User:CatWatcher/Sandbox1

Cunt, meaning the female genital parts, is one of the most tabooed of Four Letter Words in the English language. The latinised, Vagina, simply means "sheath" in Latin, and it has been in use for around three centuries. "Cunt", by comparison is a legitimate non-slang word with an extremely long history. There are cognates from other languages:
 * con in French
 * cunnus in Latin
 * kunta in Old Norse
 * kuna in the Basque tongue



The word also has resembances to "cunabula", a cradle and "cunicle", and 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. This usage has now evolved into an abusive derogatory term which has now given "cunt" an entirely new meaning, in particular, when applied to men as well as women.

Mark Lawson, writing in The Guardian (Feb 5, 2004) contends that the word has now lost its power to shock. 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.

Historical references

 * In the first century BC, Cicero held thet "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 ]
 * 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 imes in the first part of the 20th century by authors such as D.H.Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and James Joyce's 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 could be used in mainstream literature.