Part 3
‘Apparently “bottom” was the common equivalent, in the secret language 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.