10 Words That Sound Rude (But Really Aren’t) - 500 Words Ep. 32

A few days ago, HH tweeted this:

If you’re CUNCTATIVE then you’re prone to delaying or procrastinating.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 12 August 2016

It’s one of those words that, if you’re not careful, could be taken in a very, very questionable direction. But there are plenty of words that don’t even have to be mispronounced to raise eyebrows—they’re just straight-up dirty. Or, at least, that’s how it might seem.

‘To be in a panshit’ is an old Scots expression meaning ‘to be in a fit of excitement’.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 29 May 2016

CLATTERFART is a 16th century word for a gossip or telltale.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 17 November 2015

In 18th century slang, a PRIME-COCK-BOY was a keen, energetic novice or freshman.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 21 April 2016

Peniaphobia, for instance, is nothing more than the fear of poverty and destitution. Pissasphalt is a type of bitumen. A tittynope is a crumb or portion of something, left over after all the rest has been used. A cockchafer is a beetle. A cock-bell an icicle. In fact, whether you’re talking about assart or spunk-water (you can thank Tom Sawyer for that one), there are quite a few words in the English language that sound rude, but really—genuinely—aren’t.

So brace yourselves, because it’s 10 of those that are the subject of this week’s YouTube video:

If you haven’t had your fill, there are nearly 100 words like these for your perusal over on Mental Floss, any one of which could have made the final cut here. One word that didn’t, however, and that perhaps needs a little more explanation, is this:

A COVERSLUT is an item of clothing worn to cover up a stain on a garment underneath.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 15 June 2015

The key to this word (and others like it) is that sluttish originally meant just “untidy” or “slovenly”, while labelling someone (of either sex—Chaucer describes a man as sluttish in the Canterbury Tales) as a slut once simply implied that they were messy or disorganised.

But by the end of the fifteenth century that meaning had begun to broaden. Now it was people’s characters and morals—and, wholly unfairly, women’s morals in particular—that were being described as sluttish, if they were loose or disreputable, and it’s from there that the word’s modern connotations eventually emerged.

The older use of slut and sluttish to mean “untidy” survived right through to the early 1900s, giving the word coverslut more than enough time to emerge in the language in the mid-1600s. Essentially, it referred to nothing more than a garment warn to disguise untidy clothes underneath, or to protect your clothes from messy work or chores. So despite appearances, it was really nothing more than an apron.

DOLLY-TRIPE is an old Warwickshire dialect word for an untidily-dressed woman. pic.twitter.com/ir0FIE5YBF

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 25 October 2015

Cacafuego

There’s really no nice way of putting this, but the fact is that poop crops up more often than it duly should on this blog. And thanks to a tweet from the HH feed the other day, we’re going back down that way again now:

CACAFUEGO is a 16th century word for a blustering, over-confident braggart. It literally means ‘fire-shitter’.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 29 March 2016

There’s no denying that cacafuego is a brilliant (and unavoidably useful) word, but is it really genuine? Or, to put it another way:

Does anyone ever read @HaggardHawks tweets and wonder, ever so briefly, if they've just been taking the piss out of us for years?

— Kateri (@katerimorton) 29 March 2016

Wow, imagine if that were true. A plot twist to put M Night Shyamalan to shame. But let’s not get bogged down in piss halfway through a blog about shit, so to speak.

No prizes for guessing that cacafuego was borrowed into English from Spanish, and combines the verb cacar (modern Spanish cagar, “to void excrement”) with fuego, “fire”. It first appeared in English as another word for a blustering braggart in the early 1600s, but we can be fairly sure that it was in use before then thanks to the somewhat unlikely-sounding involvement of Sir Francis Drake.

Sir Francis Drake: looking a little ruff

In 1578, part-way through his circumnavigation of the Earth, Drake rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean, hot on the heels of a 120-tonne Spanish galleon called the Nuestra Señora that he had heard was laden with a rich cargo of silver and jewels from the Spanish colonies. And he wanted it.

Sailing up the Pacific coast of South America, Drake’s Golden Hind caught up with the Nuestra Señora off the coast of Ecuador. Knowing that an attack made under the cover of darkness was his best bet, he slowed his progress by tying some of his ship’s store of wine to the stern and throwing it overboard, so that by the time the Hind reached the Nuestra Señora it was the middle of the night. The Spanish crew were taken by surprise, and after a brief skirmish they surrendered, allowing Drake and his men to take control of the ship.

