which I postulate, of the word “buttocks”. Now, among primitive peoples
_no man will utter common words which coincide with or merely resemble
in sound tabood names_, and, though the twentieth century refused to
admit itself primitive, we cannot now understand on what grounds this
refusal could have been plausibly justified. The principle I have
italicized is a direct quotation from a contemporary treatise on taboo.
The author, whose name has been lost with the title-page of the unique
copy in the Jerusalem Library, was only able to state this principle
in the case of the South African Zulus and other savage tribes; but
there is little doubt in my mind that the point of the joke lay in
the sensitivity of the Bottom families to the obscene connotations of
their name. That the buttocks should have been tabood is a surprising
idea, but apparently a morbid prolongation of the lavatory-taboo
accounts for it: or so Mannheim holds. The Bottom names either had no
original connexion with the buttocks as in _Bottomwallop_, which is a
geographical name, or, as in _Longbottom_, they were inherited from
an age when the taboo had not yet hardened. Be that as it may, the
unfortunates who were born at this period to a name containing the
tabood syllable were in a quandary. If they changed their names by
Deed Poll, the expense and embarrassment would be considerable. Yet
not to change meant that they would continue to be aware of repressed
snickering wherever they went beyond the immediate circle of their
friends. Most of them, therefore, changed the spelling merely from
“Bottom” to “Botham”, and thus thought to circumvent the taboo. Indeed,
as Roberts tells the story, the Bottom guests were all disguised as
Bothams or Bottomes. One family, the Sidebottoms or Sidebothams, went
so far as to pronounce their name “Siddybotaam” and in Bigland’s _Life
and Times of H. Botomley_ (1954) there is mention of one of these
“Siddybotaams” to whom Bottomley (a famous practical joker) is said to
have introduced himself as “H. Bumley, Esq.”, “bum” being a common, but
strongly tabood, shortening of “bottom”.
‘Now, the secret language, which was generally known as “smut”――possibly
the idea of defilement is latent in this word, since another synonym was
“The Dirty Talk” or “The Foul Language”――was so rich in its vocabulary,
and drew so copiously on the legitimate language for secret obscene
usages of common words, that the greatest ingenuity was needed in
legitimate speech to avoid the appearance of obscenity. Thus so common a
word as “bottom” meaning a _base_, a _bed_, a _fundament_, a _cause_,
owing to its use in smut as an equivalent for “buttocks”, could never be
used in the legitimate language in any context where a _double entendre_
might be understood. The word “parts” becoming a synonym in Smut of the
organs of generation had to be used with great care, and these are
merely two isolated instances of a principle so strong that when two
persons who had been initiated into the third or fourth degree of the
secret language began a conversation, practically not a single phrase
could be used by them without this _double entendre_, causing hysterical
laughter. _And not merely the names themselves but any words that sound
like them are scrupulously avoided, and other words used in their place.
A custom of this sort, it is plain, may easily be a potent agent of
change in language, for, where it prevails to any considerable extent,
many words must constantly become obsolete and new ones spring up._
‘This is a quotation from the same anonymous ethnologist, who is here
discussing the taboos in Melanesia and Australia on the mention of the
names of certain relatives, whether dead or alive, but it also explains
many linguistic changes in the vocabulary of the nineteenth, twentieth,
and twenty-first centuries: for instance, the constant out-of-dating
of popular equivalents to the words “whore” and “harlot” which being
Biblical alone remained in constant use as pure descriptive terms;
and the disappearance from common use of the phrase “a man of parts”,
meaning “a man of great attainments”, and the phrase “he (or she) has
no bottom”, meaning that the person referred to has no stability of
character. It will be seen that this furtive language must have had a
great influence on the legitimate language.
‘For confirmation of my theory of the indecency of the word “bottom”
see Boswell’s _Life of Doctor Johnson_ under the date of 1781:
Talking of a very respectable author he told us a curious
circumstance in his life, which was, that he had married a
printer’s devil.
_Reynolds_: “A printer’s devil, sir! Why I thought a printer’s
devil was a creature with a black face and in rags.”
