I don’t think Etymonline.com was around in 2003. Here’s a sampling of their histories.
I haven’t been in the UK in a while, but I’m thinking “cunt” is much more objectionable here than there. In the U.S., it’s within inches of being as forbidden as the N-word, and is generally referred to as “the C-word.”
On the other hand, I recently watched an episode of The Rook in which Olivia Munn, playing an American in London (I gather it’s a UK show) asks a colleague what happened to her boyfriend. Upon being told he was killed by the bad guys, she mutters, “Cunts,” under her breath.
The script was clearly written by a Brit, as an American would never say this. She might go with “fuckers” or even “motherfuckers,” but in the U.S., “cunt” is solely a very insulting term for a woman, and “cunts” could only refer to a group of women … and, as I said, would be used only in the coarsest of company.
A “loop splice”, a way of joining the ends of two ropes so there’s an oval hole where they meet, was called a cunt splice in older sources.
Where have you seen evidence of that?
I think a “loop splice” refers to what sailors call an eye splice, and what sailors call a cunt splice may be bowdlerized to “cut splice”. It’s not the same splice: an eye splice is a loop at the end of a rope.
The terminology seems to be applied inconsistently, but I was referring to this splice:
When I took Latin there was a picture of a Roman soldier with arrows pointing to and naming various parts of his gear. A sword was “gladius” of course. But what brought giggles was the word for the sheath the sword is placed in. That was “vagina”
Sure; Ashley, for example, says it has been called it a “cut” splice, a “cont” splice, a “bight” splice, and an “anti-Galligan” splice (!). However, nowhere in his book does he mention anything known as a “loop splice”.
Similarly, the cuntline of a rope is sometimes changed to contline, cantline, etc.
There is the (rare) pronunciation with a soft “C” that can refer to anything derogatory, i.e., “sunt”.
The Oxford Dictionary of Ships and the Sea refers to the splice as a “cut splice” (rather than the older “cunt splice”) and uses “contline” in place of , as it says, the objectionable “cunting”
Easy: Caesar and Mark Antony picked up the terms when they were dating Cleopatra and it spread from there!
For the record, I decided to look up Egyptian loanwords in Hebrew, and while I found more than I expected, as far as I can tell none of them have migrated to English.
This topic title made me think of the (already mentioned) term Shakespeare used in his play (Henry IV pt 1?), “Thou bull’s pizzle…!”
Pharoah comes to English from Hebrew via the Bible. The page cited upthread (20 years ago, but still up) says:
That is kind of interesting, because one word that does more literally mean “great house” in the Bible is heḵal, but that was originally borrowed from Sumerian which is not a Semitic language at all. It exists in English as haikal (central sanctuary of a Coptic church).
Re Egyptian etymologies. There’s a theory that the word “cat” could be Egyptian in origin, or at least from some language in the Afro-Asiatic family that Ancient Egyptian belonged to. The word can be found in a similar form all over Europe (where its Vulgar Latin form cattus superseded the classical felis), but also in non-Indo-European languages such as Arabic and Berber. Our domestic cat descends from the North African wildcat, so it is not implausible to assume that as the animal spread, so did the word for it.
Side note to a five-year-old post, but vulgarity generally didn’t trigger the censors in Shakespeare’s day. They cared about blasphemy and religious or politically sensitive content, not sex. (The “bull’s pizzle” line from 1 Henry IV kinda is pushing the envelope, but only because it is addressed to the Prince of Wales – who is OK with it – not because anybody objected to talk of pizzles in general.)