Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

52 Forbidden Words
It is generally accepted that cunt is the most tabooed word in English.
But the same is not true of its cognates in other languages. Although French
con and Spanish coño have the same origin and literal meaning as cunt,
their extended uses are much less dysphemistic. French vieux con (‘old
cunt’) is more likely to be jocular than insulting; Fais pas le con ‘Don’t be
stupid’ compares better with British English ‘Don’t be such a twat’ or
AmericanEnglish‘Don’tbeajerk’thanwiththemoresevere‘Don’tbea
cunt’; and the exclamative comment Quelle connerie! means something
like ‘What (a load of) bollocks!’. Spaniards are nicknamed coños in Chile,
Mexico and other parts of South America because, by reputation, they so
frequently use the word. A delicious experience might be described as
como comerle el coño a bocaos ‘like eating cunt by the mouthful’; the
back of beyond is en el quinto coño ‘in the fifth cunt’; a response to an
utterance that is very difficult to believe or patently false is ¡Y el coño de
mi hermana! ‘and my sister’s cunt!’; a pain in the arse is pena pa mi coño
‘paininmycunt’;¿Dónde coño estás? means roughly ‘Where the hell/fuck
are you?’ and ¡Coño! ¿Dónde estás? means something like ‘Shit! Where
are you?’. Cunt was already a well-established word in Early Middle
English – so it presumably existed in Old English. Strangely, it turns up
in medieval place names: e.g. there were a number of Gropecuntlanes in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 34 – a name suggesting a disreputable
lovers’ lane or red-light district. It is also found in people’s names, e.g.
Godwin Clawecuncte (1066), Simon Sitbithecunte (1167), John Fillecunt
(1246), Robert Clavecunte (1302) and Bele Wydecunthe (1328); 35 these are
the real-life counterparts to Biggus Dickus in Monty Python’s Life of
Brian. 36 However, such names almost certainly seem worse today than
they sounded in the Middle Ages, because cunt does not appear to have
been intrinsically dysphemistic then. Thus, it was used in Lanfranc’s
Science of Cirurgie c.1400 where vagina (or perhaps urethra) would be
required today:
In wymmen þe necke of þe bladdre is schort, & is maad fast to the cunte. (OED)
There was a Cunte Street in Bristol, but that may well be because a cunt was a
water channel. What in the eighteenth century was still sometimes called the
River Cunnit by Wiltshire locals had become (as it now is) the River Kennet;
adjacent to it was the Roman settlement Cunetio. 37 The terms cundy, cundit,
kundit, cundut are all early variants of conduit found in the OED.
Although the term cunt may once have been orthophemistic, this does not
guarantee that the use is orthophemistic. Between the thirteenth and the late
nineteenth century, this body-part term was homophonous in some dialects
with the adjective quaint, also spelled queynte (among other ways) by, for
instance, Geoffrey Chaucer in the Miller’s Tale: