Submitted by vrphotosguy55 t3_10p6fjv in todayilearned
People today underestimate how much profanity was in use in daily life back then, partly because of how the times are depicted/glorified.
Plus, there were words and phrases they used that were considered course but lost their original meaning/punch over time.
It's an ongoing process. For example, "fuck" once had an impact. Now it's a routine vocabulary word. It happens the other way around too. "Piss" was once the normal word for urination. When "piss" became crude, it was euphemized to "pee."
Edit: Another example: In medieval England, "cunt" was tame enough to officially name a street where prostitutes plied their trade "gropecunt lane." Most (not all) of them have been renamed.
John Neal. The Quentin Tarrantino of his time
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I'm in
First known reference in English apparently is in a compound, Oxford street name Gropecuntlane cited from c. 1230 (and attested through late 14c.) in "Place-Names of Oxfordshire" (Gelling & Stenton, 1953), presumably a haunt of prostitutes. Used in medical writing c. 1400, but avoided in public speech since 15c.; considered obscene since 17c.
The phrase itself is much, much older, even appearing in Shakespeare. King Lear, Act 2 scene 2.
More here. I don't find any surviving examples. Maybe all have been renamed.
Grope them by the cunt
If you’re a celebrity, they let you do it.
That’s the case with basically anything these days too. I work in engineering and watching my company’s promotional and marketing department do their thing, you would think we are all upstanding professionals with a perfectly clean mouth.
That’s what gets recorded and remembered, not my co-worker and I going on about how another department fucked us.
Text isn't NSFW
NSFW is not safe for work in text.
John Ordway noted in 1805-06 in his journal that the Native Americans the Corps of Discovery wintered near knew lots of English phrases, including S.O.B. They picked the phrases up from English merchant trading vessels.
First usage in American literature, but the phrase is much older. Billy Shakes used a florid variant in King Lear in 1608: "One that..art nothing but the composition of a knaue, begger, coward, pander, and the sonne and heire of a mungrell bitch."
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Give me a drink!
Never heard of John Neal and reading his wiki entry seems like a pretty awesome guy. Way ahead of his time on many issues. I think I'll give his books a read.
The OED also offers this quotation from a legal document of 1655:
>Damaris Dry..to answere Richard Carter Headborough..yt she did..reuile him..Calling him ye sonn of a Bitch, asking him also where ye Bawd his mother was.
I am mad scientist. It so cool! sonuvabitch
Holy shit, she called his mother a "Bawd"? :-O
Somebody keeps putting up article links to him on the front page of Wikipedia every few months.
And he was a headborough, the 17th century equivalent of a cop. I imagine things didn't end well for Damaris Dry.
I was of the understanding fuck was quite common in medieval England and became more of a swear over time? Something about birds being called windfuckers?
IIRC there was a fight on the floor of congress (used to be very common) that started when one guy called the other a rascal. Naughty, rascal, etc used to be fighting words but now they’re completely inoffensive lol
The first use of "son of a bitch" on American TV was the MASH episode "Guerilla My Dreams" in 1979.
> windfuckers
/r/Bandnames
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Similarly arse to ass.
I’m sure I read that the language used in the tv show Deadwood used more modern swear words on purpose , rather than the more religious swear words people back then would have used. This religious swearing would feel very tame to us these days, so they used modern phrases to give an idea of what it felt like to hear it.
TupeloSal t1_j6iia6l wrote
Well I’ll be a….