Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

168 Forbidden Words
I had myself tattooed. (‘An urge deeper than the skin’, The Age (Melbourne), 17
September 1988, Saturday Extra, p. 5)
And the tattoo? Flowers: scarlet blossoms! We cannot know whether this is
folk memory, a symbol for spring, or pure accident; in any case, it demonstrates
the powerful association between flowers and menstruation.
The expression flowers, ormonthly flowers, and its translation equivalents
in other languages, may have a variety of sources. The most likely one is the
plant growth metaphor of seed for ‘ovum; semen’, sap for ‘seminal fluid’,
flower or bloom for ‘menstruation, i.e. prima facie evidence of fertility’, 68
fruit for ‘children’.
FRUITFUL VINE. A woman’s private parts, i.e. that has flowers every month, and bears
fruit in nine months. (Grose 1811; sic)
The metaphor is found in Middle Dutch medical texts, where the most
frequent term for menstruation is bloeme ‘flowers’, along with the verb
bloyen ‘bloom’. 69 The word dracht, which usually denotes a yield of fruit
or the fruit itself, was also used to mean ‘foetus’, and more often ‘pregnancy’.
The child was referred to as vrucht ‘fruit’:
‘for just as trees without flowers [bloemen] will bear no fruit, so too will women be
bereft of their pregnancy [literally ‘yield’], if they are without [this] purging.’ (Daems
1967:180)
It has been suggested 70 that flowers derives by either remodelling or folk
etymology 71 from Latin fluere ‘flow’ via French flueurs (a medical term for
‘discharge’ from the sixteenth century), 72 which was either remodelled as, or
in England misinterpreted as, fleurs ‘flowers’. Enright suggests the origin of
flowers is flow (cf. the archaic a woman in her courses). Tampons are
graded for heavy or light flow days; and flow is used nowadays among
North American female students (if not elsewhere, too), along with flushing.
73 Middle Dutch vloet ‘flow’ was an occasional alternative to bloeme.
While such etymological speculations are suggestive, they will not account
for the archaic German euphemism Blumen or Dutch bloeme, unless these
are presumed to be loan translations of English flowers – which is most
unlikely. The plant growth metaphor provides the most likely source
for archaic flowers ‘menstruation’. Yet there is plenty of evidence that
X-phemistic popular terms for taboo topics often have multiple sources,
each reinforcing the others. 74 Supposing that flowers ‘menstruation’ was
indeed based on a plant growth metaphor, it may well have been reinforced
by an association with the notion of ‘flow’.
We should remember that virginity was held to be the flower of maidenhood,
and it was lost on deflowering (a nicer expression than popping her
cherry). In Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Fanny Hill writes of her own