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Censorship

In some contexts, ‘cunt’ remained a socially acceptable word until very recently: “in rural areas [of England in the 1960s] the word was still being used as an ordinary everyday term, at least when applied to a cow’s vulva” (James McDonald, 1988). However, besides this location- and usage-specific example, ‘cunt’ has been the primary English language taboo for over five centuries. I have attempted to ascertain approximately when the word first became taboo, and have also documented the history of its media censorship.

The censorship of ‘cunt’ is a cyclical process: initially, the word was socially acceptable, then it became taboo, and more recently it can be found with increasing regularity in both print and broadcast media. This gradual mainstream acceptance represents an erosion of the word’s taboo status.

‘Cunt’ was used medically by Lanfranc, who, in the early fifteenth century, wrote: “In wymmen [the] neck of [the] bladdre is schort, [and] is maad fast to the cunte” (14–). Two hundred years later, however, the ‘cunt’ taboo was firmly in place: Minsheu rendered it “Cu [and] c” (’Cu etc.’, 1617) and John Fletcher resorted to “They write sunt with a C, which is abominable” (1622). It is not possible to unequivocally identify the date from which ‘cunt’ first became taboo, though Mark Morton (2003) provides a rough guide: “Up until the fourteenth century or so, cunt appears not to have been a taboo word. […] By the fifteenth century, however, the word cunt seems to have shifted toward the taboo. […] Near the end of the seventeenth century, the word cunt was firmly ensconced in obscenity”.

Southwark’s ‘Gropecuntelane’ dates from 1230, indicating that, at that time, the word may have been bawdy but was not obscene. Similarly, the earliest example of a ‘cunt’ surname is that of Godwin Clawecunte from 1066, and the latest is Bele Wydecunthe’s from 1328. Lanfranc, writing one hundred years later, does not disguise the word, though Geoffrey Chaucer does.

Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, employs the deliberately faux-archaic spelling ‘queynte’ (variants: ‘queynt’, ‘qwaynt’, ‘quaynte’, ‘queinte’, ‘coynte’, and ‘coint’; modern spelling: ‘queint’) as a substitute for ‘cunt’. Eric Partridge suggests that, to form ‘queynte’, “Chaucer may have combined Old French coing with Middle English cunte or he may have been influenced by the Old French cointe” (1931), and Mark Morton suggests a link to ‘quaint’, though the simplest explanation is that Chaucer added the ‘nte’ mediaeval suffix of ‘cunt’ to the feminine ‘qu’ prefix. William Shakespeare’s “acquaint” in his Sonnet XX (1609[a]) is a disguised reference to both ‘quaint’ and ‘cunt’. Andrew Marvell uses similar literary camouflage in To His Coy Mistress, with a reference to “quaint honour” (1653):

“Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: the worms shall try
That long preserved virginity:
And your quaint honour turn to dust;
And into ashes all my lust”.

Three hundred and fifty years later, an If… cartoon by Steve Bell also disguised ‘cunt’, this time by rendering it as the faux-French “QUEURNT” (2003). Perhaps this comic example adds a new dimension to Chaucer’s ‘queynte’, which can be seen as a similarly exoticised rendering of ‘cunt’.

The Canterbury Tales, which are full of more minor swearwords such as ’shit’ and ‘piss’ though not the tabooed ‘cunt’ (except in disguised form), were written at the very end of the fourteenth century, thus it seems that ‘cunt’ was an acceptable term throughout the Middle Ages, becoming taboo during the late fourteenth century. Peter Fryer contends that “it has been avoided in written and polite spoken English since the fifteenth century” (1963). There was almost certainly a period of transition, during which the word’s status gradually changed from acceptability to taboo, just as, five hundred years later, it is in transition again, from taboo to acceptability.

Swearing And Cunt Censorship

The earliest recorded linguistic taboos are Middle English blasphemies such as ‘’slids’ (’God’s eyelids’) and ‘’sfoot’ (’God’s foot’). It is interesting that these early curses were related to parts of God’s body - the eyelids and feet - as contemporary swearing has become secularised though bodily taboos have remained: from eyelids and feet we have moved to erogenous zones such as ‘cunt’, ‘cock’, ‘tits’, and ‘arse’.

Whilst the church exercised considerable power over society in the Middle Ages, its authority diminished following the Reformation of the sixteenth century. With this revolutionary iconoclasm came a reduction in the potency of religious profanity, thus, for example, the insulting term ‘devil’ was significantly weakened: “the first use of devil as ‘merely a term of reprobation’, sometimes playfully applied, [occurred] after the main ructions of the Reformation” (Geoffrey Hughes, 1991).

