A Short History of Offensiveness

Inspired equally by this post courtesy of ThinkinFYou and the despairing idiocy of my devil children, I thought I would post a brief and pretty accurate history of the WORST. WORD. EVER!!! 

When I was an undergraduate, a bumbling English Major with a penchant for research and way too much time on my hands, I latched onto the English Renaissance as my literary period of interest.  Now, it may interest most of you to know that William Shakespeare is almost single-handedly responsible for making “Cunt” a dirty word.  Thanks a lot, Shakes. 

“Cunt” was an old Gaelic word, one that literally meant “thingy” — see, even before remote controls and tool boxes, our limited human vocabulary was forced to come up with general catch-all words.  So if you were a Dark Ages wife, just straggling back from whatever terrible, soul-sucking labor you’d just engaged in, at the elderly age of 32, 10 sickly infants mewling and tied along with a hefty sack of manure to your stooped back, and your husband called, “Huswife!  Bring me yer cunt!”, then you would NOT, as modern readers assume, drops babies, poo and trou and present your withered loins to the poor man, probably fixing a wagon wheel or some such.  No, you would realize that he wanted the sack of manure you were holding, and his inquiry was roughly the equivalent of screeching, “Hon, bring me that thingy, won’t you?”  As women, apparently, for centuries we’ve had to interpret the wants and needs of our menfolk who lack any and all proper vocabulary for expressing it.  What did he want with your sack of manure?  Well, probably to mix with water into a paste to use as adhesive in holding that wagon wheel back in place.  Yes.  Travel sucked until about 1955.      

Fine, fine.  So “Cunt” = “thingy”… why all the hatin?  Eventually, we as a scabrous, filthy people, crawled our way out of the Middle Ages and pedantic adherence to the all-mighty, completely corrupt Catholic church, and entered into the glory of the Renaissance!  Hurrah! 

Probably taken just after eating a turkey leg and getting blown by a vassal

Henry VIII, being an incredibly powerful douche-bag, and never having learned anything about moderation, judging from his wives (6) and waist-line (126 inches), decided that he was going to say bollocks to the Catholic church, give himself his own damn divorce (thanksfornothing, Pope Jackass), and thus break England away from the “Bishop of Rome.”  Hurrah!  Well.  Sort of.  Because he freaked everyone out religiously, that also meant that Henry inadvertently invented the first group of religious assholes — the Fundamentalist Puritans.  These tools are, not coincidentally, the nut jobs who founded the first American colonies and spent their first few winters burning witches. 

Dance of Witch-Burning Joy

Yeah.  Those people. 

By the time Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, comes to the throne, all the Puritans who had failed to get their sad-faced selves on the Mayflower were moping around London, generally destroying happiness wherever they could.  In fact, they were such dicks about it, they would not even allow profanity on the Stage!  And we all know that entertainment consists of 90% swearing and 10% jokes about excrement.  What was a young playwright like Willy “Cock Joke” Shakespeare to do?  Well, he figured that most of London wasn’t legally retarded, so he relied on using seemingly innocuous slang terms to refer to all his down-there business writing dialogue.  The Puritans, not having the sense to hang out in pubs most days, would not realize the gentle mockery and thus be unable to demand theater closure due to “destruction of public decency.”  (THIS is why Sarah Palin must never again hold political office, kids.)

Soooo.  That’s why “thingy” came to mean “VAGINA.”  Hence, the play Much Ado About No-thing?  = Much Fuss over Not Getting Any Pussy.  Hell, even Merchant of Veniceends with a vajay-jay joke.  And because poor old “cunt” also meant “thingy,” the two terms were indelibly, and eternally linked. 

None of this is to suggest that the Renaissance was not, generally speaking, a fairly misogynistic time.  These people believed in Galen, an ancient ”physician” who wrote that lady parts were just inverted male parts, and thus women were just male babies who had been too LAZY in the womb to obligingly pop a dick out.  There were all kinds of apocryphal legends circulating about young girls who, upon getting over-heated or because of other too-masculine qualities finally had their inner dick pop out, probably horrifying a) their parents b) their husband and/or c) the family dog.  It’s true.  It’s called the One-Sex theory and it fucked over women for like 2000 years.    

So there is your short history of the word “Cunt.”  Don’t believe me?  Look it up, suckas.  I got a degree in this shit.