Emine Saner’s Guardian piece doesn’t have any revelations, but it’s got some nice quotes:
If it were the 14th century, your name was Robert Clevecunt and you lived on Pissing Alley, you wouldn’t have hesitated to tell anyone your name or address. Such words were common enough to be unremarkable. It is easily offended 21st-century humans who would change our name by deed poll and lobby the council to change its road signs.
However, we may be becoming more relaxed about swearwords. It was reported last week that an employment judge, presiding over a case of unfair dismissal and discrimination, had decided that using the phrase “I don’t give a fuck” in a “tense” meeting was not necessarily significant. “The words allegedly used in our view are fairly commonplace and do not carry the shock value they might have done in another time,” said the judge.
Swearing is everywhere. It is on TV, on social media, in music. Young children use “WTF” and “OMG”. For many of us, workplace swearing seems so normal that it doesn’t even stand out any more (this was one theory, in that employment tribunal, as to why others in that meeting couldn’t remember if that particular swearword was used). […]
This isn’t to say that anything goes – witness the broadcasters braced for impact whenever they need to mention the chancellor Jeremy Hunt, or Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who was taken off Channel 4 news for a week for being overheard, off-camera, using the C-word to describe Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister.
The shambolic few weeks of Liz Truss’s tenure as prime minister gave rise to some good swearing – not quite the magnificent creations from The Thick of It, but punchy nonetheless. “I am fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck any more,” the then deputy chief whip, Craig Whittaker, was reported to have said; a German news clip of apolitical correspondent recounting it verbatim went viral. During the economic turmoil that was unleashed, the Financial Times reported that allies of Truss described stories of tensions between her and the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, as “weapons-grade bollocks”.
Has swearing finally lost its power? Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and a swearing expert, sighs. “I’ve been answering that question for 50 years,” he says. “The offensiveness of any word is entirely dependent upon context. All of us carry the calculus for who, what, where and when. If I went in my dean’s office, I wouldn’t swear in there; a student wouldn’t swear in there, but they would swear in a dorm room or a bar.” […]
“We are exposed to more swearing than ever in history – all of the media that we consume,” says Jay. “However, that doesn’t mean that the average person swears more. Again, it depends on the context.” Language evolves and taboos weaken. Stephens found a copy of Vanity Fair from the early 20th century in which the word “damn” was disguised with dashes. “Then, that was an unprintable word, but now we’re comfortable with that. I think we are more comfortable with the four-letter words now than we have been.” What is driving that? “This is just my opinion, not a research-informed answer, but society is becoming more open and we’re freer with language like we’re freer with lots of other things.” […]
In her book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr – she of Pissing Alley and many other brilliant examples – writes that, in the English middle ages, there was little taboo around bodily functions or sex, so some of the words we find most offensive now would not have been considered so. Things started to change in the 14th century. “Combined with the rise of Protestantism, and with it a strain of puritanism, this civilising process slowly transformed innocuous words into what modern observers would recognise as obscenities.” […]
What worries Emma Byrne, the author of Swearing Is Good for You, is that as words such as “fuck” lose their impact, worse words might take their place. “Swearing tends to lose its power as it loses its taboo status,” she says. “The terms that remain taboo tend to be slurs, derogatory terms for other people, and I would much rather the bodily functions stayed as our outlet.” […]
Jay has shown that, contrary to widespread belief, swearing is not the refuge of those who are lacking in vocabulary. “Swearing is a wonderful evolutionary advantage – for humans to be able to express their emotions abstractly. It allows me to vent, it allows me to express frustration, anger, but also surprise, joy. It allows me to express that and communicate it to you very effectively. When you say ‘fuck you’ to someone, it’s almost like punching them, but it’s not punching them.”