_Johnson_: “Yes, sir. But I suppose he had her face washed
and put clean clothes on her. (Then looking very serious and
very earnest.) And she did not disgrace him; the woman had a
bottom of good sense.” The word _bottom_ thus introduced was
as ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us
could not forbear tittering and laughing; though I recollect
that the Bishop of Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect
steadiness, while Miss Hannah More slyly hid her face behind
a lady’s back who sat on the same settee with her. His pride
could not bear that any expression of his should excite
ridicule, when he did not intend it; he therefore resolved to
assume and exercise despotick power, glanced sternly around
and called out in a strong tone, “Where’s the merriment?” Then
collecting himself and looking aweful to make us feel how he
could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for
a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced “I say the
_woman_ was _fundamentally_ sensible” as if he had said “Hear
this now and laugh if you dare!” We all sat composed as at a
funeral.
‘_New words sprang up everywhere, like mushrooms in the night....
The mint of words was in the hands of the old women of the tribe,
and whatever term they stamped with their approval and put into
circulation, was immediately accepted without a murmur by high and low
alike, and spread like wildfire through every camp and settlement of
the tribe._
‘This is our ethnologist, again, on the Paraguay Indians: but he does
not enlighten us as to who held the word-mint of Smut in his own
country. It seems probable that the Stock-Exchange was responsible
for a greater part of the new coinages, that from the Stock-Exchange
they spread to the big business houses, and were distributed by the
commercial travellers to the provinces; but the close connection of
the Stock-Exchange with the Turf made the book-makers also useful
disseminators of the new coinages. A smutty story or a new word-coinage
seems to have been, with whisky-and-soda, the usual ceremonial
confirmation of a big business deal or the laying of a bet. Other mints
of greater or less importance were the major Universities, the Inns of
Court, and the Military Academies.
‘The composition of smutty rhymes, chiefly in a strict five-line
verse-form, known as the “Limerick”, with the conventional beginning
“There once was a ...”, was one of the chief occupations of these
high-priests of Smut, and two or three at least of the legitimate poets
famous at the end of the twentieth century are known to have added
largely to the common stock of tradition.
‘Even in our enlightened times, the sex-taboo and lavatory-taboo linger
to a certain extent, owing to the natural reserve men and women feel
about these functions. The lavatory-taboo still survives with us at
meal-times, but we find it difficult to understand the extraordinary
customs to which the morbid enlargement of this natural reserve
led. For instance, the playwright Hogg records that not only was it
considered obscene for a man to show a woman the way to the lavatory,
but that even man to man, or woman to woman, an evasive phrase had to
be used: “Would you care to wash your hands?” “Have you been shown
the geography of the house?” nor would even intimate friends consent
to notice each other if one of them was emerging from the lavatory
or entering it; and, if this was the first meeting of the day, would
greet each other half-a-minute later on un-tabood ground with every
pretence of novelty and surprise. If a woman had a slight contusion on
the breast, it was considered most obscene to mention it directly, but
tender inquiries would be made after “your poor side”, “your injured
shoulder”. So our anonymous ethnologist, in a caustic account of the
idea of virgin-birth among primitive tribes, is forced to write:
_Nana, the mother of Attis, was a virgin, who conceived by
putting a ripe almond in her bosom._
‘The curious alternation of prudishness and prurience in the social
life of the time makes strange reading. On one hand were to be found
sexual extravagances, so fantastic as to be quite unintelligible to-day
even to modern physiologists, on the other such delicacy of feeling
that in some classes of Society the word “leg” was actually tabood,
and we have it on the authority of the social historian Gilett Burgess
that in Boston in the 1880’s it was considered necessary to clothe the
naked legs or “limbs” of tables with white cotton pantaloons. Until
the decade following the “Great War for Civilization”, the young women
of the English moneyed and middle classes lived what was called “very
sheltered lives”: which meant that, in the name of modesty, they were
left to find out for themselves the simplest facts about the sexual
mechanism. These facts, probably owing to a morbidity induced by the
lavatory-taboo, they seem to have been frequently unable to grasp.
