We’re Taking the Fire Out of the Old Sexual Euphemisms

Every day our language tends to escape reality in euphemisms, but today’s euphemisms are meant to protect special groups from abuse, not, as in the past, to avoid the subject of sex.

As I have said, only a few decades ago The Times would not print such words as condom, abortion and rape. I can’t recall that condoms were ever mentioned at all. Abortions were illegal operations and rape was a criminal assault (not even a sexual assault).

Nick Zrinyi notes that in Victorian times, any word even remotely related to sex or the body (especially the female body) was taboo. Ladies (not women) had limbs, not legs; her bosom was a single appendage on what was called “the front of her back,” and a bustle made a single appendage on her back.

Zrinyi says that at first glance the Victorian era seems to have been a time of the greatest sexual innocence accompanied by the largest number of euphemisms.

On thinking it over, though, he wonders if all those euphemisms might have been symptomatic of the sexiest era of all time. “My gosh, they must have had sex on their minds all the time.”

Evidently the Victorians’ reluctance to mention sex reflected no reluctance to engage in it. The eloquent and influential minister Harry Ward Beecher, who exhorted his flocks against sin, was sued by a former protege for adultery with the plaintiff’s wife. The era was treated to many juicy scandals like the fatal triangle involving Stanford White, Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit (“The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing”).

In “The American Language,” Henry L. Mencken devotes a chapter to “Forbidden Words,” noting that the American people were once “the most prudish on earth.”

This prudishness preceded the Victorian Era by decades and lasted until World War I, which brought on “a certain defiant looseness of speech,” he says.

It was even worse in the West, where the word bull became cow-creature, male-cow or gentleman-cow . A cock became a rooster. This nicety was carried to idiocy by a young man who told a young woman that her brother had become a rooster-swain in the Navy.

Legs did not exist. Even pianos had limbs. Chicken legs were referred to as joints. People did not go to bed; they retired. Servant girls were not seduced; they were betrayed.

The word woman became taboo, and female took its place. But female, like most euphemisms, soon fell into disfavor. When Vassar Female College was established, the public protest forced it to drop the Female.

Delicacy flowered after the Civil War, Mencken says, and many euphemisms appeared in the press. Indeed, many were still in use after World War I. He mentions interesting or delicate condition for pregnant, criminal operation, house of ill repute, fallen woman, statutory offense, felonious attack, serious charge and criminal assault.

Medical authorities for years urged newspapers to use such words as syphilis and gonorrhea, to help make the public aware of them. Yet, in an article on this very subject, the New York Tribune used social diseases, preventable diseases, communicable diseases but not their true medical names.

Mencken notes that an advisory issued by the London Daily Express for its reporters and sub-editors listed the following acceptable euphemisms:

Cited as a co-respondent for adulterer; woman of a certain class for prostitute; producing a certain state for abortion; having, for purposes of gain, exercised influence over the movements of the girl victim for pandering; improper assault or to interfere with for rape.

In the use of simple obscenities, not directly related to sex, Mencken found relaxation of proscriptions exercised before World War I. He argues that expletives may lose their force through overuse. Thus, when a sergeant says, “Get your ----ing rifles!” his soldiers recognize it as mere routine. But if he says, “Get your rifles!” they know it’s an emergency.

“All expletives tend to be similarly dephlogisticated by overuse,” Mencken says--a fate that is not likely to overtake dephlogisticated itself. (It means robbed of fire.)

I wonder what Mencken would think of the almost unrestricted flood of four-letter words pouring from our television sets today. I have a feeling that we are indulging our freedom from the restraints of the motion picture code, which did not even allow damn until Rhett Butler said it in “Gone With the Wind.”

Today, a movie with a dozen damns would not even rate a PG-13. There are only two or three obscenities that I have not heard on television, and I certainly can’t print them here, nor would I want to.

I trust they will never be dephlogisticated.