Young children, he says, “progressively learn how to express their anger, which originally is very physical – tantrums, biting, scratching – and then it becomes much more abstract. I can yell ‘fuck you’ to someone across the street and I don’t have to hit or bite them.” As offensive or upsetting as it might be, he says, “it’s better than shooting someone. We have enough of that crap here [in the US].” […]
Even chimps might swear. “The two things that are sufficient for swearing to emerge are a taboo and the means to express it,” says Byrne. For the chimps that were studied, that was bowel movements and learning a sign for “dirty”. “They used that sign as a way of expressing frustration, of telling someone they’re not happy with them, and also joking. They have a really scatological sense of humour and would wind up the humans by basically doing what my six-year-old does, which is say ‘poo’ all the time at the table.
“I loved that, as soon as you have a taboo and the means to express it, at least in one other species, we’ve seen that used in the same way as we use it.”
Her favourite example of swearing, though, she says with a laugh, tells us much about how swearwords deliver far more than the sum of their parts – how they can convey frustration, intensity, shock and humour, but also sufficient emotion regulation and language skills, where once there would have been an angry physical reaction. It was when her toddler turned to her, looked her dead in the eye, and said: “Mummy, get me out of this fucking highchair.”
I like that kid. Thanks, Trevor!
Setting England aside, what was the status of swearing in decidedly never-Protestant southern Europe? Were @𐩕!꩜#⁕ commonplace in, say, medieval Italy? If so, what made them go away?
> It is easily offended 21st-century humans who would change our name by deed poll and lobby the council to change its road signs.
Those same easily offended humans probably are a lot more blase about religious swears than our ancestors were.
Words like “gadzooks” are not just funny things said by cartoon wizards, they’re minced oaths so people can avoid saying hugely offensive things like “God’s hooks” while still getting their meaning across.
But I bet none of us think “God’s hooks” is anything to get offended over, unlike Mr. Clevecunt of Pissing Alley, who probably did have an opinion on the subject.
One day, Gale was driving, I was navigating, and Irene was in a car seat in the back, around age two (old enough to face forwards, anyway). The highway had many tight turns and was clogged with traffic. Gale muttered, “There are so many assholes on this road”, and Irene came out with “Many assholes, many assholes!” We all burst out laughing, and the phrase became a family joke for many years.
4.1 scaramuccis, says Scaramucci.
Witness the simple search-and-replacements of hell & devil: who/what/why/where the fuck, fuck knows what…
I may have referenced this before as a good instance of shifting word taboos within my own lifetime, but … The 1986 track “I Don’t Like Rock ‘n’ Roll” by the proto-gangsta rapper Schoolly D includes the line “All you long-haired faggots can kiss my ass.” In the version of the rather hilarious contemporaneous video* that’s easily findable on youtube, the word “ass” is bleeped out while “faggots” is heard unexpurgated, presumably because someone thought, as of 1986, that the former word was more taboo than the latter. I expect that the trendlines subsequently crossed.
*Featuring several different subgenres of stereotypical Young White Dudes, all of whom look like they could have gone to high school with me, being kidnapped and reprogrammed by the star and his henchmen, in some sort of mad-scientist way, until they prefer rap to rock.
Of course, all that has really happened is that the taboos around swearing have shifted domains. We laugh at people censoring “damn” and “bloody” in print 150 years ago. We pride ourselves in our earthy robustness about “fuck”. Meanwhile, people 50 years ago, as J.W. Brewer reflects, had no problem with “faggot”. And a substantial subset of those who laugh at censoring “damn” also refer to “the n-word”. If objecting to one is being a snow-flake, so is objecting to the other.
Is swearing still taboo? Swearing does in fact include racial and sexuality slurs. It is not restricted to sex and religion. Of course swearing is still taboo. And the article acknowledges this, though I think in an unreflective and superficial way.
What this hopefully humbles us into realising (though it won’t) is that all these judgements are culturally contingent, and that antinomianism and taboo-breaking are not useful goals in isolation. If taboos needed to be lifted around sex in the pursuit of a more open and fair society, then great. But libertinism for its own sake is no more virtuous coming from the left than from the (alt-)right.
