Cunt

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'''Cunt''', meaning the female genital parts, is one of the most taboo  [[acd:Four Letter Words | Four Letter Words]] in the English language.  
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'''Cunt''', meaning the female genital parts, is one of the most taboo  [[fun:Four Letter Words | Four Letter Words]] in the English language.  
  
 
==Etymologies==
 
==Etymologies==

Revision as of 02:25, 13 September 2007

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Don't bother checking Conservapedia, because its "article" about Cunt has been deleted and locked.


Cunt, meaning the female genital parts, is one of the most taboo Four Letter Words in the English language.

Contents

Etymologies

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The word vagina simply means "sheath" in Latin, and it has been in use in English for around three centuries[1]. "Cunt", by comparison is a legitimate non-slang word with an extremely long history. There are cognates in other languages:

  • con in French
  • cunnus in Latin
  • kunta in Old Norse
  • coño in modern Spanish
  • kuna in the Basque tongue
  • kut in Dutch



The word also has resemblances to "cunabula", a cradle and "cunicle", an obsolete word for a passage. The Romans extended the use of "cunnus" to mean whore, in much the same way that English speakers used "cunt" as a perjorative term for "woman", as well as for a woman's anatomical parts[2]. This usage has now evolved into an abusive derogatory term which has now given "cunt" an entirely new meaning[3], in particular, when applied to men as well as women[4].

Shock Value

A beauty cunt, eh?

Mark Lawson, writing in The Guardian (Feb 5, 2004) contends that the word has now lost its power to shock[5]. This was following an outburst from punk icon John Lydon (one time member of the Sex Pistols), who, at 10.30pm on February 4th 2004, during a mainstream live British television transmission of "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!", accused the voting audience at home of being "fucking cunts" for failing to choose him as that night's loser. Fewer than 100 complaints were received by ITV1 (the broadcaster) and Ofcom (the regulatory authority) combined.

Cunt in Popular Culture

  • "See You Next Tuesday" is a catty acronym back-formation sometimes used intentionally.
  • The Clash, in keeping with their observed policy of using one swear word per album, use the line "all the young cunts" several times in their song "All the Young Punks" on Give 'Em Enough Rope.

Historical references

  • In the first century BC, Cicero held that "cunnus" should be avoided as being obscene.
  • The City of London (ca. 1230) once boasted a Gropecuntelane
  • Chaucer used the word unblushingly in his Canterbury Tales (1387-1400). The Wife of Bath in her tale, says:
    • What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone?
    • Os it for ye wolde have my queynte allone?
  • In Twelfth Night (1600-1601) by Shakespeare, the steward, Malvolio picking up a letter, attempts to decipher it:
    • By my life, this is my lady's hand.
    • These be her very C's her U's and [n's omitted [6]]
    • Her T's, and thus she makes her great P's.
  • In The Royal Angler of Windsor, a ditty on the Subject of Nell Gwyn, Charles II's mistress, John, Wilmott, 2nd Earl of Rochester writes:
    • However weak and slender be the string,
    • Bait it with Cunt, and it will hold a king.
  • By the time that Robert Burns came to write his Merrie Muses of Caledonia (ca. 1800), the use of the word was expurgated from the text:
    • For ilka hair upon her c___t
    • Was worth a royal ransom.
  • The word was used several times in the first part of the 20th century by authors such as D.H.Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and James Joyce, in Ulysses (1922), in which he describes the Dead Sea as ".. the grey silken cunt of the Holy Land". However, it was not until Lady Chatterley's Lover was finally cleared for full publication in 1959 (US) and 1960 (UK) that the word "cunt" could once again be used in mainstream literature.

See Also

Vandalism to this page

References

  1. . The oldest example of "vagina" in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from 1682, pre-dating the first use of the word Penis by around two years
  2. Rawson, H. (1981), A Dictionary of euphemisms and other doubletalk, Macdonald
  3. The Urban Dictionary only admits of the term being abusive towards women
  4. However, in some online dictionaries, such as Your Dictionary, one of the definitions cited is: "a disparaging term for a person one dislikes or finds extremely disagreeable"
  5. Has swearing lost its power to shock?
  6. It should be noted that "cut" meant the same thing as "cunt" in Elizabethan slang
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