Authors: Bill Bryson
The Victorian horror at the thought of swearing in print has lingered up to our own day. According to Ashley Montagu, as recently as
1947
Technology Review, a
publication of the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology read almost exclusively by scien-
THE MOTHER TONGUE
tists and technocrats, changed the expression "doing his damnedest" to "doing intensely his very best." Ten years later the same author used the same phrase in a book and again had it cut.
Montagu also cites the instance in 19 4 1 of a federal judge threat-ening a lawyer with contempt for using a base and indecent word in his court. The word was
darn.
In 1988, Burges Johnson actually managed to write a book on swearing,
The Lost Art of Profanity,
without once mentioning any of the four-letter words. He would not have gotten it published otherwise. And as late as 194g, the Hollywood Production Code banned the word
dames.
In that year, as Mario Pei notes, a movie called
Dames Don't Talk
had its title changed to
Smart Girls Don't Talk.
The editors of the
Random House Dictionary
of 1966 decided, after considerable agonizing, not to insert any four-letter words.
They did not appear until the publication of
RHD-II
in 1 987 . The original
Oxford English Dictionary,
despite its determination to chart every word in the language, contained none of the four-letter words, though they did appear in the supplements to the
OED,
which began to appear in 1972. They also appeared in the
Concise
Oxford Dictionary
from about the same time.
In 1988, William Safire managed to write a column in
The New
York Times Magazine
about the expression
the shit hit the
fan without actually mentioning
shit.
The closest he came was to talk about the use of "a scatological noun just before the familiar
hit the
fan. -
During the Watergate hearings, the
Times
did print the term
candyass,
used by Richard Nixon, but did so only reluctantly. The paper's stylebook continues to say that goddamn "should not be used at all unless there is a compelling reason." And the National Transportation Safety Board displayed extraordinary delicacy when it published a transcript of cockpit voice recordings during the crash of a United Airlines jet in Sioux City, Iowa, in 198 9. An example: "We're not going to make the runway, fellows. We're going to have to ditch this son of a [word deleted] and hope for the best.''*
The British are relatively broad-minded about language, even in
* Published in
The New York Times,
September in, 1989.
S WEARING
their advertisements. In 198 9 Epson, the printer company, ran a lighthearted ad in British newspapers about the history of printing, which contained the statement that "a Chinese eunuch called Cai Lun, with no balls but one hell of an imagination, invented paper."
I doubt very much that any American newspaper would accept an ad referring explicitly to the testicular condition of the inventor of paper.
Most of the quality newspapers in Britain have freely admitted expletives to their pages when the circumstances were deemed to warrant it. Their first opportunity to do so was in 196o when a court decided that
Lady Chatterley's Lover
could be printed in full with-out risk of doing irreversible damage to society's well-being. Three British publications, the
Observer,
the
Guardian,
and the
Spec-
tator,
took the opportunity to print
fuck
themselves and were promptly censured by the Press Council for doing so. But the word has appeared many times in the British press since then, generally without any murmur of complaint. (Ironically, the tabloid news-papers, though usually specializing in matters of sex and prurience, are far more skittish when it comes to printing swear words.) In 1988 British papers were given an outstanding opportunity to update their position on obscenities when the captain of the En-gland cricket team, Mike tatting, reportedly called the umpire of an important match "a flicking, cheating cunt." Only one newspa-per,
The Independent,
printed all the words without asterisks. It was the first time that
cunt
had appeared in a British newspaper.
Some words are less innocent than they seem.
Bollix
is com-monly used in America to describe a confused situation, as in this quotation from the
Philadelphia
Inquirer [October 7, 1987 1: "It was the winless Giants' third loss of the bollixed strike-torn sea-son." Or this one from American Airlines' inflight magazine,
Amer-
ican
Way [ May 1, 19881: "Our faux pas of the month for February was the crossword puzzle titled Heavy Stuff, which was all bollixed up." It is probably safe to assume that neither writer was aware that
bollix
is a direct adaptation of
bollocks
(or
ballocks),
meaning "tes-ticles." It is still used in England to describe the testicles and also as a cry to express disbelief, similar to
bullshit
in American usage.