As I reflected once on Stephanos Sachlikis, first poet to rhyme in Greek: https://opuculuk.quora.com/Ooh-He-Said-Fuck-He-must-be-a-revolutionary . Yes, he was Rabelaisian. He was also an unabashed feudalist. The two are more compatible than you might think. After all, 4chan.
@Nick Nicholas: Ahh, now I’m getting nostalgic about being a 20-year-old college radio DJ back in the winter of ’85-’86 and playing this ode to the supposed liberatory power of uttering the word “fuck” over the airwaves. After 11 pm, which in those days meant the FCC didn’t give a fuck. Things may have changed on that score, for all I know.
https://genius.com/Sonic-youth-flower-lyrics
@Nick Nicholas: It’s not the same thing. People who hit their finger with a hammer may yell damn/fuck/tabarnac according to the era and the place, but they wouldn’t use personal epithets in that context. Those are meant as putdowns of less-powerful minorities, and that has only recently become unacceptable across the board, for the first time in maybe forever.
“taboo-breaking are not useful goals in isolation. If taboos needed to be lifted around sex in the pursuit of a more open and fair society, then great. ”
And in the Victorian era taboos around sex needed to be invented, again in the pursuit of a more open and fair society.
I was first pulled up for a religious “swear word” when I was about seven years old. I had run across the headmistress of our Infants School (an old spinster, I believe) in the street, and while I was talking to her inadvertently said “Oh gee!” to something.
In shocked tones she asked me “What did you say?” I was quite surprised and couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. It was only some time later (I don’t remember when) that I understood that in her view I was actually blaspheming. (How would a child know that unless they were brought up in an extremely strait-laced family?)
There is certainly an evolution to what people find offensive. As to what offends Americans these days, I was once given a lecture by a semi-literate white American when I used the word “niggle”, contextually correctly, in a written sentence.
And the fact that I don’t have to explain why I was given a lecture, makes my point.
i think the distinction between being profane and putting down powerless groups is an important one – glad it came up. And guys who seem to be itching to use the n-word… f off.
It does not seem to me that taboo words are a universal category. Even from one village to the next there can be differences with regards to sexuality of feces — I know that from personal experience on the Balkan peninsula.
EDIT: As in, feces are taboo at this village on one side of the river and sex is taboo on the other side of the river.
And guys who seem to be itching to use the n-word… f off.
Huh? Please tell me you’re not taking the side of the semi-literate white American who objected to the use of the word “niggle.” That’s how the left gets the reputation of being witless and intolerant.
Aren’t we confusing at least three different types of words by calling all taboo or formerly taboo words swear-words? There are words that are used to describe actual things, actions, etc and are taboo because the thing being described is unmentionable. (There may be contexts where it must be mentioned – law, medicine – and then there are specialized words that can be substituted and the discussion will be kept from children and in a former era, from women.) The thing itself is too disgusting or shocking to be mentioned except when absolutely necessary.
Then there are words that originated as actual swears – promises, imprecations or intended guarantees of truthfulness. I swear by God’s blood, I swear by the tabernacle, may God damn me if I lie, may God damn you for what you did. The thing itself is too holy and powerful to be discussed and using the word lightly risks divine punishment.
Next there are insulting words used to describe oppressed or outsider groups of people.
The last group – words that are used as more or less meaningless expletives and intensives seems to be drawn from the first two categories only.
Hat – Nope, was just (over?)reacting to a possible whiff of “why can’t we just say it!” in one of Nick N.’s remarks above. Sorry to come out guns blazing like that, but I’ve seen countless arguments on places like twitter that were supposedly about free speech or something but actually hinged on white people really, really wanting permission to say one particular word.