Drake sailed both the Nuestra Señora and the Golden Hind back to the South American coast to unload her treasure. Knowing just how substantial a prize he had secured for England he treated the Spanish crew well, inviting the officers to join him for a grand banquet and giving every crewmember a parting gift and a letter of safe conduct, ensuring as safe a journey home to Europe as possible. Drake himself continued on his journey, and having completed his circumnavigation arrived back in Plymouth on 26 November 1580.

So where does all the flaming poop come into this? Well, Drake’s captured galleon might have been officially known as the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, or “Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception”, but to her crew she was the Cacafuego, or “fire-shitter”. That might seem like an odd (and fairly uncomplimentary) nickname for—well, anything really, but just like the Spitfire centuries after her, it was probably intended to be a reference to her impressive weaponry and blazing cannon fire, or else to her speed through the water and her “fiery” temperament. 

And just as spitfire was once a nickname for an irascible, hot-tempered person, in the seventeenth century cacafuego became a byword for a blustering, swaggering braggart—a meaning perhaps influenced by the fact that, despite her impressive armoury, the Cacafuego had proved no match for Drake. 

Ananym

A few days ago over on @HaggardHawks, I posted this:

An ANANYM is a word formed by reversing the letters of another, like ‘yob’ from ‘boy’.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) August 12, 2015

Which raised this perfectly appropriate question:

@HaggardHawks Er … are there any other examples?!

— Paul Graham-Sharples (@Paul_Sharples) August 12, 2015

The short answer is, yes, there is. But the long answer is—well, much more interesting than that.

So, first things first: the ana– of ananym is the Ancient Greek word ana, which was variously used to mean “back”, “up”, “on”, “around”, “towards”, “throughout”, and just about every other preposition you can imagine. It’s the same root we find in words like anagram, analogy, and analysis, as well as in less obvious places like Anabaptist (literally “one who baptizes again”) and Anastasia (which means “resurrection”).

The suffix –nym comes from the Greek word for “name”, onyma, which is same the root as in much more familiar words like synonym, acronym, pseudonym and anonymous. So put together, an ananym is literally a “back-name”—a word formed by reversing another.

That’s all well and good, of course, but what about examples?

Well, admittedly the majority of ananyms in use today tend either to be proper nouns or fictional inventions: think of Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Corporation, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (a partially-reversed “nowhere”), or Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which was set in the fictitious Welsh town of “Llareggub” (you can work that one out yourself).

There are towns called Adanac in Canada, and Saxet in Texas. The girls’ names Segna and Nevaeh are “Agnes” and “heaven” spelled backwards. Dioretsa is the fantastically fitting name of an asteroid with an appropriately retrograde orbit. And if you’ve ever thought searching the Internet was too straightforward, why not try searching for everything backwards over on elgooG?

None of those will find its way into a dictionary any time soon, of course, but that’s not to say that a handful of ananyms haven’t already done so. Mho, for instance, is the name of a unit of electrical conductance, coined in opposition to the ohm, a unit of resistance. Along similar lines, physicists have at their disposal units called the yrneh (a unit of inverse electrical inductance, derived from the henry) and the daraf (a measure of electric elastance, as opposed to the farad, a measure of electrical capacitance). And not wanting to be outdone by the Michael Faradays of this world, in 1921 the US engineer Frank Bunker Gilbreth invented the therblig, a unit of work in a time-and-motion study. (Shameless plug—there’s more about these in the HaggardHawks fact book…)

By far the most familiar example of an ananymic word, however, is yob, which has been in use since the mid-nineteenth century to refer to what might otherwise be called a hooligan or a ruffian. It’s earliest record comes from a Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, compiled by the English lexicographer John Camden Hotton in 1859.

The full title of Hotton’s dictionary (which is way too long to reproduce here) goes on to explain that it contains “glossaries of two secret languages spoken by the wandering tribes of London”: the two “languages” in question are Cockney rhyming slang and “back slang”, a much less familiar variety of Victorian English slang that, as its name suggests, involved reversing the letters of everyday words and phrases to form an entirely new (and fairly unintelligible) vocabulary. In other words, back slang it was a language of ananyms.

Like rhyming slang, back slang is thought to have first emerged in the early 1800s. In his dictionary, Hotton describes it as “the secret language of the costermongers”, suggesting that it probably originated among London street traders as a means of communicating exclusively with one another, presumably to the bewilderment of their customers.

