Filthy English, page 13
Perhaps above all, there is cock. Writing this stuff and thinking about it so much, you start to see sex everywhere. Religion, too. Well, I do. I wash my hands or fill a kettle and I find myself thinking about penises, particularly when I’m in America. I turn the top of the tap at the side of the basin. I remember that Americans call it a faucet. Then I remember why Americans call it a faucet and I think: that’s where Puritanism gets you. Puritans see sex everywhere – even when it’s only there in their imaginings. And they try to hide it – even if only by changing words that might suggest it. That Americans have faucets on their basins is a direct result of sexual and semantic squeamishness. Essentially, it’s a euphemism. Faucet is a word that replaced a previous commonplace word for the same thing, cock.
Once you start looking, you find Puritanism’s lace-fingered prints in odd corners of the language. Take pop music, a font and foundry of sexuality, direct and implied. Not always where you might expect it, though. The other day, I found myself listening to a young Mick Jagger singing the Dartford blues, a twelve-bar about how he was a little red rooster on the prowl. Again, I found myself thinking about penises. Not about the penis that is so obviously there, the one put there right in the title, by the song’s writer, Willie Dixon, a giant bassist and producer from Vicksburg, Mississippi. That penis, the rooster-penis, is traditional blues metaphor. It’s classic rural blues language, simple and clear: a loud and assertive male animal standing in for the penis.
That barnyard analogy is there in the older blues on which Dixon probably based his song: Memphis Minnie’s 1936 hit, ‘If You See My Rooster (Please Run Him Home)’. It’s there, too, in a 1950 piece of Los Angeles rhythm and blues, ‘Ain’t A Better Story Told’ by Little Willie Littlefield and Little Laura Wiggins. ‘Weeell,’ sings Little Laura – about whom precisely nothing seems to be known. ‘Early in the morning, the rooster starts to crow. That’s the time of day I’m ready to go. You gotta rock with a steady even roll. We know what we’re doin’. Ain’t a better story to be told.’ A rooster rising early: some rock, some roll: ain’t a better story to be told. If that’s not sex, well, I never heard a jump blues before. The essential subject of Tin Pan Alley and show tunes is that twentieth-century innovation, the universal, democratic right to romantic love. The default setting of country music is the succulent allure of being cheated on. Rhythm and blues’ home is where the fucking is.
I wasn’t thinking about the rooster-penis, though. I was thinking about another penis, the one that has been deliberately hidden behind the rooster. I was thinking about cock. That’s the word – and thought – that puritanical Americans hoped to conceal when they started replacing it with another one, rooster. Once upon a word, male chickens were cocks – everywhere in the English-speaking world. Then eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American puritans decided they had a problem with having the same word for both a male bird and a male sexual organ. What’s for dinner? Cock and chips. That kind of problem. So they took a Dutch word, a relative of the English word roost, and Anglicized it to rooster. So no more confusion with cock.
So, I think: there’s Mick Jagger singing about his rooster. I imagine he was thinking that singing about his little red rooster meant he was getting all that sexy, southern mojo juice running through him. In fact, all along he was using a euphemism imposed on Americans by delicate-minded, black-hatted puritans. As the Rolling Stones were forced by American TV to change ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ to ‘Let’s Spend Some Time Together’, so those eighteenth-century Puritans made Americans replace the time-honoured name for a male chicken, cock, with rooster. They squeezed out cockade and coxswain, too, replacing them with roostercade and rooster swain. Haycocks became hay stacks, weathercocks weathervanes. The father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, had changed the family name from Alcox. Genital squeamishness is also the reason Americans now have roaches rather than cockroaches – even though the word has nothing to do with penises or even chickens but is, rather, an Anglicisation of the Spanish cucaracha. In 1840, the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported, perhaps tongue-in-cheekily, ‘The Baltimore Clipper suggests that cocktails should henceforth be called rooster’s shirts!’ The Puritans’ militant wing even had doubts about the word ‘hen’. They tried to change it to ‘she-rooster’.
And yet, a century later, black southern lyricists – ever in search of evocative penis metaphors and knowing nothing of this campaign of linguistic suppression – looked in their barnyard and found roosters where cocks once were. They knew that you can call a cock a rooster as long you like but it’s still a cock: the word might change but the associations with the object itself never do. Puritans can try and separate the word from the thought but no-one can separate a lyricist from his metaphors.
