SEXIS WRONG

participle, vituttaa, meaning “to be annoyed.”
In England, cunt has been considered taboo in print and
speech since the fifteenth century. Prior to this, though, it was
an accepted enough part of English vernacular that it featured
in the names for public thoroughfares. In about 1230, Gropecuntelane
was a London street; other cities, too, including
Oxford, York, and Northampton, possessed Gropecuntelanes
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Paris, there was
rue Grattecon (Scratchcunt Street). Today, all that remains
of the too-lewd lane names are truncated versions—Grove
Street (Oxford) or Grape Lane (York).
Yet from 1700 to 1959, cunt was considered so obscene that
it was a legal offense to publish the word in its entirety. This
meant that lexi cographers had a problem. The first edition
of Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785)
bleeped it out with four stars, ****. Three years later, the
second edition, incredibly and offensively, defined cunt, or
c**t, as “a nasty name for a nasty thing.” Amazingly, the Oxford
English Dictionary did not permit cunt’s entry into its hallowed
pages until 1976. The entry then read: “1. The female
genitals, the vulva. 2. A very unpleasant or stupid person.” In
the twenty-first century, cunt is still not a word that “authorities,”
be they media-based or political, allow an individual to
say freely. It remains the most taboo and insulting word in the
English language.
When considering the etymology of cunt, it’s hard to ignore
the tone of the word. Whether it begins with a hard c, k, or q,
the sound of cunt is particularly distinctive. A quick trip around
old and modern Europe gives a veritable concerto
in C, as well as an impressive history. As
well as the cunts listed above, there are: cunte
or counte (Middle English); kut (the Netherlands);
kunta (Old Norse); queynthe (Middle
English); qwim (sixteenth-century England);
cunnus (Latin); cona (Portuguese); cont (Wales); cunnicle or
cunnikin (nineteenth-century England); kunte (Middle Low
German); cut (eighteenth-century England); and chuint (Ireland).
Outside Europe, this refrain continues. There’s the Sanskrit
term kunthi; the Indian words for cunt, cunti or kunda;
and also Arabic and Hebrew, where cunt is kus. In these latter
two languages, the word for cunt is said to be related to those
for cup and pockets, making it some kind of receptacle. This
idea of a vessel or container ties in with the suggestion that
cunt is linked to the Old English word for womb, cwithe.
Other etymologists cite the root cwe (cu) as the connection
between the words cunt and cwithe and a host of other
words, such as queen, kin, country, and cunning (which derives
from the Old English cunnende). This cu root, it is said,
signifies “quintessential physical femininity.” It’s certainly the
case that the basic term, kuna, meaning woman, is found in
a startlingly large and geographically widespread number of
languages and language families. Some of the language families
kuna is represented in are the Afro-Asiatic (for example,
in the Cushitic language Oromo, qena means lady); the Indo-
European (in the English word queen); the Amerind (Guarani
kuña means female); and the Indo-Pacific (the Tasmanian for
wife/woman is quani).
Does cunt derive from a global word for woman—kuna?
Some scholars suggest it does. They point to ancient Egyptian
writings, such as the maxims of Ptah-Hotep, where the
word for cunt is synonymous with that for woman. However,
it should be made clear that for this culture, cunt was in no
way an insult; rather, it was a word of respect. The Egyptian
for mother, k-at, literally “the body of her,” also means the
female genitalia or vulva. An ancient Indian goddess provides
another link between words for woman and words for cunt.
Kunthi is both a Sanskrit term for the vagina and the name of
an ancient Indian mother goddess. Kunti, a goddess of nature,
was said to be able to take innumerable men into herself
without altering her essence, just like the earth. She features
in the epic Sanskrit poem of India, the Mahabharata. The ancient
Anatolian goddess Kubaba, the “Creatrix of All,” also
shares the cu root.
You can tell someone to go get
lost in Finnish by saying,
“Vedä vittu päähäs! ”
(“Go pull a cunt over your head!”).
Although the etymology of cunt is disputed, the most accepted
and cited explanation again ties it to words for woman.
This explanation is also the one that seventeenth-century
Dutch anatomist Reinier de Graaf gives in his treatise on female
genitalia. However, in order to understand how de Graaf
viewed the word (cunnus in Latin), a question needs to be
asked: What is cunt? In the twenty-first century, according
to the dic tionary, cunt refers to the female genitals (collectively),
or a very unpleas ant or obnoxious person. However,
when de Graaf was writing, cunt had another meaning, that
is, it was perceived in another way. And it is in de Graaf’s
view of cunt, I feel, that the true etymology of the word can
be found. This meaning also explains why cunt wasn’t always
heard as a swear word, as it was merely a way of describing
a specific part of female anatomy. For de Graaf, cunnus was
the word used to describe “the great cleft.” But what is “the
great cleft”?
Well, this great cleft is simply the area of a woman’s genitalia
that is visible to an onlooker when she has parted neither
her outer nor inner labia. Looking face on, what is visible is
VAGINAS, LES CONS, WEATHER-MAKERS, AND PALACES OF DELIGHT 271