So in London back slang, a cabbage was an edgabac, an orange was an edgenaro, and pinurt pots were turnip tops. An exis-yeneps was sixpence, a rouf-yeneps was fourpence, and earth gens was three shillings. After a good day’s trading, one seller might comment that he’d made a doogheno hit, or a “good hit” (“implying that he did well at market, or sold out with good profit,” according to Hotton), after which he might treat himself to a top o’reeb (a “pot of beer”), if not a track (a “quart”)—and end up quite kennurd (“drunk”), or at least flatch kennurd (“half-drunk”).

And second from last on Hotton’s list is yob, listed as Victorian back slang for “boy”:

Although linguistic techniques like back slang have remained in use ever since (and are by no means exclusive to English), aside from yob you’d be hard-pushed to find anyone who still uses any of the other entries on Hotton’s list, or to find any similar terms listed in a modern dictionary. 

Contrast that with rhyming slang, which has contributed considerably more to our language than meets the mince-pies: if you’ve ever used your loaf (loaf of bread = “bead”), 86ed something (eighty-six = “nix”), took the mickey out of someone (Mickey Bliss = “take the piss”), or called them a berk (Berkley Hunt = look that one up yourself), then you’ve used rhyming slang, whether you’ve realized it or not.

Os smynana thgim eb erar, tub er’yeht yb on snaem tcnitxe.

Cacemphaton

Earlier this month, UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband made headlines (as well as a new Labour Party slogan) by exclaiming that “Hell, yes!” he was tough enough to be the next Prime Minister. Then, earlier this week, David Cameron likewise made headlines when he admitted to feeling “bloody lively” about the upcoming election. Well, somebody has to.

But no matter how rousing, how convincing, or how appropriate you might think the two leaders’ sweary outbursts were (and if they think this is swearing, they should really try standing at a bar in Newcastle on a Friday night), their use of tongue-worms nevertheless brings to mind two brilliant terms from the murky world of rhetoric.

The first, cacemphaton, is the rhetorical use of bad language. It literally means “bad show” or “bad appearance” in Greek, the –phaton suffix being a distant relative of words like phantom and epiphany. It was coined by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian in the first century AD, in his enormous guide to speech-making, Institutio Oratoria, or “The Institutes of Oratory”. Twelve volumes of rhetorical treatises, you say? Count me in! 

(Asking a rhetorical question and then answering it yourself? That’s anthypophora.) 

Marcus Fabius Quintilian: He’ll never catch a cab up there.

Quintilian, unsurprisingly, wasn’t a big fan of bad language—in fact he labelled it “objectionable”, “corrupt”, and “unbecoming”. So when it came to actually writing about the expletives he had in mind, he neatly dodged the issue by writing instead that, “it would be tedious to specify them, and in doing so I should dwell upon the very fault which I say should be avoided.” He’s got a fucking point.

But the bad language Quintilian was referring to wasn’t the same “bad language” we use today. Instead, he used cacemphaton to refer to a clumsy or ill-advised choice words, and in particular a chance combination of words that could be misinterpreted or misheard as something vulgar. By means of an example, he singled out the Latin word intercapedo, meaning “interruption” or “interval”, which he advised against using because its final two syllables sound remarkably like the Latin word for “I fart”.

So originally cacemphaton referred to the unintentional use of bad or vulgar language—like when the F word suddenly appears in the middle of your polite request to “pass a fork and knife”, or when you tell someone to “catch it!”, and instead it sounds like a warning not to step in a used litter tray. But over time Quintilian’s definition broadened, so that today cacemphaton generally refers to any rhetorical use of coarse or vulgar language, particularly for emphasis or effect. The unintentional “bad language” that Quintilian identified, meanwhile, is now termed cacosyntheton—literally “badly put together” language.

If you are going to swear, though, there should always be a good reason for it—which brings us to the second word on our list: lalochezia. It describes the use of foul language to relieve stress, pain or frustration. So those words that rush through your mind (and out of your mouth) when you miss your train, stub your toe, or accidentally brush against a hot iron? That’s lalochezia. 

Appropriately enough for a word concerning foul language, lalochezia itself has a pretty foul etymology. So while the initial lalo– is a derivative of the Greek word for “speech”, lalia (as in glossolalia, the proper name for speaking in tongues), the –chezia part is a derivative of the Greek verb chezo—which means “to defecate”, and is a not-so-distant ancestor of the English word shit. So, etymologically speaking at least, lalochezia is literally “shitting out of your mouth”. 

Quintilian would have been horrified.