Using “niggle” in this day and age, on the other hand, shows a lack of ability to read the room, as it were, but is not necessarily disingenuous. Niggling and niggardly have been consistently, notoriously misinterpreted as offensive in the US for several decades now… which kind of makes them de facto likely to cause offense, no matter how innocent the words themselves might once have been. To give a possibly similar example – the term “master bedroom” is out of fashion now in the US due to folk etymology / rumor, which I personally find idiotic, but I’m certainly not going to be using it loudly in public from now on if I can avoid it!
feces are taboo at this village on one side of the river and sex is taboo on the other side of the river.
So the river itself springs inter faeces et concubinatum. Sounds pretty polluted.
I don’t know how it was in the past, but in the present I find that southern Europeans (mainly French and Spanish in my range of knowledge) are less easily embarrassed about words and indeed actions than British or American people are. The great geneticist/statistician/biochemist/political activist J. B. S. Haldane had a good sentence about that that unfortunately I can’t track down, so I’ll have to be content with some anecdotes of my own.
Around the turn of the century I was having a lot of troubles with allergy to cypress pollen (very common in this part of the world, at just this time of year). One time I was in my specialist’s office when he had a call from another patient, who wanted him to diagnose her problem over the telephone. I can’t do that without seeing you, he said, you’ll have to come to my office and show me your bottom. I find it hard to imagine a British doctor saying that to a patient over the telephone, let alone in the presence of another patient.
Another occasion that springs to mind occurred when we had been to a primary school for a film*, lecture and discussion about conditions of the very poor in the shanty towns around Lima. Afterwards I wanted to have a pee, and went to look for the children’s toilets. There was a queue and no lighting apart from the general lighting of the area, and no door on the toilet. In front of me in the queue was a woman of about 25 who went in, pulled her knickers down and made some comment about how small the toilet was. It was dark, but very far from pitch dark, and she didn’t show the slightest embarrassment about having a pee in full view of me and others in the queue.
====
*Nothing to do with the rest of this post, but as this is a language group I will add something about the Spanish of Peruvian shanty-down dwellers. There were several people living in the most appalling conditions who were interviewed. They all spoke the purest Spanish that would (or should) put most Chileans or Argentinians to shame. I had no difficulty understanding any of them.
As Emine Saner is apparently of Turkish origin, even if she grew up in a small Midlands town, she can perhaps be forgiven for writing “on Pissing Alley”, but the Guardian cannot be so easily forgiven for not correcting it to “in Pissing Alley”. In England people don’t live on streets, they live in them, and I doubt it was different for Mr Cleavecunt in the 14th century.
O and I are next to each other on the keyboard…
@Bloix, it is unclear what are words for promiscuous women (and though I can’t remember an example of a world for women from disreputable social classes used as an expletive, I can imagine it becoming one. Cf. “slut”).
Then there are female dogs.
O and I are next to each other on the keyboard
Even on a Turkish keyboard !
@A. C-B
https://londonist.com/london/history/the-ghosts-of-fleet-street-past
Here you see “on Fleet Street” and “in Fleet St.” in what to me appears to be free variation. I admit I was unable to find even one example with “on” in either Pepys or Boswell’s London Diary, so the “on” is presumably due to contamination by non-Londoners (although I had great hopes of Boswell in this regard), or I am missing some distinction explaining when “in” is required or “on” is permitted.
@AG, it is remarkable that where you read Nick’s (rather innocent) comment as a possible attack on a taboo, I read it as a possible rationalisation of old taboos.
Paranoia:)
drasvi – Well, I obviously don’t know what the intent was, but for the analogy between “damn” and “the n-word” to work, you have to accept the implication that in the future, the n-word will deservedly be seen as just as innocuous as we currently believe “damn” to be. It also mentioned snowflakes. These were choices that raised a (small but noticeable) warning flag for me. I suppose the analogy could have been implying that the n-word was not offensive *in the past*, which… really depends on who you ask, I would suppose.
@AG, it is possible. Maybe people will use it as an expletive:)
But if racism itself will disappear (I hope it will) it will be as inoccuous as insults that we read in historical novels. People do it: they forget old prejudices. I guess our goal is this.