The transition from religious to secular swearing, reflecting the concurrent transition in society, changed the boundaries of linguistic taboo. Religious curses (’damn’) were replaced by taboos relating to bodily functions such as sexual intercourse (’fuck’) and excretion (’shit’). In the twentieth century, these in turn were joined by new taboos relating to ‘politically incorrect’ language, including homophobic (’queer’), sexist (’bitch’), and racist (’nigger’) abuse.

In Swearing, his history of profanity, Geoffrey Hughes notes that “genital, copulatory, excretory and incestuous swearing” has now largely replaced religious oaths: “[the] great and obvious force behind most medieval swearing was Christianity […] the grisly invocation of Christ’s body, blood and nails in the agony of the Crucifixion seems as grotesque and bizarre to us now as modern […] swearing would have seemed to medievals” (1991).

Jesse Schiedlower traces the history of swearing from religion to sex and beyond: “Throughout the centuries, different topics have been considered incendiary at different times. Several hundred years ago, for example, religious profanity was the most unforgivable type of expression. In more recent times, words for body parts and sexually explicit vocabulary have been the most shocking […] Now, racial or ethnic epithets are the scourge” (1995).

In The Curse Of The C-Word (2001), Mark Irwin calls ‘cunt’ “THE ULTIMATE INSULT” and “the most obscene non-racial English curse” (2001[a]), though he also suggests that racist insults such as ‘nigger’ may eventually replace ‘cunt’ as the ultimate taboo: “Even in the 1970s, [’nigger’ appeared in] TV sitcoms and in print - even in children’s books - while the words fuck and cunt were never seen […] The move from religious to sexually orientated [swear]words took place 300 or so years ago in English [and a] hundred years from now, words such as cunt and fuck may be viewed as quaint oddities” (2001[b]). In The Aristocrats, a fictional vaudville act is named “the Nigger Cunts” (Paul Provenza, 2004) precisely because ‘nigger’ and ‘cunt’ are, at the time of writing, the two most offensive English words.

After the Reformation, literary censorship was performed by the Privy Council and theatrical censorship was the portfolio of the Master of the King’s Revels. Mindful of these restraints, William Shakespeare’s references to ‘cunt’ are all in disguised forms. Thus, in Measure For Measure, we find ‘counsellors’ used as a pun on ‘cunt-sellers’: “Good counsellors lack no clients” (1603[b]). Similarly, in Henry V, Katharine confuses the English terms ‘foot’ and ‘coun’ (’gown’) with the phonetically similar French ‘foutre’ (’fuck’) and ‘con’ (’cunt’), calling them “mauvais, coruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France, pour tout le monde” (1599).

In her analysis of Shakespeare’s sexual puns, Pauline Kiernan (2006) has identified references to ‘cunt’ in the most innocent-sounding phrases: she translates Shakespeare’s “tallow-face” (from Romeo And Juliet, 1597[b]) as “greasy-cunt”, and his “vocativo […] Genitivo” (from The Merry Wives Of Windsor, 1602[b]) becomes “vocative-Cunt […] Genitiv-Cunt”.

In Twelfth Night, Malvolio virtually spells out the word: “By my life, this is my lady’s hand! these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s” (1601[b]). Sir Andrew Aguecheek understands the cheeky allusion: “Her C’s, her U’s, and her T’s: why that-”, though he is swiftly interrupted by Malvolio before he can state the obvious. ‘C’, ‘U’, and ‘T’, of course, spells ‘CUT’; the missing ‘n’ is contained in the ‘and’ of “and her T’s”, with ‘and’ “no doubt be[ing] pronounced ‘en’” (Peter Fryer, 1963) to heighten the similarity. Shakespeare’s “carved” in The Taming Of The Shrew (1596) is an indirect reference to ‘cunt’, as the definition of ‘carved’ is ‘cut’.

Four hundred years after Shakespeare, ‘cut’ and ‘cunt’ were still being confused. David Lodge punned on ‘Silk Cut’ with his phrase “Silk Cunt” (1988). John Spellar delivered a speech in the House of Commons, as reported by Simon Hoggart: “[Spellar tried to say] “We recognise that these cuts in the defence medical services had gone too far,” but he inserted an unwanted letter “n” in the word “cuts”. It still made perfect sense” (2000).

‘Cut’ was itself a recognised euphemism for ‘cunt’ in Shakespeare’s time, and there are three reasons for this: firstly, its almost identical spelling; secondly, its meaning as ‘water channel’, alluding to the vagina and its fluids; finally, its meaning as ‘wound’, which alludes to the vagina as a gash. None of these reasons persuaded Dover Wilson, however, as he steadfastly maintained that Shakespeare’s ‘CUT’ was merely “a typographical error for C-U-E” (Eric Partridge, 1947). A further ‘cut’/'cunt’ pun was provided by Thomas Middleton, whose A Fair Quarrel includes a reference to “callicut” (1617).

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