quote:In some contexts, 'cunt' remained a socially acceptable word until very recently: "in rural areas [of England in the 1960s] the word was still being used as an ordinary everyday term, at least when applied to a cow's vulva" [McDonald, 1988]. It did not appear in modern dictionaries uncensored until Penguin's English Dictionary of 1965. Terence Meaden suggests that the legal suppression of 'cunt' constituted "a series of vicious witch hunts encouraged by an evil establishment wishing to suppress what amounted to apparent signs of Goddess beliefs" [Meadon, 1992], and, indeed, there was a 'Kuntah' tribe in the Sahara, and, in India, a group called 'Kundas' who worshiped the goddess 'Kundah' or 'Cunti'. Ptah-Hotep may have used the term when addressing an Egyptian goddess, perhaps in the form of 'quefen-t'.
quote:The Tales Of Caunterbury, which are full of other, lesser, swear-words such as 'shit' and 'piss' but not the tabooed 'cunt' (except in disguised form), were written at the very end of the fourteenth century, thus it seems that, throughout the Middle Ages, 'cunt' was an acceptable term, becoming taboo during the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries. There was almost certainly a period of transition, during which the status of the word gradually changed from acceptability to taboo, just as, five hundred years later, it is finally in slow transition again, from taboo to acceptability.
Weird. I'd have assumed (in keeping with some of the statements in this thread) that it would have been the Norman conquerors stigmatizing the Anglo-Saxon speakers. But this apparently ain't so. |