But if racism itself will disappear (I hope it will) it will be as inoccuous as insults that we read in historical novels. People do it: they forget old prejudices. I guess our goal is this.
Exactly.
though I can’t remember an example of a world for women from disreputable social classes used as an expletive, I can imagine it becoming one
Am I misreading you? Блядь would seem like an obvious example. Also “puta”, “puttana”, “putain” and of course “kurwa”.
@Bloix – insulting words for women are certainly used as expletives in many languages and cultures. That might constitute a fourth group in your categorization, distinct from disparaging words for people from a different tribe, which don’t seem to be used as expletives. I suppose there is an argument that a word like “puta/kurwa” is perceived as a taboo sexual word like “coño/pizda” and so can be used as an expletive.
@Vanya, I meant groups defined not by promiscuity as such but still antonymous to “lady”.
E.g. the situation with Russian девка and баба.
Maybe English slut too.
Sluts are defined by nothing other than promiscuity… but bitches aren’t.
I suppose the analogy could have been implying that the n-word was not offensive *in the past*, which… really depends on who you ask, I would suppose.
Well, growing up as a Southern white boy in the 1950s, I used the N-word just as freely as grownups did around me, but I would have been scolded for saying “shit.” Since then, a moral advance has taken place.
The N-word was of course always offensive to its recipients, even in West Virginia. Ah, the innocence of youth.
“Sluts are defined by nothing other than promiscuity”
I have a book of ‘Stories from Grimm’ given to my father in his boyhood a century ago In it, the word is used to describe the ‘bad’ girl in the story ‘Mother Holle’ when she has had pitch poured over her as punishment for laziness. The traditional meaning, at least here in the UK, was ‘an idle and dirty woman’.
Actually *both* meanings of slut, ‘slovenly’ and ‘sexually promiscuous’, go back to the 1400s, and with earliest citations of 1402 and c1412 respectively, it’s impossible to say for sure which one is older, especially since the senses can overlap and it can be unclear which one is meant.
The ‘slovenly’ sense has been declining in BrE for a while; the OED did a full revision of slut and related words in 2020 and labeled all such senses as “somewhat dated”, “dated”, or “obsolete”. I’m not familiar with that sense in American English in my lifetime, but COHA does have some old citations that could be interpreted that way, e.g. “She turns out for the opera in a red dress, and in her house she relaxes like a slut” in a 1933 novel.
More at Separated by a Common Language.
In England people don’t live on streets, they live in them
Given that on is standard in North America, which is usually conservative about these things, this is probably a post-1700 change. The OED’s first quotation for lives on is 1907 and Canadian, but the record is sparse; there is no lives in quotation from N.A. (We do live in buildings, and not generally on them; this is interpreted literally, whereas neither in a street nor on a street is literal. “Are they laughing at us?” “No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.” You can of course piss in the street or on it, as you will.)
The usual explanation is that at refers to points, on to lines and surfaces, and in to enclosures. That makes me think that British streets became an exception for some reason.
I’ve seen “slut’s wool” in English novels to refer to what I as an American would call “dust bunnies” or “dust mice”, but I don’t know if it’s current usage. And one of Alexander McCall Smith’s “44 Scotland Street” books has one character describing someone as a slut (meaning she’s messy), with the person he’s talking to thinking he means promiscuous. In one of the other books I believe there’s a similar miscommunication with the meaning of “mad” (insane versus angry).
I was going to comment that the “messy” meaning of “slut” is covered by “slatternly”, but I note that “slatternly” is now marked as “dated”. Time marches on.
“In xxx street” is normal for me, but I suspect that “on xxx street” is gaining ground under American influence. I’ve encountered Americans online who will correct you if you use “in” in this context, suggesting that they are totally unfamiliar with this usage.
one of Alexander McCall Smith’s “44 Scotland Street” books has one character describing someone as a slut (meaning she’s messy)
In some older German novel a female character was described as a Schlampe, meaning merely that she was careless (schlampig) with housekeeping and/or apparel. It corresponded to the word “slattern”. Today calling a woman a Schlampe implies that she is “no better than she should be”, that mysteriously expressed British put-down.
