely popular episode. So clearly other people thoroughly enjoyed themselves as well. So we had to get you back on to talk about the history of swearing in general. Because it's a fascinating subject. I love a swear word. I get a bit. carried away with swear words and often forget what company I'm in and that not everybody has as much fun with them as I do. But I suppose my first question to such an eminent linguist as yourself is what are swear words? It's such an obvious starter question. But when you really break it down, it's strange that you can make a noise and that offends people. Yeah. And that putting the same meaning into a different word, you know, you can't say urinate off or defecate.

sure. So, you know, if you make it urinate or defecate, it becomes kind of medical and not swearing at all. That's weird that, isn't it? That doesn't work at all. No. Some people have faux swear words. Fudge instead of fuck or sugar instead of shit. I mean, it may do the job for them, but it's never going to get them, you know, censored or whatever. And some of them can justify it as in tune with, let's say, their religious beliefs. I mean, you ask what is a swear word and it? It kind of varies. The earliest cases of what we now call and still counters swear words would have been from a time when people actually believed in the kind of magical efficacy of words. So if you think about terms like an oath or a curse, those were real things. Early swear words took the name of the Lord in vain or invoked the name of the devil.

Or they were, you know, curses. They were magical incantations that were thought to be able to cause. and sickness and crop failure and so on. So they were dangerous words. But then we've got other sets of words which become offensive or get counted as swearing later on, things like the kind of sex terms and the bodily function terms, which really reflect sort of changing ideas about kind of manners and changing social norms for what can and can't be said.

I mean, some words that we now consider very offensive really were completely inoffensive for centuries. But a person who's done a lot of research on the history of English swearing is Tony McHenry, the corpus linguist Tony McHenry. And he reckons there was a major shift at the end of the 17th century when the rising middle class of the time, you know, people who were essentially in trade, small manufacturers and shopkeepers and so on, tried to assert their moral superiority over both the laboring masses and the aristocracy, who actually have the power and wealth. And they didn't have great wealth or political power,

but they could try and set a moral tone. And one instrument they used was founding societies like there actually was a society called the Society for the Reform of Manners, a Christian middle-class society, founded in 1691, which basically tried to get existing but largely unenforced laws against immorality and vice enforced. So they encourage people to inform, on their neighbours. They even paid them in some cases to inform for things like breaking the rules

about the Sabbath by working or about drunkenness, prostitution, gambling, that sort of thing, but also swearing, blasphemy, profanity, those kinds of things. And they badgered Justices of the peace to actually prosecute. Just on the say so of one person, you know, at the beginning you could get someone fined for swearing, you know, just if one, witness swore before a Justice of the Peace that this had happened. According to McKinnery, you know, while this was not 100% effective, because Justice of the Peace sometimes said, we've got more important things to do. It did kind of generate a sort of moral panic around swearing, which McHenry would say has in some form lasted for, you know, the 300 years since. You know,

before that it was a kind of grave religious offence, or it might have this magical witchcraft. sorcery significance. But this was when, you know, if you like, manners changed. Manners became modern and swearing became not something he did in polite company. So this is the period sort of the late 17th century onwards when swearing gets associated with all the things we associate it with now, like being uneducated and not having a good vocabulary, being, you know, a kind of rough working class thing to do, being associated with men rather than women and with, you know, kind of the young and rebellious. So when swearing becomes

kind of unacceptable, all these different kinds of swearing, not just for religious reasons, but for social ones, that, of course, obviously makes it into a way that you can rebel against authority. Until the words are offensive, you don't get any kind of charge out of using them to sort of show that you are the kind of person who goes against social norm, but after it becomes that, then you do. McHenery would say that this is what offends people in modern times. What swearing is in modern times is really not any longer about blasphemy or sorcery. It's about, you know, disrespect for in particular middle class authority and standards. So it's words that offend against those norms and they come in various varieties. So we've kept some of the old

blasphemy sorcery type of ones, but also added a lot of different swear words, bodily functions, sex, just impoliteness in general. And of course, today, the new swear words are, if you like, what used to be called politically incorrect. So, you know, there's a lot of evidence that people nowadays are much more concerned about, let's say, racist epithets or, you know, homophobia, prejudicial sorts of language than they are about old things like, you know, bloody and bastard and bugger and so forth. Things like the BBC and Ofcom do surveys, periodic. to find out what language people think is offensive on television. And they have seen this shift away from people.

