As others from different locations have indicated, to call someone a “cunt” in the US is pretty taboo. In the British Isles, not nearly so universal.
Sorry, chaps – not expressing myself at all well, lately. That was meant as a rhetorical question.
What I’m trying to address is the area that I took CalMeacham to be exploring in his first post, where he’s attempting to understand the taboo status of the word “bloody” by assigning different possible meanings to it, and then assessing whether that meaning would justify the perceived degree of taboo.
In the specific case of “bloody”, people have been trying this for a couple of centuries without any convincing success. From all I’ve read, there just isn’t any evidence that the word ever bore those meanings, or that anyone using it intended it to. Every instance of “bloody” in the written record is either a description of something being literally or figuratively covered in blood, or else it’s a more-or-less meaningless intensive. When Jonathan Swift wrote “it was bloody hot walking today” in 1714, he’s pretty clearly using the word just as we would use it today. It was only some time after Swift’s death that the “bloody” became unmentionable in polite English, and it’s difficult to imagine the word somehow gained a meaning it hadn’t had before. What we do know happened is that it became enormously popular with the rougher sections of the working class around that time, and that this coincides with polite society dropping it like a hot turd.
My more general point is the difficulty of assessing the degree of taboo associated with a word by reference to its literal meaning. Yes, it’s often the case that references to certain parts of the body, waste products from it, and – well, just about anything that may come under the general heading of “religion” – might be considered offensive. But none of this is universally true, across all times and cultures; and where it is, there’s little rhyme or reason to it. Generations of people came out with minced oaths like “drat”, “darn”, “heck” and “H E double toothpicks” – but what is actually offensive – even to a religious person – about the words “damn” and “hell”? Why is “shit” less acceptable than “excrement”? They mean the same thing. (And, yes, those are rhetorical too. 
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NOTE: All of the above was originally typed and posted some nine hours ago, at which point it became clear that the board was having none of it. If it turns up twice, you know why.
I’ve heard most of the curse words, but the “c-word” is akin I think to the “n-word” over here in the States. My co-worker thought she heard a Senior VP say the c-word and said something to him, and when he realized what she’d thought he’d said, he apologized all over himself (he’d actually said fuck, which while not exactly appropriate for the work environment, is still scads better than the c-word*.
My mother was English, and I remember the time I said “bloody” and she looked at me all sorts of shocked.
*Yes, I will say c-word, because I find it highly offensive, a hideous-sounding word, and I will not type it out.
They go more into the C word over in this thread.
On the bright side, it gets you extra points here. (video)
A cunt is also a knife-sharpener. The term is not much used in that sense nowadays.
The word’s origin is ancient, one of the oldest known, thought to be as old as “ewe” for sheep or “corn” for grain. The word “queen” is from the same root, and originally a “queen” was only the “king’s woman”.
Gotta stop. Gonna miss the edit window.
I think that if you stopped Joe and Jane Average on the streets of Smalltown, USA, they wouldn’t know the origin or meaning of “bugger”–I think they might think it stood in for “fuck”. Buggery isn’t buggery over here–it’s sodomy or a lewd or indecent act (may not have the phrasing correct on that last one). That doesn’t explain the censors or whatever we call the movie rating people these days, but it does explain our lack of indignation at the term. Plus, it’s fun to say!
I liken bloody to shit–a word I’d say with no problem in front of peers, but one I would use sparingly in front of my parents. I can’t see using bloody in RL conversation, much as I’d like to, because IMO it would make me sound very affected. Here, in print (so to speak) it come more naturally to me. YMMV.
When Shakespeare wrote the immortal lines “what bloody man is that” was it a deliberate joke based on an existing swear word?
I myself was more amazed when the word “Wanker” was used in a Harry Potter movie: I wouldn’t think they would be able to substitute the equivalent word “jerkoff” without a brouhaha even though it was used in the nonsexual context.
The British are generally far less prone to naughty-words-itis than Americans are. C. S. Lewis once recorded a talk for the Episcopal Church Radio and Television Foundation that was rejected as unfit for US broadcast.
No – it wouldn’t be unlike Shakespeare to do that, but there’s no evidence that the word had anything other than its literal meaning in Shakespeare’s time.
John W. Kennedy writes:
> C. S. Lewis once recorded a talk for the Episcopal Church Radio and Television
> Foundation that was rejected as unfit for US broadcast.
Cite? I’ve read a lot about Lewis and I don’t recall that ever being mentioned. Indeed, I don’t think that Lewis ever recorded a talk for the Episcopal Church Radio and Television Foundation. He recorded a number of talks for the BBC, and the recordings of some of them may possibly have been sold in the U.S. by the Episcopal Church Radio and Television Foundation, but I don’t believe he recorded for them specifically.
Maybe he started by saying, “Let me tell you about that motherfucking Tolkien…”
Many Lewis biographies mention the incident. The unused talks were later reworked into the book, The Four Loves, and were finally made available to the public in their original form on audio cassettes in the 1970s, as “Four Talks on Love”.
Wrong author–Pulp Christianity was written by Quentin Tarantino.
The biographies are wrong, I think. The lectures were broadcast by the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation:
It’s possible, as some other websites claim, that they weren’t rebroadcast because the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation found them too explicit about sex, but I’d like to see a statement from somebody at the foundation saying that. This sounds to me like somebody’s later guess about why they weren’t rebroadcast. There’s no particular reason why they should be rebroadcast. The lectures that made up Mere Christianity were never broadcast again, for instance. The foundation continues to sell the lectures “Four Talks on Love,” so I find this story implausible.
They received some spotty distribution, and, as I said, were made available on cassette in 1970 – I own a set, in fact – but they were not nationally aired as planned (and as had been heavily advertised) in 1958, as witness a contemporary article in The Living Church. It appears from that that they were “channeled into college and urban communities for a more sophisticated audience”.
“Professor Lewis,” he was told, “I’m afraid you brought sex into your talks on Eros.”
John W. Kennedy writes:
> . . . a contemporary article in The Living Church . . .
Cite? Could you give me the date of the article and quote me the passage where this is said?
> “Professor Lewis,” he was told, “I’m afraid you brought sex into your talks on
> Eros.”
What are you quoting from here, and why do you think it’s an accurate report of what was said to Lewis? Would someone really say something as silly as “Professor Lewis, I’m afraid you brought sex into your talks on Eros”? That sounds to me like someone’s later guess as to the real reasons. I find it hard to believe that someone said that explicitly.
I’m getting hold of some Lewis experts on an E-mail mailing list to find more information about this.
Thanks.
I hate trying to interpret what Shakespeare meant. This sort of thing happens all the time.
You’ll find it all in, among other sources, Walter Hooper’s C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life & Works. It’s also in the biography by Hooper with Roger Lancelyn Green.
“The Living Church”, 1958-09-28, p26
“The Living Church”, 1958-11-23, p 26
And of course the Foundation doesn’t voluntarily tell the story nowadays; it makes them look like idiots.