Selected Literary Essays by C. S. Lewis

Author:C. S. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

FOUR-LETTER WORDS

Ce n’est point ainsi que parle la nature

MOLIÈRE

Literary historians sometimes use the word Elizabethan qualitatively rather than chronologically and apply it to poems written after the accession of James I. I am going to take a similar liberty with the expression ‘four-letter words’, and make it mean what are called ‘obscene words’ in general. Some of my specimens contain more than four letters.

I believe—for I have not found the passage—that Lawrence somewhere says it is hard to know how four-letter words affected the mind of the Middle Ages.1 Whether he did or not, I think it worth a moment’s inquiry. We cannot arrive at an absolutely certain answer, but there are grounds for a good guess. If we want a clue to the way medieval people felt about any word we naturally look to see how they used it. We open, in fact, the glossary of Skeat’s Chaucer.

The following four-letter words (in my extended sense) are in alphabetical order.

Bele chase. Comic and roguish euphemism for muliebria pudenda. Skeat lists it twice. On both occasions it is used by the Wife of Bath (D 447, 510).

Coillons (testes). Used abusively by the Host to the Pardoner in bitter anger (C 952).

Ers (nates vel anus). This occurs twice in the Miller’s Tale (A 3734, 3755). The context is slapstick farce. It occurs also in the Summoner’s Tale (D 1690, 1694). There the context is farcical fantasy with a satirical implication; the teller is insulting friars as deeply as he knows how. It is just conceivable, though ars metrike is good Middle English for ‘arithmetic’, that the choice of this word in D 2222 contains a double entendre.

Fart. Always in slapstick farce. Miller’s Tale (A 3338, 3806); Summoner’s (D 2149).

Pisse (n). Either in slapstick (Miller’s Tale, A 3798) or in a pseudo-scientific context (Canon’s Yeoman, G 807).

Queynte (bele chose). In farce (Miller’s Tale, A 3276) and in the mouth of the Wife of Bath (D 332, 444).

Quoniam. Comic synonym for the preceding. Used once (but one MS here reads queynte) by the same speaker (D 608).

Swiven. Used in slapstick (Reeve’s Tale, A 4178, 4266, 4317; Cook’s Tale, a 4422). In Miller’s Tale, A 3850, there is a tone of malevolent triumph. There is malice also when it is used by the crow in the Manciple’s (H 256). In the Merchant’s (E 2378) it is said in furious anger.

I am anxious not to try to prove too much. Skeat’s entries are probably not exhaustive. Still, we may note for what it is worth that farce and abuse are the normal contexts of all these words. Any reader who finds the passages in which they occur inflammatory and in that sense ‘corrupting’ must be, in Johnson’s phrase, ‘more combustible than most’.

Set against these a passage that, I think, might possibly inflame: the consummation of the love between Troilus and Criseyde (III, 1142–1421). Here every word (though not, to be sure, the whole passage) could have been read aloud in a Victorian girls’ school.

None of the eight words I have extracted from Chaucer, so far as I can discover, occurs in Gower.

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