Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

260 Notes to pages 69–78
25 Partridge 1984.
26 Cf. Dauzat 1917.
27 Halliday 1978: 171.
28 Andersson and Trudgill 1990: 79.
29 Jay 2000: 178.
30 Bybee 2003.
31 Cf. Cameron 1995.
32 Oxford Companion to the English Language 1992: 940.
33 Hughes 1991.
34 Grose 1811, first published in 1783.
35 Mort and mott (or mot) are cognates. The origin of the term is unknown, but the
meaning was often ‘piece of arse, bit of cunt’, since mot (or motte) is a euphemism
for ‘cunt’ by borrowing the French mot ‘word’. It may not be irrelevant that a mort
was a young but mature fish (more precisely a salmon): the terms fish(tail) and ling
were slang for ‘vagina’, a fishy odour being commonly attributed to this organ –
especially when not so frequently washed as is today’s practice.
36 Crystal 1998: 183.
37 Cf. Aman 1984–5: 106.
38 Cockney rhyming slang was perhaps best publicized by Thames Television’s
Minder series, 1979–94. However, there is also rhyming slang in Australia and
in naval yards in America. Wear the fox hat ¼ where the fuck’s that.
39 The Oxford University vs Cambridge University row boat race, held annually in
March since 1829 (except for war years), on the River Thames between Putney and
Mortlake.
40 Notice that hampsteads, like teeth, is plural; this is common pattern, cf. minces,
bristols, thrupnies.
41 When you are scared, you lose your arse (bottle) and you shit yourself.
42 Gaff is twentieth-century slang (and is no euphemism). It may derive from Romani
gao ‘town, village’, but possibly derives from gaffer, in that it is the place over
which a gaffer (a word that goes back at least to the sixteenth century) dominates –
namely his home.
43 Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. Indeed, fish is surely quicker and easier to
process that Lillian Gish.
44 Joos: 1961.
45 There is a reference to them in the ‘First Grammatical Treatise’, written in
Icelandic around 1135; cf. Haugen 1972.
46 The same text is found in Miles Coverdale’s Bible of 1535.
47 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, III.i.92.
48 Jay 1992: 68; Jay 2000: 91, 137.
49 For instance, seven-year-old-and-under stories include ‘spitting, shitting, pants
down, naked girls, pee fights, biting weeners, sucking buggars, pinching asses,
and fucking. From 8 onward there are references to having a boner, farting, tits,
being horney, a dickey, animalism, having babies, throwing up, massages, cunts,
eating shit, leaping on girls, sexual assaults, being pregnant, whores, vaginas, and
incest’ (Sutton-Smith and Abrams 1978: 524, quoted in Jay 1992: 28).
50 Jay 1992: 60–70.
51 Jay 1992: 123.