You know, profanity hardly offends anybody now, whereas racism, for example, offends much larger numbers of people than, you know, sex terms or whatever. So it's a changing picture what is swearing. That was fascinating. Do you think we've always had swear words? Like, obviously some of them will have been lost to us. But I mean, even back in the ancient, when we were wandering around caves, if someone dropped a rock on his foot, you might have had a word to shout out.

Yes, taboo is a very old cultural property. And it is connected with the idea of word magic that the utterance of certain words has to be forbidden because it can affect real and catastrophic actions in the world. And I think that, yes, in every society that we know of, there are these rules around what can be seen. said they differ a lot across time and across space. But I would guess that, yeah, we always had if you like swear words, although they probably won't call that. Swear is obviously associated with oaths and so forth. We still invest a lot in the power of words. We don't think that we do, but swearing does still offend people, depending on what you do. But also, like, when you swear on the Bible in court, that's effectively words, just that you're saying. But we hold that to be

very, very sacred, don't we? Yes. And of course, atheists, can affirm instead of swearing. I have done that myself. It's interesting to me how few people do that. So I remember once being at somebody's citizenship ceremony and people have to swear an oath of allegiance to the queen, as she then was. And almost nobody chose to affirm it without a religious kind of thing. And I was thinking, well, not all these people are religious. I'm sure they're not. So yes, there is a survival in the way that we think about and indeed use language of very much older kind of historical beliefs that if you ask people, I think they'd say, no, of course I don't believe that. And we've lost some cracking swear words along the way.

I mean, if you read through Shakespeare, it's stuffed full of what would have been quite, oh my God, did he really just say that? Like, zoons, that's a good one that I think might be during a revival. God's wounds. But you have to actually care about, you know, Jesus Christ, wouldn't you? But then again, you know, I mean, Jesus Christ is a good example of something that people say, kind of on autopilot who are not religious at all, or who if they were brought up in a religion, were brought up in a different one where Jesus Christ isn't really a thing.

It's kind of interesting how these things survive in our everyday linguistic conduct without really being backed up by, you know, what we avertly believe or would say we believe. My 11-year-old niece is allowed to text message her family now and she will regularly text message to me, OMG, and then tell me something really, but it's kind of funny that she's, oh, my God, that is actually a blaspheme swear word that has now lost all meaning because she doesn't really know what.

She's just telling me someone's nicked her gel pens or something, but she's quite happy just using that. and we'll probably go on using that kind of thing. I don't know if a family are religious or are bringing her up in any faith, but you don't need a faith to use the, they're just kind of a register of language that everybody in a particular kind of community uses. And of course, it is the same for other religions. So, you know, recently there's been a lot of commentary on, you know,

Muslims on demonstrations or whatever using words that contain the name of God and so forth. And I always want to say to them, look, you know, yeah, it might mean something, but it might not. just as when you say Jesus Christ when you hit your finger with a hammer, that doesn't mean that you're a religious fanatic or something. My favourite thing that my niece says when she messaged me is she now talks to me, like she's a drag queen.

And there's lots of like, oh yeah, girl, slay and fierce, which absolutely creases me. I did screenshot one of the first messages she ever sent to me and her other aunties because she was allowed to be in a group chat with us. And it went like this. It went, hi everyone, I'm going fucking shopping on Saturday. Yes, that's right. I can swear now, and I just fell about, but I don't know if she knows what the word fuck means,

but tell us a bit of history about it. So when she's finally 18, I can show her that message and then tell her about the history of this word that she's so happily banding around. Well, fuck is quite a difficult one to talk about because actually it's a word of uncertain origin and etymology. So it's Germanic. We know that has lots of cognates in other Germanic languages. It meant kind of hit or strike, but how it got kind of adapted, specialised to mean sexual intercourse is not so clear at all or when.