Englishmen had cocks long, long before they had penises. The technical formal word didn’t arrive till the sixteenth century, brought into the language from a piece of Latin that was slangy but not obscene – it originally meant tail. An anatomy room of Latinate euphemisms arrived in English around this time, including ‘urinate’ and ‘copulate’. The first penis in the OED is from a quite wonderfully titled 1578 medical textbook, John Banister’s The Historie of Man, Sucked from the Sappe of the most Approved Anathomistes. This switch from cock to penis, rudery or affectation? Probably both. Ever since William arrowed Harold, Latinate and frenchified words have moved in politer circles than old English ones. Despite that, though, cock was an acceptable word for a penis until at least 1830.
There is still a Cock Lane in the City of London. In the fourteenth century, it was the only place in the City where prostitution was legal. It now sits quietly, just round the back of Snow Hill police station, in the shadow of Holborn Viaduct and the shortest of strolls from Smithfield market which has been selling animals, live or slaughtered, since at least the twelfth century. For eight hundred years or so, the area also hosted the Bartholomew Fair which started out as a highly respected annual cloth sale but which often became riotous and always revelous from the late sixteenth century. It was finally suppressed by the City authorities in 1855.
I made my pilgrimage to Cock Lane on a sunny Saturday evening. Once described as ‘dingy, narrow, half-lighted’, it’s now a pedestrianized street – alley, almost – about 200 metres long, all offices, all recently refurbished. I had the place to myself. There is not the slightest hint of its whoreish past. At the top end of the lane, though, there is a plaque recalling its more recent notoriety as a world centre for bodysnatchers. Till 1910, the Fortune of War pub stood at the junction with Giltspur Street – the spot where the Great Fire of 1666 finally burned itself out. The pub had a room in which bodysnatchers would lay out their booty for inspection and selection by surgeons from over the road at Bart’s Hospital – the oldest in London. Such was the rough trade that facilitated medical progress. (The plaque doesn’t mention that in 1761 the pub’s landlord, Thomas Andrews, was sentenced to death for sodomy, then pardoned by George III.)
Gropecunt Lane is a short walk away, past the Old Bailey and two Wren churches, St Paul’s and St Mary-le-Bow – whose bells’ reach mark the boundaries of cockneydom. As a word for Londoners, cockney has been around almost as long as Cock Lane – since 1600, at least. No penile link is suggested, though, in any of the three possible derivations I’ve seen. One, it’s from cockenay, meaning cock’s egg – i.e. a small and mis-shapen one. The idea is that this meaning is extended first to mother’s darling and then town-bred milksop. Experts reject the popular idea that it’s from Cockaigne, a mythical place of wonder – i.e. the city with gold-paved streets. There’s not even a suggestion of a link to ‘cocky’, which the OED says is from the bird – as in cock of the walk.
Cock has been the word for a male chicken since Old English times. It’s there in King Alfred’s translation of Pope Gregory I’s Pastoral Care, a how-to book for the clergy – both singularly, as kok, and plurally, as cocces. It had taken its modern spelling in time for Shakespeare to write, in Richard III: ‘The early Village Cock Hath twice done salutation to the Morne.’ The first written appearance given is from 1618. ‘Oh man what art thou? When thy cock is up?’ It’s a line from a play written by Nathan Field, an actor who appeared in Shakespeare’s plays and who was a noted skirt-chaser. The play is called Amends for Ladies. The OED is still winsomely old-fashioned in its discussion of cock as penis: ‘The current name among the people, but, pudoris causa, not admissible in polite speech or literature.’ Pudoris causa: because it is shameful. In a twenty-first-century dictionary of record.
Why cock for penis, anyway? There are two theories, maybe three. The first involves holding a chicken (male or female) by the head. See, you got the analogy straightaway. The second brings us to an understanding of why Americans have faucets where the British have taps. Let’s start with the word ‘stop-cock’. It’s a tap, nothing more complex than that – even if nowadays it’s strictly a below-stairs tap. Bathrooms and kitchens have taps by the basin and stop-cocks in the cupboard. So what is the cock that this stop-cock is stopping? This cock is what the OED calls ‘A spout or short pipe serving as a channel for passing liquids through.’ An obvious penis metaphor, surely.
