Originally Posted by
showmeguy
There is something important missing in this thread, and that is a little bit of the history of the English language, the most successful language on our planet, with more literature and more good literature than any other language, and this is often attributed to its ability to include words from other languages. I adore my native tongue, and believe it has greater powers of expression, meaning, nuance, precision, concision, and (of course) has more idioms and lends itself to puns and other delights beyond any other language. English has its origins in Anglo-Saxon and the Teutonic branch of languages, as distinct from what are called the Romance languages, those languages descended from the language of the Romans: principally French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.
However, English was not the official language of England after 1066 when William the Conqueror, who was from Normandy, which is to say France, invaded and conquered England. French became the language of the courts of law and the court of the King. It was the language used by educated people and by lawyers and judges. The Magna Carta, written in 1215, was written in Latin and translated into French, but not into English, not into Anglo-Saxon. The nobility and all the upper crust spoke French, and only the poor uneducated conquered people of the region spoke English, and virtually nothing at all was written in English until approximately 1350 when Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, which was in part a vulgar sort of poem and written in a vulgar language, according to the snobbery of the day.
In English, cunt is the word denoting the female genitalia, and vagina is the French (Romance - Latinate) equivalent. Cunt is a noun. It has a clear denotative meaning. It is a perfectly good word. However, it has a bad connotation, and not for any better reason than that the upper class, the ruling class, spoke French and considered anything in English to be vulgar, a thousand years ago.
Like all members of the underclass, speakers of English were prosecuted more often and punished more severely under law than their French speaking betters. For this reason our laws are sprinkled with phrases giving French and Anglo-Saxon equivalents so the poor dirty ill-spoken underclass could understand the gravity of the charges against them. A statute I had occasion to read in earnest lays a duty on the citizens of my state to be careful (Anglo-Saxon) and cautious (Latinate). I heard an interviewee on NPR recently who was an officer in a not for profit corporation who said that she "worked together (Anglo-Saxon), collaboratively (Latinate)" with other non profit organizations. The thousand year old snobbery is still alive today. This despite the enormous success of English, despite the utter failure of French to become the language of England.
There is an aspect to the matter that has to do with the tendency of unlettered people to use words solely for their connotations, often without even the slightest attention to the plain meaning of the word. Once upon a time the word 'gay' meant something like happy or joyful.
I heard a man complaining about his middle aged middle son (the third of five children) who borrowed his boat and did not return it. It was near a holiday and the man wanted his boat back, and bitched about his son, calling him a bastard and a mother fucker before he calmed himself. To him, these words had NO DENOTATIVE MEANING. They were the merest expression of the intensity of his unhappiness. I am willing to bet Dad and Mom were married to each other when the son was conceived, and I am also willing to bet the son never had sex with his mother.
Was it poor taste to speak of the son in this manner? Yes, of course it was.
The woman who tells her lover that she wants his prick in her cunt is using perfectly good language with a clear meaning and in a frank and arousing way. And in plain English.
I do not object to this usage. But when the word is used to convey the intensity of distaste for a person, then I too object to that usage. It is the usage of the ignorant, unable to express the meaning of his or her disaffection. I can object to the ignorance and the disaffection, but I cannot ennoble myself by adopting a long forgotten snobbery.
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