I mean, it's not the word that medieval people would have most commonly used for sexual intercourse. They would be more likely to say, you know, Sweever or something like that. But fuck kind of comes into use. The first written citation from the Oxford English Dictionary, the big historical source dictionary, is about 15. So quite late, really. But we know it must be an older word, but how it was used is not very clear. Other words were much more common in the Middle Ages for actually talking literally about sexual intercourse. But you start seeing it, you know, being used in the way that we're more familiar with in the early 16th century.

That is late. One of my favourite things about fuck is that it occurs in compounds of which one of my favourites would be windfucker, which is an old word for Kestrel. So Kestrel, I guess, strikes the air. It will now be known as nothing else in my head other than a windfucker. And doesn't it also appear in names? If I remember correctly,

somebody turned up called Simon Fuck Butter because he, like, made butter, which is made by striking milk. Yes, I suppose it is. I don't know whether that's true, but it wouldn't be a surprise because we talked about this on the earlier, a cunt podcast, that cunt was often used in by names, so names that preceded historically

surnames that were inherited and kind of, you know, if you had a lot of Simons in the village, you needed to distinguish them, so you'd give them a name that was about what they did or where they lived, or that was a by name. And cunt often appeared in those. I think I'd talked about the case of somebody, Bell Wiedkunt, who was a woman, and Cedric Clawcunt, who was obviously a rather unpleasant man. Would you just love to trace back the fuck butter line and work out at which point they went, I think we should change this?

Should we change this name? Well, my names were individual. They weren't inherited. They were replaced by surnames, which are inherited. So anyone who made butter could have had that nickname. I don't know. They were more like nicknames.

A fuck butter. Can we put to bed the story that fuck was an acronym for for fornicating under the king or whatever that is. Yes. I mean, that's quite obviously and true because we have many Germanic cognates of fuck

from before most people could write. So it's very unlikely. To be able to form acronyms, you need to be able to visualize the words in your mind. So that one's not true at all. Sometimes I see that one doing the rounds on social media. No, I know. In fact, etymologists would say, whenever somebody

tells you something originated as an acronym, you should probably dismiss that. It's almost always wrong. I mean, there are exceptions where things were an acronym, but, you know, radar is an acronym, for example. That's a good tip. I'm just going to, I'm going to remember that one now. If anyone tries to convince me something was an acronym, I'm going to say, no, Deborah said, Deborah said, this is nonsense. What I like about the word fuck is it's had one of those journeys now where it meant something and then it meant an act of sex. And now it kind of means,

I don't even know what it means, the way it's linguistically used, the way that you can go, oh fucking fucking fuck fuck fuck sake and it sort of doesn't mean sex like that like i'm not saying sex sex sex sex sex fuck sex sake that that doesn't make sense it's now kind of become it's an intensifier yes and it's one of it might be the only one in english it's certainly one of a small number if it isn't the only one where you can actually um infix it so in other words usually we put bits of words on either the beginning or the end in english but with fucking you can go amps are fucking lootly. So that's called in fixing.

You stick it in the middle. That's very unusual. And we touched on cunt there. It's still one of my favorite words, even though it's so offensive. So many people don't like it. I think it's had a fascinating history. And I love the fact that it's like fuck.