As Pyles notes, Barnacle Bill the Sailor was originally Ballocky Bill
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and the original words of his ballad were considerably more graphic and sexual than the innocent phrases beloved by generations of children. The American slang word
nuts
also means "testicles"—though oddly when used as an exclamation it becomes wholly in-nocent. Other words concealing unsavory origins include
bumf,
which is short for
bumfodden
or "toilet paper" in German, and
poppycock,
an adaptation of a Dutch word meaning "soft dung."
(In answer to the obvious question, yes, they also have a word for firm dung—in fact two:
poep
and
stront.)
A few swear words have evolved different connotations in Britain and America. In America, a person who is pissed is angry; in Britain he's drunk. Bugger, a wholly innocent word in America, is not at all welcome in polite conversation in Britain. As Pyles notes, until 1934 you could be fined or imprisoned for writing or saying it.
A bugger in Britain is a sodomite. Although
bugger
is unaccept-able,
buggery
is quite all right: It is the term used by both the legal profession and newspapers when someone is accused of criminal sodomy.
15.
W ORDPLAY
SIX DAYS A WEEK AN ENGLISHMAN
named Roy Dean sits down and does in a matter of minutes some-thing that many of us cannot do at all: He completes the crossword puzzle in the London
Times.
Dean is the, well, the dean of the British crossword. In pro, under test conditions, he solved a
Times
crossword in just 3 minutes and 45 seconds, a feat so phenomenal that it has stood unchallenged for twenty years.
Unlike American crosswords, which are generally straightfor-ward affairs, requiring you merely to fit a word to a definition, the British variety are infinitely more fiendish, demanding mastery of the whole armory of verbal possibilities—puns, anagrams, palin-dromes, lipograms, and whatever else springs to the deviser's de-vious mind. British crosswords require you to realize that
carthorse
is an anagram of
orchestra,
that
contaminated can
be made into
no
admittance,
that
emigrants can
be transformed into
streaming,
Cinerama
into
American, Old Testament
into
most talented,
and
World Cup team
into (a stroke of genius, this one)
talcum powder.
( How did anyone
ever
think of that?) To a British crossword en-thusiast, the clue "An important city in Czechoslovakia" instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at
Czech(OSLO)vakia again.
"A seed you put in the garage" is
caraway,
while "HIJKLMNO" is
water
because it is H-to-O or H 20. Some clues are cryptic in the ex-treme. The answer to "Sweetheart could take Non-Commissioned Officer to dance" is
flame.
Why? Well, a noncommissioned officer is an NCO. Another word for sweetheart is
flame.
If you add NCO
to
flame
you get
flamenco, a
kind of dance. Get it? It is a wonder to me that anyone ever completes them. And yet many Britons
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take inordinate pride not just in completing them but in complet-ing them quickly. A provost at Eton once boasted that he could do
The Times
crossword in the time it took his morning egg to boil, prompting one wag to suggest that the school may have been Eton but the egg almost certainly wasn't.
According to a Gallup poll, the crossword is the most popular sedentary recreation, occupying thirty million Americans for part of every day. The very first crossword, containing just thirty-two clues, appeared in the New York
World
on December 21, 1 9 13. It had been thought up as a space filler by an expatriate Englishman named Arthur Wynne, who called it a word-cross. (Remember what I said about inventors never quite getting the name right?) It became a regular feature in the
World,
but nobody else picked it up until April 1924 when a fledgling publishing company called Simon and Schuster brought out a volume of crossword puzzles, priced at $1.35. It was an immediate hit and two other volumes were quickly produced. By the end of the first year the company had sold half a million copies, and crossword puzzles were a craze across America—so much so that for a time the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad installed dictionaries in each of its cars for the conve-nience of puzzle-solving travelers who had an acute need to know that Iliamna is the largest lake in Alaska or that oquassa is a kind of freshwater fish.
Despite this huge popularity, the most venerable papers on both sides of the Atlantic refused for years to acknowledge that the crossword was more than a passing fad.