Does BrE still use “the” before some named major roads, as in “in the Brompton Road”?
“the Foo road” is simply the road from here to Foo, which may be the next town over or a major centre much farther off. Once street nameplates get erected, the r in “Road” is capitalised. I suppose the “the” might get dropped if for whatever reason the sense of “road to Foo” is utterly lost. Many tourists on the Brompton Rd don’t know what or where Brompton is, but most locals do.
One (perfectly American, and not prone to using Anglicisms*) onetime girlfriend of mine did use “slut’s wool” in the sense “dust bunnies” but as best as I can recall (this was a long time ago) this was simply a fixed phrase and there was nothing else in her idiolect to indicate that she used the relevant non-sexual sense of “slut” outside that fixed phrase.
*She was in fact prone to mocking the sort of Americans who watched too much BBC programming on PBS and adopted a certain BBC way of speaking, with her standard example being someone (American) who would call a loud noise a “frightful din.”
mollymooly: But I’ve also seen “in the King’s Road”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only occurrence of slattern I saw before this thread had the “sexually promiscuous” meaning.
I also wonder if the “sexually promiscuous” meaning of Schlampe is actually calqued on Hollywood English.
German does it for absolutely all streets.
To go back to my original Schoolly-D shifting-taboos example, it is clear that “ass” and “faggot” fall into different subcategories of (at least mildly) taboo words,* but neither is used, in the varieties of English with which I am familiar, as a standalone expletive of the sort that pops out of your mouth spontaneously when you stub your toe or hit your thumb with the hammer.
*”Faggot” in the relevant sense was I think always mildly taboo or at least colloquial. In the old days when typical American newspaper coverage was by default fully in favor of the criminalization of consensual male homosexual acts, a headline would not use that word, but instead might say that “perverts” or “sodomites” or “inverts” or what have you had been arrested in a police sting. It is not a word you would have expected to hear from the pulpit in a sermon decrying the sinfulness of the acts of the referent, unless you were at a church in which sermons were commonly given in a much less elevated register than those I have personally attended.
As it happens the epistle reading appointed for this Sunday in the Byzantine (that word again!) lectionary includes 1. Cor. 6:13, which in the KJV uses “fornication” as the Englishing of πορνεία. Many more recent translations eschew that in favor of some phrase like “sexual immorality.” I’m never sure how much this has to do with a (correct) scholarly insight that πορνεία has a somewhat broader scope than “fornication,” and how much has to do with the Euphemism Treadmill and Victorian and post-Victorian (we are not out of the relevant era yet …) discomfort with the sometimes “earthy” lexical choices of the KJV. In any event, the lesson was read this morning in my parish in a translation that used “sexual immorality,” but due to chance human error in speech production it was read as “sexual immortality.” I don’t know whether euphemisms (esp the sort that characteristically involve materially more syllables than what they replace) are especially prone to that sort of error, but I’d sort of like to hope so.
It seems to be a relatively new meaning: it’s not in Grimm, Paul or the standard etymological dictionaries (Pfeiffer, Kluge).
“fornication” is a skunk word. The narrowest sense seems to be “the sin of straight sex between unmarried consenting adults”, but for some speakers and contexts any and all of those words can be removed, with the possible exception of “sex”.
“sexual immortality”
Day saved. And now to bed, having just dragged stackoverflow through the mud.
@Y re non-protestant Southern Europe:
Well, in Croatia, it is more about saints and animals.
When I moved from Croatia to Australia, I was struck by the absence of animal-related swearing and a predilection for bodily functions.
Eg. “Piss off” was one that was really puzzling to me when i first arrived. The closest Croatian equivalent would be “odjebi” (= “fuck off”) – which shows, after all, that there is some common ground when it comes to English & Croatian swearing.
