'Cock' can be 'rooster', 'dick' = Richard, yet 'f*ck' and 'c*nt' are never non-dirty

Factual Questions
1

In a recent conversation with a native Russian friend about the obscenities of our native languages, I pointed out that “Russian has several words for crap, but no word for sh!t”. (Not an observation original to me; I’m pretty sure that Nabokov said the same thing.)

My Russian friend agreed, but countered that “English has several words for xren, but no word for xuj” – the first being a somewhat vulgar word for the penis, and the second being an incredibly filthy word for the penis. (Incidentally, xuj is pronounced somewhat like the English word “hooey,” but squashed into one syllable.)

I objected, “Whaddaya mean? We’ve got cock, dick, prick – all of which are too dirty for television.”

But the Russian pointed out, as in my thread title, that all of these words can, in certain contexts, be G-rated – unlike fck and cnt (and their respective Russian equivalents jebat’ and pizda) which are “inherently dirty” and have no non-obscene uses.

So here’s my actually question for the SD collective minds: Is it possible that the English language used to have an “inherently dirty” word for the penis that became extinct because it was too taboo to pronounce, and this forgotten word was replaced by euphemisms (cock, prick, dick) that latter became dysphemisms?

By analogy, many people know that “bear” wasn’t the original English name for critters in the family Ursidae; it was a later euphemism, signifying “the brown one,” presumably because of superstitious fears that pronouncing the animal’s True Name out loud would invite attacks.

P.S. Just to be clear, I’m not asking about when and how the words cock, prick, and dick came to mean “penis” – it’s pretty well-established that all three, when used in the phallic sense, are probably less than 300 years old, and originated as euphemisms. I’m asking whether there are theories about what word Beowulf might have used on occasions when he needed a “dysphemism” for the male crank.

P.P.S. In case anyone’s wondering, the Russian term xuj is theorized to be cognate with the Slavic word for “tail” – meaning that it, too, probably originated as a euphemism. But unlike the fairly recent “cock-as-in-penis,” xuj probably made the transition from “euphemism” to “dysphemism” in very, very ancient times, long before Russian had branched off from the other Slavic languages – possibly even before Old English had branched from its Germanic roots.

2

Actually, there is an older usage of the word by sailors describing a type of knot called a “cunt splice.”

3

?? “Govno” has no non-“filthy” meaning.

4

From the illustration on that page, it looks like the name of the splice might be derived from the “female genitalia” meaning.

And I’m pretty sure that “cock” and “prick” were both used in Shakespeare, in a phallic sense, which would put them at older than 300 years.

5

Neither does “crap”, but it’s still considered a milder word than “shit”.

6

“Govno” is not mild. “Der’mo” is. And “crap” can be non-filthy if it means “rubbish” or “nonsense”.

7

Hmmm… but did this knot get its name because sailors thought the knot looked like a minge? (Remember, we’re talking about the same demographic that mistook manatees for mermaids.)

The Wikipedia article on “cunt” says that although the word’s original etymology (and thus the oldest original meaning) is disputed*, a surviving manuscript from circa 1325 confirms that the word’s vaginal sense is at least as old as that . So if the term “cunt splice” did not come into currency until later on, presumably the sailors bestowed it in honor of the body part, and not in reference to an older, non-anatomical meaning of “cunt.”

  • It MIGHT be cognate with the same Indo-European root that gave us such words as “genital” and “gonad”. Or it might be cognate with Greek gynos, "woman. But counter-intuitively, English “cunt” has no proven relationship to the Latin word cunnus, which not only sounds similar but has the same meaning, namely “vulva.” (And, in turn, cunnus probably isn’t related to “genital”, “gonad,” or “gynecology.”)
8

I have no doubt that the Cunt Splice got its name from the resemblance. The current replacement name is “Cut Splice”. similarly, the groove between strands of rope in a twisted rope used to be called the cunting, undoubtedly for the sorta resemblance. The modern sensitive term is contline.

9

Yeah, but the cunt splice was called thus because its shape reminded one of specific anatomical minutiae.

ETA : what I mean is, whether the word “cunt” to mean lady bits has etymological origins in Proto-German or Latin (it’s not quite clear), it long predates the Royal Navy.

10

ETA2: fuck, beaten to it like the redheaded stepchild of an alcoholic.