In 1663, the Marquis of Worcester, author of An Exact and True Definition of the Most Stupendious Water-commanding Engine, wrote: ‘To turn two Cocks, that one Vessel of water being consumed, another begins to … re-fill.’ In 1688 Randle Holme wrote: ‘The Cock or Tapp, letting out the hot water.’ For a long, long time, for English-speakers, a cock was a tap was a cock – two words, one thing. Only, a cock was at least two other things, too – male chicken and penis.
In the early nineteenth century, however, English-speakers on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have started having a problem with what experts would call cock’s polysemy. They became uncomfortably conscious that people were using the same word for two quite different channels ‘for passing liquids through’. This attitudinal change coincided with the years around Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne and so could well be linked to the general rise of the nineteenth century’s squeamishness and prudishness – though Victoria herself seems to have enjoyed an extensive and fulfilling love life with Albert.
The English turned for comfort to tap, confining the cock to the world of plumbers and their mates. The Americans took to another old word, faucet. Which is, in fact, something of an error. Faucet was originally half of a twosome – spigot and faucet, in which spigot was the liquidity channel and faucet the control mechanism. Faucet or tap, no matter: they’re still both cocks. According to the OED, there is a remnant of this meaning in ‘cocksure’ – the ‘original reference may have been to the security or certainty of the action of a cock or tap in preventing the escape of liquor’. On the other hand, the OED also cites this, from 1637: ‘If a man be well hung, hees cocksure.’
There is also that other, third possible explanation for cock as penis. This claims that it’s actually a shortening of pillicock, a word that meant both penis (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century) and vagina (sixteenth to seventeenth century). The two meanings are there in King Lear: ‘Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill.’ Pill itself was a Scottish word for penis. In time, pillicock became pillock, a word fit and suitable for 1960s prime-time television, in the mouth of Alf Garnett in Johnny Speight’s east London sitcom Til Death Us Do Part. You stupid pillock – that was okay. You stupid prick – that wouldn’t have been. It’s also suggested, by both Partridge and Green, that pillock is not, in fact, a penis word at all. Rather, it’s a testicles one, a ‘blend’ of two slangonyms for them, pills and ballocks.
Cock-ups? Although it might seem they’re a variant on fuck-ups, some say they relate to the tap meaning. When beer went wrong, brewers drained the bad stuff out by turning the cock up. Is there a difference between cocking something up and ballsing it up? Probably not. Either way, you’re most likely making a dick of yourself.
Perhaps the most popular of the words that cock and prick edged from the language was ‘mentula’, originally a Latin one. The Romans themselves did use the word ‘penis’ but more often they used mentula. Not all male Roman sexual organs were mentulas, though. If the glans (slanguage: bell end) was exposed, the word was verpus – which, on account of circumcision, was often used if the penis was Jewish. And, as English-speaking small boys can have pee-pees, so Latin-speaking ones had pipinnas.
There’s an odd thing there, though. Latin is a gendered language. Pipinna is a feminine noun and so is mentula, while cunnus is masculine. How can that be? That expert, Casanova, came up with an explanation – in Latin, at the age of eleven, according to his autobiography. Over dinner, a visiting Englishman wrote down a couplet of a question for the young Venetian to read aloud: ‘Discite grammatici cur mascula nomina cunnus/Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet.’ Tell us, grammarians, why cunnus is masculine while mentula is feminine. Casanova says he replied with a pentameter of an answer: ‘Disce quod a domino nomina servus habet.’ Because the slave always takes his master’s name. ‘My first literary exploit,’ boasted the Venetian in his Bohemian anecdotage as the librarian at the Castle of Dux.
The truth is that the two words took the genders they did because of their pre-history. Cunnus was masculine because Latin nouns that end -us are masculine – cunnilingus, for example, which, in Latin, referred to a person not an act. This gender-confusion is far from uncommon. The French con† kept its Latin masculine root, as did all the other modern European descendents of cunnus, with the exception of the Portuguese cona. A Brazilian penis is female – cazeta. A French one, too – la bite. Nearly always it’s because of the way the language generally handles nouns that look like that. The French vagin comes from a word for sheath, a masculine noun. Nor is it only sex words. In German, Mädchen, a common term for a young woman, is neuter – because words with the diminutive suffix -chen always are.