Literature gave them little clue, owing to the custom of writing one
part of the body when another was meant; and the use of words like
“kiss”, “embrace”, and “hug”, as synonyms for the sexual act confused
them so completely that in a majority of cases they were married
without having the vaguest idea of what really happens between man and
woman, or how babies are born, and the suddenness of the realization
frequently caused nervous shock and even madness. The young men, on
the other hand, by the time they came to marry, usually had had such
a fantastic experience of sex-life among the professional “harlots”
of a lower social class that it was most rare for a satisfactory
sex-adjustment to be made between them and their wives; and it is
computed that at least nine marriages out of ten were completely
wrecked before the “honeymoon” was over.
‘Between 1919 and 1929 there was a marked relaxing of the sex-taboos
among the educated classes: in art-exhibitions though not in public
art-galleries, paintings of female nudes in which the pubic hair
was represented were for the first time admitted. There were also
great changes during this decade in the fashion of women’s dresses.
Skirts, which hitherto had hidden the ankles, now revealed the knees;
and “evening dresses” were worn, we are told, “without any backs”,
though it is conjectured that the buttocks were still covered.
“Bathing-dresses”, garments worn by both sexes, even when actually
swimming in the water, became less voluminous, and the use of
“bathing-stockings” by women was discontinued. There is record of
a novelist James Joyce, whose works, though published in a foreign
country, probably France, were smuggled into England, openly read
and even regarded as “modern classics” by a literary minority: Joyce
appears to have defied all taboos in his writing, and it is a pity that
the Universal-Fascismo combination of 1929 succeeded in destroying
every copy of his most famous work _Ulysses_, which would have been a
mine of information for our present inquiry.
‘For the rest of the century the taboos continued almost as strongly
enforced as in the period preceding the War. Indeed, Fascismo did its
work so thoroughly that only tantalizing scraps remain of those few
records of Smut made in the post-War decade, and the post-Fascismo
records are not particularly helpful. By the edict of 1930 the talking
of Smut became a capital offence, and when in 1998 the regulation was
relaxed, the tradition had become almost extinct. It is now, therefore,
impossible to suggest accurately what were the different degrees of
initiation of which Hogg speaks, nor how the different dialects of
Smut――Garage Smut, Club Smut, Mess Smut, School Smut――varied. But our
knowledge of preceding centuries is no less scanty. We have no critical
apparatus for filling in the lacunæ in Marcus Clarke’s account of
convict obscenity in his Australian novel _For the Term of his Natural
Life_, or in Benjamin Disraeli’s account of industrial obscenity in the
1830’s given in _Sybil_; nor can we supplement Alec Waugh’s hints of
Public School obscenity in his _Loom of Youth_ (1917). The poets were
as timorous as the novelists. James Stephens records a “Shebeen” curse
of the 1920 period:
The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:
May the Devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.
That parboiled imp with the hardest jaw you will see
On virtue’s path and a voice that would rasp the dead....
... May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange;
but it is most unlikely that this is a faithful example of the swearing
of that day. It is known that swearing in the war[4] was of a very
violent character, but not a trace of it, beyond an occasional _damn_
or _bloody_, occurs in Siegfried Sassoon’s otherwise very realistic
war-poems. Contemporary newspaper reports of divorce-proceedings are
known to have been rigorously cut: such euphemisms were employed as “a
certain condition”, “a certain posture”, “a certain organ”, “a certain
unnatural vice”, so that it is difficult to know why such interest in
these cases was shown by the readers of the newspapers, unless they
were possessed of that primitive intuition which the savages in our own
Central African reservations still to some measure display.
[4] Field records that a party of deaf and dumb children were in 1918
taken to a cinema-show called The Somme Film and had to be taken away
because of the ‘bad language’ on the screen.
‘Two cases are known of a whole edition (150,000 copies) of a daily
newspaper having to be destroyed because of a breach of the taboo which
escaped the proof-reader. Both are recorded by Brunel in his _Recent
Press History 1928_, but he mentions no names and does not explain the
matter in great detail:
The whole country edition of one of our leading dailies had
on one occasion to be suppressed because of a one-word change
made in a leading article by a printer who was under notice of
discharge: the alteration was made after the proofs had been
passed. The sentence was, if I remember:
‘His lordship heartily recommended to all ministers and other
public servants who think of retiring from the service of the
Crown that they should devote their energies and leisure to
the interesting and enjoyable occupation of farming: he himself
had proved....’