It's so old. We can't really work out where it actually came from. It's Germanic again, though, isn't it? It is, yeah. And it was used. not only in by names, but also early on in topographical feature naming. So, you know, a cleft in place names. So if there was a hill with a kind of cleft in it, that might be referred to as, you know, a cunt. And of course, grope cunt lane. Yes, indeed. There were grope cunt lanes in numerous

towns and they were the Red Light district, essentially. I like that about the medieval people. They were very literal, but they were naming stuff. Like the streets that the privies were on were just called Shit Street and the Red Light District. It's a lane for groping cunt. That's what we do on Gropin'Cunt Lane. They didn't mess around. And so that obviously led to the kind of metonym use where cunt comes to stand for the whole woman,

so a woman becomes a cunt. I suppose when you say it like that, that doesn't sound particularly good. For it to be turning up in medieval street names and it does turn up in some medieval medical texts as well. Doctors are just writing about, That suggests it wasn't particularly offensive to those people. Because if I went and saw my doctor and said there's something wrong with my cunt,

I think that security might be called it. Possibly, but I mean, yes, you're right. I mean, this is an example of what I was talking about earlier, that manners change in the course of history. And before a certain time, I mean, McEnnery would say before the late 17th century, a lot of terms that we now consider obscene were not really obscene. You do find them in medical texts. the extent that medical texts are in English at all. And you do find them in context where they're

clearly just being used in a kind of literal way. So shit meant feces or done, animal done. Those kinds of things they were. Busted was just, you know, the normal and indeed the legal term for the illegitimate child of someone important, usually. And these things don't become swear words until this change in manners. That's really part of the transition to modernity. after this short fucking break. I think that the Americans might finally be catching up with the use of the word cunt because I've definitely seen it being used more in films and TV shows now.

It's not deployed like the Scottish do it where it just means nothing at all. It just means a person, a thing. But I have seen it appearing more and more in American TV shows. I'm wondering, maybe it's starting to lose some of its power over there, possibly. Well, that's possible,

but I would probably be looking to change in the ecology of the media. I mean, would this be on sort of streaming platforms where you have to subscribe? It's narrowcasting, not broadcasting. You know, you imagine your audience is sort of free to disengage. You're not just addressing the public at large, so you won't get millions of complaints.

So, you know, it's not regulated in quite the same way. I mean, you don't hear it much on the BBC, say, or other public service broadcasters in Britain. Occasional exceptions might be made. made after the watershed. And after many, many meetings where they can decide whether or not you can say it. I'll give you two buggers in a shit and no more than that. I want one and you can take back two folks.

Exactly. I have heard that that is the kind of negotiation you have to go through if you're producing some realism. The media were very important in sort of changing where the boundaries were in the 60s. And also, of course, getting a huge backlash in the form of Mary White House and the Viewing and Listening Association, who were incredible campaigners against swearing, which they seemed to find even more offensive than depictions of sex and violence. I went on Woman's Hour after my book was published. And I have a chapter in that on the history of the word cunt. And I was sat down and I was told, like, obviously you can't say that word, but I can't allude to the word.

I can't say see you next Tuesday. I can't say the C word. So I was completely, actually, we're just not going to talk about that chapter. That word is completely out. And then Jenny Murray, Dame Joan, Jenny Murray, who was doing the interview at the time. She walked right in before we were on air.

And she went, who wrote the chapter on, Cunt? I fucking love that word. I was so blindsided by it. I was trying to do this interview. I'm like, Jenny Murray just said, come to me. You touched on the word shit there. That is, that's a fast.

anyone. That's a good medieval word that didn't offend anyone and then became offensive. Where does that word come from? Well, that again is German and lots and lots of cognates in Dutch and German, low German, blah, blah. And it's actually attested in old English. So, you know, you don't have to wait until 1,500 to have it written down, partly because it appears quite often in stuff that's essentially for agriculturalists, what we might now call veterinary. manuals, except I guess they didn't have vets as such then. So about, you know, what to do when your cow has diarrhea and that kind of stuff. It's another of those bodily function words that became offensive later and was superseded.

So if you wanted to be polite, well, actually, if you wanted to be really polite, I suppose you said nothing. But if you wanted to be, you know, medical or whatever, you imported latinate terms like feces or defecate. And now it can mean something good. That's a strange journey for that particular word. If you say, this is the shit, that's amazing. That's a complete opposite of a literal shit. You've also been able to say for even longer, you know, this is good shit. If someone sold you some high-quality marijuana, say.

