been reading cicero’s rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don’t think i’ve ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before
had a couple people be like “i have no idea what this means” so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word “penis” for naughty purposes
Thank you for this post, I will be showing it to every boomer who ever complains about how the kids these days are butchering the language.
Which is especially funny because the Romans had a very rich vocabulary for being rude. And a lot of it got very well preserved, unlike some other ancient cultures where the only people who could write were scholars and priests and the like, who weren’t going around talking about slurs all that much. Not the Romans. We have a city full of rude graffiti that got preserved when the nearby volcano asploded, and poets like Catullus who loved to get FILTHY. He wrote poems about love and lust, for men and women, and he wrote poems about people he fucking hated, and he spared no invective.
So the Latin has a bunch of rude words, we still know about them, and the hilarious thing about this quote is that it’s an ancient Roman complaining about a word for penis… And it’s the one WE STILL USE, SOME TWO MILLENNIA LATER.
I sorry Cicero, you lost this battle, hard.
He could have been complaining about peniculus (little brush), mentula (prick), sopio (penis), vomer (plowshare), verpa (hard on/ literally penis with retracted foreskin).
But nope. He picked the one word that ended up in English.
BTW one of my favorite things about English vocabulary that you can’t not see once you realize it’s there: there was a period in Englandwhere the upper classes spoke romance languages and the lower classes were germanic, before this all melted together into the Frankenstein’s monster we call English
So English has a lot of cases where we have two words for the same thing, but one is formal and medical and polite, and the other is rude.
Why is copulation clinical and fucking rude? Because “copulation” is Latin and “fucking” is germanic. Same goes for “feces” and “shit”, “vagina” and “cunt”, and so on.
Interestingly this goes for some other words too, in a way that makes sense if you think about it. You know how we have different words for some animals and the food made from those animals? Like, “cow” vs “beef”, “sheep” vs “mutton”, “deer” vs “venison”.
It’s the same thing! Just not always going back to Latin, sometimes it’s just to old French. The animal is germanic, the meat is romance/Latin.
Why? Well, think about it. You’ve got a class system. You’ve got upper-class rich people eating their fancy meals, and a bunch of poor working class people raising the animals on the farms. The animals get germanic names, and the meat get romance names, because Lord Snooty What'sHisFuck only ever sees a cow when it’s cooked up and on his plate. So he calls it “beef”, since he speaks something like French, and the guy who raised Tasty Betsy called her a “Cow” because he speaks something like German.
English has centuries of linguistic classism built into our very vocabulary! And it’s really neat to notice and see how prevalent it is.
BTW to get back to Latin, another fun thing about how their assorted dirty words worked is that it implies a lot about their value system, and how they saw gender and sexual roles. See, they had a real thing about what we now would call “top” vs “bottom”. We still have some of that, of course, but we tend to make it more gendered, and more about straight vs. gay.
The Romans didn’t think “gay” was an insult. They did have a word for that! But they did use “cinaedus” as an insult, and the closest term we have is “cocksucker”. Except they didn’t really imply the homosexual nature of that insult… For them it was just about being the bottom in oral sex. “cocksucker” or “pussylicker”, it’s all the same. Similarly they had “irrumo, irrumare”, which means “to make someone suck your cock”, which is an expression of dominance. Again, it’s not about the possible homosexuality: it’s the topping.
And similarly, they had “pathicus”, an insult that means something like the f-slur. But as always, it’s not about homosexuality, as that’s fine: it’s about being the bottom. One of the worst slurs you could call a Roman man was one that meant he let people fuck him in the ass.
The bottom line (no pun intended): Linguistics are always interesting because they tell you so much about the culture that speaks that language. Romans had a culture-wide hang-up about topping and bottoming, and to this day English has a big formal/informal divide in our vocabulary because of who won The Battle of Hastings in 1066.
The bit about English having two sets of words is a linguistic phenomenon called a stratum. English adopted a wide array of Norman and Latinate terms - many of the more technical and clinical terms were actually adopted directly from the Latin used by scholars, which is why you’ll also see them in other languages like German - which settled themselves in as a formal stratum. It also has a couple of others with more restricted uses, eg. a Greek stratum mostly used for science and an Italian stratum mostly used for music.
This is not something unique to English or even European languages. Thai has an extensive Indic stratum stratum drawn from Pali and Sanskrit that dominates formal vocabulary in a similar way to English’s Romance stratum. Bahasa melayu has both an Indic stratum and an Arabic one, covering domains such as government and religion respectively. Japanese has an extensive Classical Chinese stratum, preserved in the on-readings of kanji.
Fun little reminder of why English has a stratum (and why English is such a grab-bag of languages and linguistics). This country got invaded. A lot. Latin came from the Roman conquests, Germanic from the invasion of the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian from the invading Vikings, French from the Normans. ‘Posh’ language (Latin, French etc) was from the new rulers of the country, while 'common’ language was Germanic with a bit of the residual Celtic languages, which due to all those conquests have all but died out. But you know what didn’t die out? Welsh. Cornish has also been revived, so if you want to know what the English language was actually like without all the invasions, check out some Brythonic languages
For Welsh, I think there’s a lot of truth in that, but there are also loan words, because we were invaded too, frequently by the english. Notwithstanding the oppression of Welsh at various points and by various means, our language has been altered and influenced, as have all languages to a degree. Take eglwys which is similar to eglise (French) for church, and cwningen, which has similar roots to Kaninchen (German) for rabbit. Both of those words are imported because the ideas were new. Rabbits were brought over, as was Christianity. Afal, tatws, pannas (Apple, potato, parsnip) are similar to the English. Cwrw, cawl, aderyn (bread, beer, bird) are their own words, as are blaidd and arth (Wolf, bear) . Language tells us a lot about how and when a thing was introduced. I feel like English isn’t unique in this regard, although I do agree that the degree to which it has happened does differ. Perhaps it is more useful to think of English as lacking a scaffold, rather than Welsh as being preserved in aspic from some mythical point at which we were left alone by those other bastards.
currently between fandoms, still yelling about derek hale, benton fraser and remus lupin, my favourite werewolves. happy to receive asks and prompts, v friendly i promise.