The second occasion was this: an evening paper injudiciously printed a
letter on the disorganization of the London traffic without observing
the signature: which was R. Supward. The edition had to be destroyed at
the cost of several thousand pounds.
‘It is a pity that Brunel has left us in the dark about the obscene
connotation of _Supward_: perhaps it stands for “Bedward”, supper being
the preliminary to bed, and _bed_ being a tabood word. But this is
only a conjecture. Nor do we know what action would have been taken in
the matter by the Censor, an official in whose hands the avenging of
all broken taboos lay, had the mistake not been noticed in time; but
certainly it must have been a serious one, a heavy fine or a temporary
suppression of publication. It seems possible, however, that it was not
merely fear of the Censorship which preserved the strength of these
taboos: they were sometimes valued on their own account by men and
women of otherwise considerable intellectual force. Thus, while our
ethnologist writes of the primitive savage “so tightly bound” by taboos
of another variety that he “scarcely knows which way to turn”, he is
careful to express “the enormous debts which we owe to the savage,”
and the context makes it plain that chief among these debts are the
ideas of “decency” and “morals” in their most fantastic development.
Johnstone, an essayist of this period, has a passage which it would not
be out of place to quote here:
“But I cannot describe the awful look of horror which I
remember in the eyes of middle-aged women of the pre-War
decade when they uttered the word _décolletée_ (“with a
low-necked dress cut almost to the bosom”) or the embarrassment
still shown by the young schoolmistress or even the young
schoolmaster in the Divinity lesson, should the innocent
question be piped: “Please, teacher, what does ‘whoremonger’
mean?””
‘The ethnologist from whom we have been quoting gives us the most
authoritative of all surviving late nineteenth-century accounts of
the superstitions, taboos, and magic of earlier primitive peoples;
but what impresses us most now besides the lucidity of the argument
is the elaborate care with which, as we have seen, the author has
consented to the sexual and religious taboos of his own society and
the great number also of literary and academic superstitions in which
his accounts of savage superstitions are dressed. Though clearly a
great force in the contemporary movement for the breaking of taboos
that had outlasted their use, he never makes a direct attack upon them.
It may indeed be said that he clings to the very superstition which
he records among primitive tribes, that to dispatch the tribal god
by indirect means is not blasphemy in the first degree: that is, he
treats facetiously the beliefs and ceremonies of almost every religion
but that of contemporary English Protestantism, but points out the
common resemblances and leaves the reader to take the inevitable step.
For instance, he derides the claims of priests to divine revelation,
the doctrines also of Immaculate Conception, Redemption of Sins, the
Real Presence in the Sacrament, the Resurrection of a slain God, the
transference of evil spirits to goats and swine, but only derides them
in religions earlier than Christianity and, therefore, “superstitious”.
Though heretics within Christianity are ridiculed by him for having
claimed divinity for themselves, the divinity of Jesus Christ is
nowhere directly impugned: who is permitted to have been immaculately
conceived, to have cast out devils, taken over the burden of human sin,
and risen again. He is allowed a capital F as Founder of Christianity,
and the Virgin Mary is written of with traditional tenderness and
reverence.
‘As regards literary and academic superstitions, our author’s
faithfulness to contemporary literary ritual is such that even pedants
who recognized the dangerous tendencies of his theory were forced to
applaud the beauty of his style with its heavy rhetorical ornaments,
its numerous and unnecessary quotations from the duller poets, and its
most careful avoidance of repetition even where repetition is necessary
for the clarity of the argument. For example, he cannot bring himself
to write plainly:
Every province had the tomb and mummy of its dead god. The
mummy of Osiris was at Mendes, the mummy of Anhouri at Thinis,
the mummy of Toumon at Heliopolis.
He must dress it up as:
The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes, Thinis boasted of
the mummy of Anhouri, and Heliopolis rejoiced in the possession
of that of Toumon;
and in chapters where analogous customs of many tribes have to be
catalogued and compared, this fear of repeating the same phrase
soon fidgets the reader so much that he forgets what he is reading
about. Our author also feels the academic necessity for an occasional
platitude in the ancient “moral progress” superstition to round off
an over-argumentative chapter; it seems to weigh as heavily upon him
as the necessity of sacrificing black wallabies (or were they black
cockatoos?) in time of drought weighed on the Australian blackfellow.