The Times
of London held out until January 193o, when it finally produced its first crossword (devised by a Norfolk farmer who had never previously solved one, much less constructed one). To salve its conscience at succumbing to a frivolous game,
The Times
printed occasional crosswords in Latin. Its namesake in New York held out for another decade and did not produce its first crossword until 1942.
Only one other word game has ever challenged the crossword puzzle for popularity and respectability, and that's Scrab-ble was introduced by a games company called Selchow and Righter in 1953, though it had been invented, by one Alfred Butts, more than twenty years earlier in 1931. Butts clearly didn't have
WORDPL AY
too much regard for which letters are used most often in English.
With just ninety-eight tiles, he insisted on having at least two of each letter, which means that
q, j,
and z appear disproportionately often. As a result, success at Scrabble generally involves being able to come up with obscure words like
zax (a
hatchetlike tool) and xi (the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet). Butts intentionally depressed the number of s's to discourage the formation of plurals, though he compensated by increasing the number of i's to encour-age the formation of suffixes and prefixes. The highest score, ac-cording to Alan Richter, a former British champion writing in
The
Atlantic
in 1987, was 3,881 points. It included the word
psycho-
analyzing,
which alone was worth 1,539 points.
Wordplay is as old as language itself, and about as various. As Tony Augarde notes in his scholarly and yet endlessly absorbing
Oxford Guide to Word Games,
many verbal pastimes go back to the furthest reaches of antiquity. Palindromes, sentences that read
6
the same backwards as forwards, are at least z,000 years old. The ancient Greeks often put "Nis on anomimata mi monan opsin" on fountains. It translates a "Wash the sin as well as the face". The Romans admired them, too, as demonstrated by "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" ("We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire"), which was said to describe the action of moths.
The Romans also like anagrams - scrambling the letters o f a word or phrase to form new wore s or phrases—and turned "Quid est veritas?" ("What is truth?") into "Est vir qui adest" ("It is this man here").
Among the earliest instances of wordplay, Augarde cites a Greek anagram dating from the third century B.c. and, earlier still, a lipogram by the Greek Lasus from the fifth century
B.C.
in which the poet intentionally avoided using the letter s. So it is safe to say that wordplay is very old and effectively universal. Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: "Thou art Peter: upon this *
rock I shall build my Church." It doesn't make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same,
Wordplay in English is as old as our literature. In the eighth century A.D., Cynewulf, one of the first English poets, wrote four
THE MOTHER TONGUE
otherwise serious religious poems into each of which he artfully wove acrostics of his own name, presumably for no other reason than that it amused him. Verbal japes of one type or another have been a feature of English literature ever since. Shakespeare so loved puns that he put 3,000 of them—that's right 3,000—into his plays, even to the extent of inserting them in the most seemingly inappropriate places, as when in
King Henry IV, Part I,
the father of Hotspur learns of his son's tragic death and remarks that Hotspur is now Coldspur. The most endearing names in English literature, from Lewis Carroll to James Joyce, have almost always been asso-ciated with wordplay. Even Samuel Johnson, as we have seen, managed to insert a number of jokes into his great dictionary—an action that would be inconceivable in other languages.
The varieties of wordplay available in English are almost without number—puns, tongue-twisters, anagrams, riddles, cryptograms, palindromes, clerihews, rebuses, crossword puzzles, spelling bees, and so on ad infinitum. Their effect can be addictive. Lewis Car-roll, an obsessive deviser and player of wordgames, once sat up all night trying to make an anagram of William Ewart Gladstone be-fore settling on "Wild agitator, means well." Some diligent scholar, whose identity appears now to be lost, set his attention on that famous Shakespearean nonce word in
Love's Labour's Lost, hon-
orificabilitudinitatibus,
and concluded that it must contain an ana-gram proving that Shakespeare didn't write the plays, and came up with "Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi," which translates
as
"These plays, born of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world,: Think of the hours of labor that
that
must have involved. According to the
Guinness Book of Records, a man in
the English county of Here-ford & Worcester wrote a palindrome of 65,000 words in 1983.