Deborah, I wouldn't know anything about that. It's quite common for sort of offensive or taboo words to get used to sort of mean they're opposite. You know, in the same way, as you pointed out, fucking is an all-purpose intensifier, and not only does it not have anything to do with sex, it isn't always negative. You know, that is fucking great. There's nothing to stop you saying that.

Your work is about feminism and the history of words and offensive words, and it fascinates me how loaded our language is around women and it's misogyny. For example, if you're trying to think of slang words, words for the vulva, there are quite a few. But try and think of any for the clitoris and you are significantly reduced, whereas there are thousands of words for the penis, like loads and loads and loads. And a lot of the insults that we've got for women are very specifically

gendered, slut, slag, bitch, whore. You can add something to them that makes it for a man. You can say man-haar or he-haw, but it is intensely gendered. The only one I could think of that is really for a man and not a woman is bastard. Yeah, and that was an illegitimate child once upon a time. I mean, some of them did start off neutral. I always like people's surprise when I tell them that Harlot, for example, originally referred to both sexes and had nothing to do with fusion or musculity. Well, girl, too. Girl was originally a name for young children of both sexes. You could use it. What was a harlot? A kind of rude person. So yeah, what? When they start getting preferentially applied to women, these terms pagerate.

They become more negative and it usually ends in sex. So, you know, slut originally means a bad housekeeper. And in fact, was still quite recently used to mean that by one of those strange old blokes in UKIP. Women's sluts for not cleaning down the back of the fridge and got into trouble because he hadn't realized that it had, in fact, for decades, if not centuries, made a promiscuous woman. How do you not know that? What world do these people move in? My God, I remember that.

I mean, people often have no idea what a swear word refers to, do they? I don't know if people always know if bastard meant illegitimate child. And I'm sure they don't know that bugger was a reference to a particular sect of heretics, the Albigensians.

I can't really tell you much about them. So there was a bunch of heretics of Bulgarian origin, and that's Bugger is Bougar, Bulgar, that was a name used for them in the 14th century. And of course, one of the things that good Christians say about heretics is that there are a bunch of sexual perverts. So that's how the shift was made to Buggar as meaning the same thing as kind of Sodomite, which is also the origin, of course, of sod. So by the 16th century, bugger is being used to mean someone who engages in. for example, anal penetration, which is what we think of now,

but also other offences of sodomy like bestiality. So these were not a distinct bunch of different acts at the time. Sodomy was just a category that was for anything that was, you know, forbidden and perverted. And what were these, they called the Bulgaras? They must have just been over in Bulgaria going, we're not. We're not doing that. Well, they were dead by the time it started it meant that. I mean, originally, a bugger was.

a heretic. Similarly with a faggot, faggot, the kind of old homophobic insult. It's from faggots are the things you put on a fire to burn someone at the stake who is a heretic. Shit, I didn't realise that it was that intimately connected. That's where faggot comes literally from the faggots they would use to burn. Yeah, so you start off with a kind of religious outgroup and they become a sexual outgroup over time. I mean, I say it probably speaks to the whole. that sex has over our imaginations as humans, that eventually everything pagerates into saying. I read that the word bastard,

it's come from a French word meaning a horse's saddle. Is that another internet nonsense? I don't know. It's literal illegitimate child sense is pretty old. As a pejorative, it really happens from about the 17th century. I mean, it may have before it was ever used for any of those things, I'm not sure why a horse is saddle. Apparently it comes from the term

Phil de Bast which means pack saddle sun meaning a child conceived on an improvised bed. Apparently they used to use their saddles as beds which I can't... That's a crap bed, let alone shagging on it. I don't... I don't know if that's true. I don't really have the expertise to comment on that.