He writes:
The fallacy of such a belief is plain to us; yet perhaps the
self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain and false
as they are, have imposed on mankind has not been without its
utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength
of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly
in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of
disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure
for the more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The
more the power is exercised, the higher and stronger becomes
the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who
renounce the pleasures of life itself for the sake of keeping
or winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessing of
freedom and truth.
‘_Braced and strengthened_ with this belief, _vain and false_ as
it may be, that the _blessings of freedom and truth_ are _kept and
won_, that the _character of the race and of the individual_ becomes
_higher and stronger_ by such _self-restraint and sacrifice_, he is
particularly careful of the ephemeral temptation to abuse the sex-taboo.
‘While he speaks with bantering condescension of the poor savage who
uses the navel-cord and severed genitals of his relatives for the
magic purposes of agriculture, the language he chooses is blamelessly
scientific. In other words, he gives himself the privilege of the
priests who may treat of the holy mysteries plainly, but in the sacred
language and not in the vernacular. Or else, as one of the people, he
is exquisitely circumlocutory in his accounts of primitive orgies:
“A striking feature of the worship of Osiris as a god of
fertility was the coarse but expressive symbolism by which this
aspect of his nature was presented to the eye, not merely of
the initiated, but of the multitude.... At Philae the dead god
is portrayed lying on his bier in an attitude which indicates
in the plainest way that even in death his generative virtue
was not extinct, but only suspended.... One may conjecture that
in this paternal aspect....”
And shortly afterwards, he gravely wonders at the savage dread of
menstrual blood. Klein, in one of his essays, suggests that the whole
book is satiric in intention, and in a private letter has charged me
with having no sense of humour because I refuse to read it in this way.
But I prefer for once to have no sense of humour.’
* * * * *
To conclude, swearing as an art is at present in low water. National
passion seldom runs high, invention is numbed, and there is no appeal
of a politico-religious nature which will meet everywhere with the same
respect. The only taboo strong enough to be worth breaking is the
sexual one, and swearing shows every sign of continuing standardized on
that basis for some time. It may be that “bastard”, and similar words,
may gradually creep into legitimate speech, but only because obscener
equivalents have been found.
The only really effective form of swearing that I know is this:
Suppose you quarrel violently with a fellow-traveller in a crowded
railway-carriage, perhaps about opening windows or the disposition of
luggage. You get worsted. “Very well”, you say, with a sigh, “have it
your own way.” “By the way”, you add, with a peculiar intensity, “I
happen to know that in three weeks’ time you will have a dangerous
illness.” If the quarrel has been very violent, you may even sentence
your adversary to death.
You have not used obscene or threatening language, or expressed a wish
that your adversary should suffer. You have not used God’s name. If you
had done any of these things you would not only be putting yourself
in danger of prosecution and alienating the sympathy of the other
travellers, but you would further be weakening the effect of your
curse. “God damn you,” says Jones to Brown. Brown says to himself:
“Good; Jones is thoroughly annoyed with me, and afraid to do anything
but curse.” And Brown considers himself on good terms with God, and
cannot imagine the latter being influenced by any angry petitions of
Jones. But “You will have a dangerous illness in three weeks’ time”
is a different matter. For all the traveller knows, you may be a
specialist, giving a free diagnosis of his condition. Pride will keep
him from asking you on what grounds you said what you did. If he does
ask, he cannot force a reply from you without assault. Keep silence
for the rest of the journey, and watch his nerves gradually go. He is
pinned in that corner-seat with you opposite him: he has no refuge from
your curse because he does not understand it. The more often he tells
himself that he should pay no attention to you, the more irritating
will be the superstitious reactions. When eventually you part, he
takes the curse home with him――not your curse, but his own. For this
is an individualistic age: the community has little power over the
individual, and, if you would curse effectively, it must not be done
in the name of the community or the formula of the community. You must
put it into your adversary’s mind to curse himself with his own fears.
“Injuries only come from the heart” quoth my uncle Toby.