The problem is the confusion of ‘grammatical gender’ with ‘natural gender’. Many European languages have two or more grammatical genders but they don’t coincide at all with natural or real gender. Elsewhere in the world, there are languages with far more genders – or noun classes, as they’re also known. One Bantu language has sixteen. In French, there are two, male and female. Once English speakers have got their head around the idea that a wall is male (le mur) while a door is female (la porte), they tend to assume that there must be something intrinsically logical – if not apparent – about this male-female split. There’s not really, though. Gender comes from the Latin genus – as still used in biology. It means kind not sex. So the recent use of ‘gender’ as a way of indicating maleness or femaleness is something of a misnomer. Essentially, it’s a euphemism designed to avoid using the word ‘sex’, much as prudish Victorians used ‘limb’ for leg – without knowing the word’s penile history. The sweet thing is that long before even linguists started using the word ‘gender’, it was a French synonym for ‘to fuck’. Its English descendents are still around – engender, for example.
Unsurprisingly, other languages also endow the penis with the same, rich variety of words. South Americans, like the English, use a male name, but a different one according to country. In Chile, it’s Pepito; in Colombia, Carlito; in Cuba, Pepe; in Mexico, Sancho; in Peru, Juanito. The world is also blessed with a variety of inventive penis slangonyms. In Mexican Spanish, there’s gallito ingles – English chicken. In Catalonia, it’s a pajarito – little bird. In Romanian, it’s an arpele cu un singur ochi – one-eyed snake. In Italian, it can be uccello – bird. It can also be fava (as in bean) or pisello (as in pea). Generally, though, it’s cazzo, a word as central to Italian swearing as kurwa is to Polish. It’s a contraction of capezzo – a descendent of the Latin capitium, small head. When slanging, Italians are not at all positive about their penises. Cazzo is used as an expletive in much the way fuck is in English. Hit your mano with a martello in Italy and you shout ‘Cazzo!’ Want to say ‘It’s fucking cold?’ in Italian? Try: C’è un cazzo di freddo. Or: C’è un freddo del cazzo. Incazzarsi, literally cocked-up, means to get angry. Add cazzo to another word and the new compound always has a negative meaning. Amico del cazzo is a bad friend. Cazzata is bullshit or rubbish. ‘Cavolo!’ is its ‘polite’ derivative. As we might invoke the power of damnation not in ‘Bloody hell!’ but its seemingly polite version, ‘By heck!’, so Italians shout ‘Cabbage!’ It does not, as is sometimes claimed, have anything to do with Socrates’ ‘By the cabbage!’
It does have a kind of Mexican relation, though. When excited, Bart Simpson has a habit of shouting ‘Ay, caramba!’ It’s the one Mexican phrase everyone knows. There’s even a Disney movie of that name. What does it mean, though? Well, ay is a shouty sound, obviously. But caramba? Like the Italian cavolo and the English dork, it’s a minced oath – a polite nonsense word hiding the less polite but real caraja, a Spanish word for penis. Another South American Spanish penis word is pija. An unfortunate vineyard in Mendocino, seeing it was often used to mean ‘rascal’, has taken it as the name for its ‘most feisty field blend of grape varietals’.
The Maori for gun, putara, translates as farting penis. In Taiwan, diao (penis) means cool. When Time Asia put pop singer Jay Chou on the cover, it also gave him the opportunity to expand on his philosophy of diao. ‘It means that whatever you do, you don’t try to follow others,’ he explained. ‘Go your own way, you know?’ That is, in English perhaps, led by your penis.
Of all languages, though, Yiddish probably has the best range of words for penis, all imbued with a certain forgiving, worldly warmth. Now only regularly spoken by the ultra-orthodox Hasidim (the ones in black found in Stamford Hill, amongst other places), Yiddish was the language of European Jews – a Germanic language, like English, but written in Hebrew script. Its name comes from Yid which is the Yiddish word for Jew which is from the German word Jude: which is a shortening of Yehuda: which was the name of the Jewish Commonwealth in Biblical times: which itself came from the name of Jacob’s son, Yehuda: the descendants of Yehuda were the tribe of Israel which settled the area south and west of Jerusalem.