11

But a propos of nothing, and because I’m fond of etymological trivia, in French the word “con” has seen a rather circular evolution. Originally it was the local variant of the Latin “cunnus”, meaning cunt. Then it became a euphemism for “wild tufts of hair”, which in turn got applied to rabbits, specifically a metonymy referring to a rabbit’s bushy tail. So if you read 12th century novels, you’ll read about poachers chasing cunt, but it was less dirty than it sounds. Then later, some no doubt smart observer, raised with the notion that “connet” means “rabbit” made the comparison again, and from then on “connet” or “con” became slang for lady bits. Again.
And these days its meaning has shifted to mean “stupid” or “asshole” (in the metaphorical sense of the word, not the anatomical one) depending on the context.

So there you go, readers. At least 10 minutes of factoids to bore people with at parties.

12

“Mildness” is subjectively defined, but I solemnly assure you that govno is mild by comparison with xuj, pizda, and jebat’ (which are the “unholy trinity” of Russian cusswords). And native-speaking Russians have assured me that govno is also milder than second-tier obscenities such as bljad (arguably the fourth-worse Russian cussword) and mudak.

On Russian-language forums, I’ve seen middle-aged women unblushingly spell out govno in full, even while bljad is daintily bowdlerized to blin (the latter word rhymes with “clean” and literally means “thin, crepe-style pancake” – so yelling “BLEEN!” instead of “BLJAD!” when you stub your toe is exactly analogous to “Oh, fudge!”).

Other Russians have told me that a young child who uses the word govno in front of adults is likely to get a mere scolding, not a spanking!

In short, it may have been an exaggeration to call govno a “mild” term, but the word is nonetheless much nearer in strength to “crap” or “turd” than to “shit.”

13

Err, that would be a dysphemism. Sorry.

14

“Shit” can also mean “nonsense” or “thing/stuff I don’t know the name for” (as in saying of an unfamiliar Chinese appetizer: “This shit is delicious – you’ve gotta try it!”), but it remains an obscenity even when intended in these neutral-to-positive senses. (Just as “fuck” remains bleep-able even when it’s used in a positive way, as in “that movie was fucking awesome!”)

As to “crap,” I would argue that adults who consider it too harsh to say in front of children when they mean “fecal material” will also avoid using it in front of kids when the intended meaning is “nonsense.” So, while different English speakers will disagree over just how vulgar the word is, the degree of vulgarity isn’t really changed by the sense or the context, in my opinion.

15

For collectors of foreign-language maledicta, here’s a Webphone video clip taken by a group of teenage Russian boys just seconds after the sonic boom from the February meteor reached the city of Chelyabinsk.

Basically, the only non-obscene words heard in the 70 seconds of footage are some pronouns and prepositions – almost everything else is etymologically linked to one of the three super-filthy roots listed above, but especially xuj.

P.S. Russian cussing is distinctively phallic – while in English we can say “Holy fuck, what the fucking fuck was that fucking fucker?!”, the guys in this vid are saying, in essence, “Holy cocks, what the cockity-cock was that cocking cocker?!” (The literal equivalents of “fuck” and “cunt” are heard only a couple times.)

Feel free to make your own Sapir-Whorf arguments about the deeper cultural implications of Russia’s cock-centricity…

16

Well yes, but it’s the same with “shit” in English - it is much milder by comparison with other “obscenities”.

I am a native Russian speaker. I assure you that “govno” is pretty much equivalent, in strength, to “shit” in current English usage.

17

Even when “crap” is used to mean rubbish or nonsense, it’s still dirty. Calling something “crap” is a statement that it has the same value or quality as fecal matter.

18

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest English usage of ‘cunt’ back to 1230, when the street that made up London’s red-light district was called Gropecunt Lane.

In the 14th century Chaucer uses the Middle English variant “queynte” liberally throughout the Canterbury Tales.

In my youth the variation ‘quim’ was more commonly used. Fanny was a milder alternative and it amuses us when Americans talk about a ‘fanny pack’. Entirely different item over here:)

We still have ball cocks and stop cocks here in spite of the PC brigade.

19

I have a t-shirt that reads: “HOW QUEYNTE! – The Chaucer Society”. So far no one has caught the true meaning, except one person who knew me well enough to correctly guess I was up to something.

The F-word does have a few rare homophonic uses, such as the town of Fucking, Austria. There’s also the retired Brazilian soccer player Argélico Fucks who inspired the legendary headline: “Fucks Off To Benfica”.

20

For an “inherently dirty” English word for “penis,” how about the Yiddish loanword “schlong”? OED traces it back to the German for “serpent,” but it has no non-obscene uses in English.

(Yiddish also gave us “schmuck,” from the German for “jewelry,” but that’s more common among Anglophones as a mild insult than as slang for “penis.”)