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01.24.2002 || 02:11 A short treatise on the word 'cunt' As a word, 'cunt' is unfairly maligned. It is the victim of the ancient class war that raged between the language of the Anglo-Saxons in England and the Normans who conquered them, plus the subsequent philosophy in that country that Latin was in some way superior to the Germanic tongue of the natives. Yes, I konw -- what about the Original celts? Yes, I know, the Angles and their kin were really just the previous invaders, but what happened in 1066 was different than the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the Danish settlement. Rather than pushing out the peasants and farmers to make way for those from another land, the norman Invasion simply replaced the upper echelon of English society with Normans who spoke a germanicised version of French. What this meant was that you suddenly had different words for the foods that were served to the new aristocracy, so that the germanic peasants killed a sheep, but it was served to their lord as mutton, and so on for everything that touched law, the royal court, medicine, or religion. Further, the practise of using Latin as the lingua franca of the educated meant that Latin loanwords swept into the language and created yet another layer of status into the language, so that we fall for latin or latinate words and consider them to be 'more proper' than the original English ones. The english ones are still around, but they are home words, not work ones. ergo, we speak of a woman's motherhood when trying to appreal to her intimacy or sense of comfort, yet speak of maternity in hospitals and textbooks. Similarly, English words become bad words, whereas their Latin or French analogues are raised to officialdom even though they mean precisely the same thing: The germanic Shit (OE scite, MLG schite) is deemed rude; whereas Excrement (L excrementum) is used in elevated, though perhaps no more polite, company. Of course, these Latinate words never actually *mean* what we take them for. Excrementum literally means 'that which grows forth or an outgrowth, especially in terms of hair or nails' (Thank you OED). Now 'cunt' gets a nasty billing as being a dirty slang-word, when in reality it isn't. it has meant precisely what it seems to for-ever, unlike many of the other words that are usually used in its place. Some of them, I loathe. Most of them, I hate. certain words that pertain to animal species, boxes, or sweets are nothing if not denigrating. They also answer the pimary call of slang: They meant other things first. However, when Chaucer used 'cunt' in several guises in his Canterbury Tales (though never the blatant spelling we use to-day), he was not trying to write down towards a meaner audience; he was using a word that was in common currency at the time, and corresponded to the same anatomical phenomenon as it does to-day. Similarly, when Lafranc penned "In women the neck of the bladder is short, & is made fast to the cunte" in the 1400s, he was writing a biological and scientific document, not a filthy letter. There is evidence that the word was suppressed as part of a larger witch-hunt of sorts, aimed at suppressing anything that even hinted at Goddess beliefs and the female empowerment that would come with such things -- maybe playing off the existence of the Kundas in India, who worshipped a gooddess called Cunti (for an interesting read, check out Terence Meaden). I don't know about the goddess-worship aspect of the word 'cunt.' I know I love the word; the way it feels when it rolls around in the mouth and the sound of it as it passes the tongue. I also know that 'vagina' is a Latin word that means 'sheath' or 'scabbard.' A sheath for what, I think we can all figure out; and I certainly can't see *that* as being a very woman-empowering context for a what is a vital and sacred part of the female anatomy. |
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shite One last little note... - 09.21.2006 de-stressing, biking and terrorism - 06.06.2006 Mildly stressed... - 05.29.2006 More crime stupidity - 05.28.2006 Scary stuff - 05.25.2006
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