The only thing I could think of when we talk about bastard now is Sean Bean saying bastard repeatedly in all the things that he's been in. made for him that word. He's so good at it, just firing it out. I've got to talk to you about one of my favorite words. Is it a favorite word? I don't know. A conflicted word, pussy. The word pussy. This week, I wrote an article about this new fad of probiotic pills for vaginal health. I hate it. I hate all of that crap. And it's marketed as this idea that it can make you smell amazing. It's so, I hate it so much. But in the article, I like to use lots of slang words and silly words and my editor will go through

it and it's really interesting to watch her kind of like where's the threshold. Vigna vulva they're fine. Fanny, Foof, Pinky Minky, moo, all fine. Gash was out. Pussy, I was allowed one. And Pussy was a really difficult one for me to get into the article. And even then it had to be P-U-Star Star-Star. Why?

So talk to me about Pussy. Where does that word come from? Well, it comes from exactly where you'd expect it to. So Puss or Pussy is originally a call name for a cat. It's what you do inequality tap in. It becomes an endearment term for a girl from about the mid-16th century, my little pussy like my little cupcake or sweetie. And by about 1700, it's become preferentially attached to the vulva.

It's another example, you know, like cunt of synecdochie, the part for the whole. So women reduced to their pussy. And we have lots of cognates again in Dutch, German, Swedish, and so-and-so is an old Germanic word. It must have been also still being used as a relatively inoffensive term up to the 20th century because of that song,

Oh, lovely pussy, oh, pussy, my love, what a beautiful pussy you are, the owl and the pussy cat. I mean, unless that was sung as a wink, wink, nudge, dodge, double meaning. Well, no, I wouldn't have thought so because the owl and the pussy cat is Edward Lear. He went in for nonsense rather than innuendo.

I mean, pussy innuendos are certainly common in the 20th century, But it is still possible for a long time. I mean, I would have said it was still possible to call a cat, an actual literal cat, a pussy, or pussy cat, at least. Yeah. Do you think that we can reclaim pussy? Do you think that's going to be one of those words?

Because a lot of swear words, they get reclaimed. When you're using it to describe a vulva, it's very heavily sexualized that one. Yes. I mean, you can use pussy to mean women collectively as prey. He's always chasing pussy. It's hardly unusual for words. have a range of possible senses in different contexts. Yeah, I think pussy possibly would be

reclaimable. It would be nice to pin down what it actually meant, though. I mean, research has shown that with all these words, that I would say their core meaning is probably vulva, but when people are surveyed, there's no consensus on what they mean. No, it just kind of just means like the genital region, doesn't it? Yeah. So somebody went through all the common terms and got people to say what they were using, you know, a diagram. And the only ones on which they got majority agreement, any kind of consensus, were clit and beard. Yeah, it's not very specific, is it?

If you went in and said to a surgeon, I needed to operate on my post, that could mean anything. Absolutely anything. It could. And, you know, medics are not really helping because they're, you know, to put us at their ease, they're forever saying things like undercarriage or bits. I mean, when talking to medics, I think I would recommend some knowledge of the actual Latin medical terms to make clear what you're talking about. We do seem to shrink away from actually using the proper words. Oh, yes, we do.

Surveys show that more than half of British women in a sample of a thousand or something find the words vulva and vagina offensive. And nearly half of women under 30 couldn't identify. the vagina on the diagram. There's a serious sex and body education project there. I don't like the word Volvo because it sounds like Volvo to me, so it just communicates like a sturdy car. Volvo, of course, Latin for I revolve because the car company started out making ball bearings. Wow.

There we go. Minor bits of pointless general knowledge acquired because I worked in Yertybor, at Gothenburg in Sweden where they make volvos for a little while. Wow, I did not know that. All right, my final one that I want to ask you about because it's a good word, and I don't know if it's ever going to be used in a positive way, asshole. It's such a good insult to just fire at something.

