Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (8 page)

Most graffiti are more personal, from the sweet and touching—marriage and birth announcements—to the shocking, some of which we’ve already seen. (And sometimes it’s both, as in this wish for a happy marriage: “
Eulale, may you enjoy
good health with your wife Vera and good fucking.”)
Since the surviving graffiti are so florid
in their obscenity, scholars have generally assumed that they were written by schoolboys and “the lower classes,” reasoning that only the immature or the vulgar would descend to the level of “
Crescens’s member is hard—
and enormous.”
But scholars who study ancient literacy
argue that only about 20 percent of the population could read and write, with a somewhat larger percentage possessing rudimentary reading ability. In reality, it must have been the pretty well-educated bragging that “I fucked here.”

Epigrams are on a par with graffiti in terms of the language they use. These are short, witty poems that express a single thought or observation. Catullus wrote some, and many were collected into the
Priapea
, but Martial is the acknowledged Roman master of the genre. Martial’s twelve books of epigrams depict Roman society, high and low, in all its variety—what happened at dinner parties, in fancy villas, in the public latrines, between husbands and wives, or between prostitutes and clients.

Although he was a Roman citizen
, Martial was born in the provinces, in Spain, far from the centers of literary life and political power. His poems were his entrée into Roman high society—he had emperors for his patrons and was made an
eques
, a knight, part of the aristocracy. But using poetry as a means of personal advancement could have unintended, unpleasant consequences, especially for someone as attuned to the nuances of social hierarchy as Martial. Poets couldn’t support themselves by the stylus alone. Booksellers took most of the profits from their works, so they relied on patrons to survive.

The patron-client relationship
was widespread and quite formalized in ancient Rome. Most Roman citizens were either patrons or
clients, and some were both, to different people. Every morning clients went to their patron’s house for
salutatio
, the calling hour. The patron would distribute money (
sportula
, “the dole”), give legal advice, and inquire about any problems his clients were having—whether they needed money for a dowry, were having trouble selling their grain, had a sick mother, and so on. In return, clients owed their patrons
obsequium
, submission. (This gives us our word
obsequious
, referring to an overly fawning servility, which goes to the root of the problem with clientship.) They had to support their patrons politically, accompany them on walks around town, and generally be at their beck and call.

This subservient status rankled Martial. Being a client was a passive position, and in a society that equated manliness with action, self-assertion, and domination of others, no man wanted to be passive. It also affected Martial’s writing, setting up a dichotomy between his poetry and his personal life. Martial knew well that his epigrams “
can’t please without
a cock” (
non possunt sine mentula placere
)—that people liked them because they were racy, daring, and used obscene language. But as a client, he had to present at least a plausible fiction of being an honest, virtuous man, hence his continual protestations that “
my little book
doesn’t have my morals” (
mores non habet hic meos libellus
) or “
my page is wanton
, but my life is virtuous” (
lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba
).

Writers had a license to use bad language in epigrams, which were meant to reveal the often unlovely truth about people and things and so needed to employ the plainest words possible. As Martial says: “
A lascivious truth of words
,
that
is the language of epigram” (
lascivam verborum veritatem, id est epigrammaton linguam
). It is hard to translate this properly—the Latin implies something like “the truth found in lascivious words,” alluding to their ability to expose what people most try to hide.

A poem from the
Priapea
makes it even clearer what kind of language is appropriate for epigrams:

May I die, Priapus
, if I am not ashamed to use obscene [
obscenis
] and improper [
improbis
] words. But when you, a god without shame, display your balls to me in all openness, I must call a cunt a “cunt” and a cock a “cock.”

Epigrams can also be fun, frivolous poems, full of dirty jokes and mock insults. Whether their purpose is recreation or moral improvement, their language is
bad
. If a word is found in epigrams and graffiti and nowhere else, we can be pretty sure that it was considered obscene by the Romans.

If a word appears in satires, it might be bad, but it is most likely not one of the primary obscenities.
*
Satires too had a mandate to reveal the truth about the world (which is, usually, that the vast majority of the population is corrupt, sexually perverse, or neglectful of the gods—never that people are good, law-abiding, and ready to help one another). Satires were supposed to use more decorous language than epigrams, however. We can assume, then, that a word such as
criso
(what a woman does during sex), which appears in the works of the satirists Juvenal and Persius, was bad but not deeply offensive, or the authors would have chosen something more befitting the dignity of their genre.

Going up a step on the ladder, Latin elegies often were sexually suggestive—Ovid was supposedly banished for his
Ars Amatoria
(
The Art of Love
)—but their vocabulary was clean. Ovid’s
Elegy
1.5 gives a typical example of this mix of lascivious subject matter and chaste language (this is Christopher Marlowe’s translation, done while he was a student at Cambridge and published posthumously in 1603):

Then came Corinna
in a long loose gown

Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down …

I snatched her gown: being thin, the harm was small,

Yet strived she to be covered therewithall,

And striving thus as one that would be cast,

Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.

Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,

Not one wen in her body could I spy,

What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,

How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me,

How smooth a belly, under her waist saw I,

How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?

To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,

I clinged her naked body, down she fell,

Judge you the rest, being tired she bade me kiss.

Jove send me more such afternoons as this.

Marlowe’s language offers a good approximation of Ovid’s—it is racy and suggestive without being obscene.

