Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Food and smell 195
expression meat-cleaver ‘penis’ and sixteenth century to flash the meat use
the women-as-meat image. But even as early as the fourteenth century, we
find the term piece, and new compounds based on this appear regularly in
the language, referring both to ‘vagina’ and ‘woman’ generally. Of course,
other foodstuffs could be intended here, but the meat image has always been
the strongest: piece of stuff (seventeenth century), piece of mutton, piece of
ass, piece of tail, piece of stray (twentieth century). From the nineteenth
century, bit of also started appearing in compounds of various kinds: bit of
mutton, bit of meat, bit on a fork, bit of pork and a bit of crackling (a play on
crack ‘vagina’). Catsmeat combines the imagery of meat with women-ascats;
compare twentieth-century American slang PEEP (perfectly elegant
eating pussy). Since the sixteenth century, expressions for promiscuous men
have also employed the meat idiom: mutton-mongers/muttoner (sixteenth
century, from mutton ‘prostitute; vagina’; mutton was the commonest meat
eaten), flesh-mongers (from the seventeenth century, also meaning ‘whore’),
meat-mongers (eighteenth century, from meat ‘vagina’) and even carrionhunters.
Pimps were known as meat merchants, and brothels as meat houses
and meat markets (as dance clubs and beauty pageants are today).
The image of vagina as fish or fishpond is pervasive. Fishy terms include:
fish, tench (playing also on a common nineteenth-century abbreviation for
penitentiary, in which the penis was imprisoned), trout, tuna, bit of fish, bit of
skate, shell, whelk, periwinkle, fishery, lobster pot. Copulation becomes go
fishing, groping for trout (in a peculiar river); promiscuous men are fishmongers
and ling-grapplers. Presumably, these expressions all play on the
slipperiness of vaginal secretions and the fishy aromas evoked by a woman’s
intimate body parts.
Current expressions for the female pudendum appear to rely less on the
meat/fish metaphor (though there is the long-standing bunny, and twentiethcentury
additions like bacon sandwich, hairburger, fuzzburger and furburger
‘vagina’ show that the image is not dead). More commonly, though, this
body part is described in terms of sweets and desserts: yum-yum (also
‘penis’), cake, crumpet, pancake, jelly roll (the jam-filled sponge cake,
known also as swiss roll), muffin, cookie, bit of jam (link to menstruation)
and the recent addition golden doughnut. Earlier expressions involved a
range of different fruits: apple (a backformation from sixteenth-century
apple squire ‘pimp’), split apricot, fig and split fig, plum and, of course,
cherry.
There is, in fact, a surprising array of different edible food products
covered by these slang expressions. For female genitalia, they include a
range of vegetables: cabbage, cabbage patch, cabbage garden, cabbage
field, cauliflower, mushroom and sweet potato pie (also hair pie, fur pie).