That's another one you can find in surgical texts before early modern times sort of in 1400. But at least that's specific. At least that's not down there. At least a medieval person was going and going, it's my asshole doctor, not my undercarriage. Yeah, no, you surgeons can talk about assholes. They're basically saying, you know,

if the canker is in somebody's asshole, it's probably a bad idea to do this, that would be other, that kind of thing. It's in the 18th century that it basically becomes pejorative and becomes, once again, a metonym, so a person is an asshole. Swearing today, it's so interesting, because it's got a foot in many, many different camps,

and it still draws on all of the old stuff, It's still used as a class signifier, I think. It's still used as a signifier of social rebellion. I was going to say, do you think it's becoming more acceptable? But you made a really good point early on that it's just shifted because the N word or the P word, I won't even say them on the show because they're that offensive. So clearly swearing still has that level of impact.

Do you think it has become more acceptable to swear? Well, I think some kinds of swearing have become more acceptable in some context. I mean, I think it's very easy for people like you and me whose milieu is academic or it's the arts or so on to overestimate how acceptable swearing is. There are lots of people, and the media find this when they look at how many complaints they get,

there are lots of people who find it, you know, profoundly offensive. But I think, you know, there are various things that it can do for people. So the stuff about, you know, class and so on. Actual research on the frequency of swearing using corpora, big collections of naturally occurring language, bear out that, you know, the biggest swearers are the lowest social class, but the next biggest swearers are the highest social class. You know, as you would expect from the kind of society of the reform of manners type of history,

it's the people in the middle who are most likely to avoid. And it's also much higher in adolescence. than in any other stage of life. So it's when you're doing that thing of, you know, rebelling against social norms and trying to assert who you are. And after that, it does kind of steadily go down. Do you think will be future swear words?

That's not a very fair question, because you don't have a crystal ball. But they change so much. They move from religious offence to bodily and sexual offence. And now they're in racial epithets that are the most offensive. What do you see coming down down the road?

What would be a future swear word? I think it's difficult to tell. I mean, it depends what social shifts take place in the future. I mean, for one thing, I don't think that these old forms of offence will necessarily die because, of course, as soon as something becomes extremely taboo, for certain subgroups within society, that will be an important reason to use it, right? So things will continue to have currency in for a while, how long they take to die out, I don't know. I mean, I can imagine, I don't know, maybe animal terms becoming more contested as people assert, you know, the rights of other species or their horror about animal cruelty or whatever.

So perhaps it will be considered, you know, not okay to call someone a dog. Deborah, you have been fucking marvellous and you have a new book coming out. Yes, I do. And it's got a bit of a does what it says on the tin title. It's called Language, Sexism and Misogyny, and it's going to be published next month, December of 2023. Just in time for the festive season, though it's not exactly a festive topic.

What are you looking at in this book? Well, a number of things. I'm sort of taking my cue from the fact that feminist work on this kind of topic has been around for pretty much exactly 50 years now. What the book does is say, okay, what's still with us, What's changed because its premises, which I think there's a lot of evidence for, that sexism and misogyny, we sort of expected them to fade away.

And they haven't faded away. They've evolved. So to suit new conditions. And so I'm looking at, you know, how do they get expressed in new conditions? So I do look at slur terms, for example, what's going on with them, does reclamation work. But I also look at things like, you know, what difference has the internet made to the ways in which sexism and misogyny are expressed, you know, so the rise of very graphic, very lengthy rape threats and the rise of, you know, people like Andrew Tate and all those

crazy online misogynists who in the Victorian era would have been, you know, preaching sermons or something, and now what they're doing is making YouTube videos. And I look at the way violence against women is still being reported. I mean, again, as if it were the 18th or something and the chastity of a victim made some difference. And new work on things like AI, job ads and so on, how the words you use can actually influence who applies to for a job or what chat GPT kind of churns out. It's an attempt at a kind of up-to-date look at what's really quite an old problem. Thank you so much, Deborah. You have been an absolutely top harlot the whole way through. I've loved talking to you.

Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Deborah for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I know we always say that, but it really does fucking help us. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the women of the Haitian Revolution to the man

behind the joy of sex. This podcast was edited by Ella Blacksill and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from fucking epidemic sound.