Roman culture mandated that the language of oratory too should be above reproach, and that its themes should contain nothing titillating, even when recounted in the most restrained of terms.
The rhetorician Seneca instructs
that when publicly pleading a case for someone, “one must stay far away from every obscenity in both words and thoughts. It is better to be quiet, even if it damages your case, than to speak if it damages your sense of shame.” Any words in these genres would not be obscene, even if they were used in a vicious attack on an opponent in a debate, or in a plea for one’s mistress to get back into bed.
Crepo
,
for instance, must be a polite
way to say “to fart”—along the lines of “to break wind”—since the orator Cato uses it in a speech, while
pedo
(also “to fart”) is a less polite version, found only in satire and epigram. And we can tell that Romans did not consider
meio
an obscenity, despite its best translation as “to piss,” because it too is found in oratory. If not for the
hierarchy of genres, our prejudices as English-speakers would lead us to class it as obscene.

Epics are at the top of the list because they deal with such lofty subjects as the Olympian gods, battles, and the founding of nations. The language must be equally elevated. Here, for example, is how Virgil describes Dido and Aeneas getting it on for the first time: “
Dido and the Trojan leader make their way
/ To the same cave. Earth herself and bridal Juno / Give the signal. Fires flash in the Sky / Witness to their nuptials, and the Nymphs / Wail high on the mountaintop.” Here is no place for a
cunnus
, or even a little
criso
; if Martial were telling this story, it would have sounded a bit different.

This hierarchy of genres is the most useful tool we have for gauging the relative obscenity of Latin words. If a term is found in graffiti or epigrams and nowhere else, we can be pretty sure that it’s a
very
bad word. If it appears in satire, graffiti, and epigrams, it’s
pretty
bad, but not one of the worst, and so on, up the ladder. Occasionally, however, Roman authors themselves comment on appropriate language, providing direct evidence for a scale of obscenity.
Cicero’s letter about the word
mentula
is the most famous example. In this response to his loose-tongued friend Paetus, who mentioned
mentula
in a letter, Cicero discusses the Stoic idea that nothing is obscene, in word or in deed—that “breaking wind should be as free as a hiccough” (
crepitus aiunt aeque liberos ac ructus esse oportere
). Note his use of
crepitus
, the more polite word for “fart.” Cicero himself is on the side of modesty—he doesn’t agree with the Stoic proverb that “the wise man tells it like it is.” But his letter is a lengthy investigation into which words should be avoided, and why.
Penis
is
obscenus
, but it is not as offensive as
mentula
, for which it was originally a euphemism meaning “tail.” Cicero will actually write out
penis
, but he only alludes to
mentula
. He appears to consider
landica
and
cunnus
extremely obscene, and
pedo, colei
(balls), and
testes
(testicles) less so.
Battuo
(to beat) is merely vulgar slang for
futuo
; the synonymous slang
depso
(to knead) is
outright obscene. Authors such as Cicero, who were self-conscious about their language and recorded their thoughts, provide another way for modern linguists to get a feel for swearing in a language long dead.

From Profanity to
Politesse

If
penis
was obscene to the Romans, why has it become the most proper English term for the male organ of generation? It is not the only Latin word to make this transition.
Vulva
, a polite English word for
the external genital organs
of the female, was in Latin a vulgar word for the womb. And
vagina
(literally “a sheath,” “a scabbard,” as we have seen) was originally a crude metaphor for the anus.
Fellatio
and
cunnilingus
aren’t as common in English, since they refer to acts that are even more taboo than the body parts they involve. If we ever need to talk about these things, however, they are again our most proper words. How did all these obscene Latin words become our most polite sexual terms in English?

During its long tenure
as the language of the Roman Empire, Latin gradually split into two different languages, according to levels of discourse—a literary language that was used by the educated elite and which remained fairly stable over the centuries, and a “vulgar” language that over the years evolved into the Romance vernaculars: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, et cetera. In England, there was no vernacular Latin, only the elite language used by the Catholic Church, and later (beginning in the fourteenth century) by humanists, a new class of civil servants cum philosophers who wanted to revitalize ancient Roman and Greek texts and virtues. Latin was the lingua franca through which educated people of various countries could communicate with each other, and it
was used this way into the eighteenth century
. (John Milton, for example, was appointed Latin secretary to Cromwell’s republic in 1649. His job was to
compose the government’s foreign correspondence in Latin. The poet Andrew Marvell was his assistant.)

Latin was, at this time, what historian and linguist Nicholas Ostler calls “
a language for male
initiates.” These languages are not learned naturally but transmitted through an artificial procedure—school. Latin was handed down from teacher to student unchanged, since no one was using it in daily life, and almost the only people who could speak and write it were well-off and well-educated men. Ordinary people didn’t know Latin; women didn’t know Latin (with few exceptions, including Queen Elizabeth I); children didn’t know Latin. This made the language particularly suitable for talking about things you didn’t want the majority of people to understand—dangerous things such as sex. In the Renaissance, when many obscene Latin terms were being rehabilitated, there was great value placed on sexual continence, on staying in control of one’s base bodily urges (an ideal in ancient Rome as well, as we’ve seen). People of weak will and poor judgment—pretty much anyone
not
part of the Latin-language community, that is, women, children, and uneducated men—would lose control of themselves if they read or listened to descriptions of sexual activity or even overheard obscene words. Women’s passions would be inflamed, and they would become sexually insatiable. Children would be corrupted, their early promise blasted. Latin became the appropriate language in which to talk about sexual parts and actions since it was understood only by the few who wouldn’t get carried away reading about, say, penises. And so it remains today. If you are teaching a junior-high sex ed class, you had better say
penis
and
vagina
instead of
cock
and
cunt
—the former are almost abstractions, going as far as words can to desexualize the things they represent.