Btw. Similar things as described by Emine Saner occurred in medieval Croatia too. Eg. In the 13th century Law Code of Vinodol (Vinodolski zakon), the verb “jebati” is used without blushing.
I know a person who regularly uses the n-word when he hurts his hand. I have never seen him use it in another context.
Yeats’ “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” has:
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till.
…and while I hadn’t been exposed to any other meaning of “slut”, the context (crazy old woman in a junk shop) always made it very difficult for me to imagine that he was talking about her sexual behavior.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43299/the-circus-animals-desertion
her standard example being someone (American) who would call a loud noise a “frightful din.”
I refuse to believe that person actually exists. I have known Americans who say “gobsmacked”, or who refer to the pitch and being 2 points off the drop. I even know Americans who have lived in Britain for decades and have taken on affectations like using the short vowel in “can’t”, rhyming “scone” with “gone” and eating “biscuits”. But “frightful din” ? That seems a step too far.
Unless you are talking about members of the Elizabethan Club in their undergraduate days, that I could believe.
Now « spag bol » is an English word that should be a swear word yet is not. Also a term that is guaranteed to annoy Americans more than «frightful din ».
“Then I can hum a fugue of which I’ve heard the music’s din afore [= before]
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.” — the Modern Major-General
Looping back to taboo words in street addresses, serendipity guided me to discover that I had, in the bowels of my hard disk — no idea how it got there, I must have bought it at some point in the past — a pdf copy of “The other Paris” by Luc Sante (https://www.amazon.com/Other-Paris-Luc-Sante/dp/0374536457, for complete reference), which on page 50 (or should that be “in page 50″? Are pages like streets?) says: “Many street names were cleaned up in the early nineteenth century: Rue Tire Boudin (literally“pull sausage” but really meaning “yank penis”) became Rue Marie-Stuart; Rue Trace-Putain (the “Whore’s Track”) became Trousse-Nonnain (Truss a Nun), then Transnonain, which doesn’t really mean anything, and then became Rue Beaubourg. Many more streets disappeared altogether, then or a few decades later, during Haussmann’s mop-up: Shitty, Shitter, Shitlet, Big Ass, Small Ass, Scratch Ass, Cunt Hair. Some that were less earthy and more poetic also disappeared: Street of Bad Words, Street of Lost Time, Alley of Sighs, Impasse of the Three Faces. The Street Paved with Chitterling Sausages (Rue Pavée-d’Andouilles) became Rue Séguier; the Street of the Headless Woman became Rue le Regrattier.”
As to finger-hit-with-hammer exclamations, my grandmother used to say “Mein gott, farzicht mein kompott!” (with proper Polish Yiddish emphasis) but I never could figure out what it euphemized; as to my other grandmother, born in “the Ukrania” (as we called it then), she never exclaimed anything, euphemistically or not
You have excellent taste in books! I quoted that passage from Sante in 2021.
@eg
I think gott…kompott is not or at least not only euphemistic. There are very old rhyming invocations or charms, I think possibly also in Yiddish. I think I remember some story or anecdote where someone (a child?) gets rid of a “lantuch” by saying “lantuch, gib mir ein Handtuch” …
Is the R. du Chat-qui-Pêche the only survivor of that style?
For the first time it occurred to me: in view of all the other names, does it really refer to the literal animal? Of course, it is by the river, but…?
@Y No, there are other somewhat poetic street names (by which I mean they are not people names, place names, numbers or evoking historical moments) still in existence in Paris, the ones I remember are Rue du Regard, Rue du Cherche Midi, Rue du Départ, I’m sure there are many others
Letters are on a page: the literal sense prevails. However, they are in a sentence, paragraph, poem, chapter, etc.
Eduardo G.: “The other Paris” by Luc Sante<
I think I have that book somewhere. Thanks for the reminder!