‘A Nasty Name for a Nasty Thing’
A History of Cunt
I love the word cunt. I love everything about it. Not just the signified vulva, vagina and pudendum (which are all kinds of cunty goodness and will be returned to shortly), but the actual oral and visual signalled sign of cunt. I love its simple monosyllabic form. I adore that the first three letters (c u n) are basically all the same chalice shape rolling though the word until they are stopped in their ramble by the plosive T at the end. I love the forceful grunt of the C and the T sandwiching the softer UN sounds, enabling one to spit the word out like a bullet, or extend the un and roll it around your mouth for dramatic effect: cuuuuuuuuuuuunt!
I love it because it’s deliciously dirty, endlessly funny and, like an auditory exclamation mark, is capable of stopping a conversation in its tracks. Walter Kirn called cunt ‘the A-bomb of the English language’, and he’s absolutely right.{1} I love its versatility. In America, it is spectacularly offensive, while in Glasgow it can be a term of endearment; ‘I love ya, ya wee cunt’ is an expression heard throughout Glaswegian nurseries. That’s not true, but Scottish folk do possess a dazzling linguistic dexterity with cunt. Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting contains 731 cunts (though only nineteen made it into the film).
But more than anything else, I love the sheer power of the word. I am fascinated by cunt’s hallowed status as, to quote Christina Caldwell, ‘the nastiest of the nasty words’.{2} There are other contenders for the ‘most offensive’ word in the English language; racial slurs are obvious heavyweights. The N-word is a deeply offensive word because of its historical context. It is not just a descriptive word, it is a word that was used to dehumanise black people and justify some of the worst atrocities in human history. It enabled the enslavement and brutalisation of millions of people by linguistically denying black people equality with white people. We can understand why racial slurs are hideously offensive, but cunt? Does it not strike anyone else as odd that one of the most offensive words in English is a word for vulva? Or that this word could even be considered in the same league of offence as racist terms spawned from the darkest and most rank of human atrocities? As far as I am aware, cunt has not enabled racial genocide, so we have to ask: how did cunt get to be so offensive? What did cunt do wrong?
Let’s turn to the etymology first. Cunt is old. It’s so old that its exact origins are lost in the folds of time and etymologists continue to debate where in the cunt cunt comes from. It’s several thousand years old at least, and can be traced to the old Norse kunta and Proto-Germanic kunt, but before that cunt proves quite elusive. There are medieval cunty cognates in most Germanic languages; kutte, kotze and kott all appear in German. The Swedish have kunta; the Dutch have conte, kut and kont, and the English once had cot (which I quite like and think is due a revival).[2] Here’s where the debate comes in: no one is quite sure what cunt actually means. Some etymologists have argued cunt has a root in the Proto-Indo-European sound ‘gen/gon’, which means to ‘create, become’. You can see ‘gen’ in the modern words gonads, genital, genetics and gene. Others have theorised cunt descends from the root gune, which means ‘woman’ and crops up in ‘gynaecology’.{3} The root sound that most fascinates etymologists is ‘cu’. ‘Cu’ is associate with the female, and forms the basis of ‘cow’ and ‘queen’.{4} ‘Cu’ is linked to the Latin cunnus (‘vulva’), which sounds tantalisingly like cunt (though some etymologists claim it is unrelated), and has spawned the French con, the Spanish coño, the Portuguese cona, and the Persian kun.[3] {5} My favourite cunt theory is that the ‘cu’ also means to have knowledge. Cunt and ‘cunning’ are likely to have descended from the same root – ‘cunning’ originally meant wisdom or knowledge, rather than sneakiness, while ‘can’ and ‘ken’ became prefixes to ‘cognition’ and other derivatives.{6} In Scotland today, if you ‘ken’ something, it means you understand it. In the Middle Ages ‘quaint’ meant both knowledge and cunt (but more of that later). The debate will rage on, but the bottom line is that cunt is something of a mystery.
Here is what we do know: cunt is the oldest word for either the vulva or the vagina in the English language (possibly the oldest in Europe). Its only rival for oldest term for ‘the boy in the boat’ (1930) would be yoni (meaning vulva, source or womb). The English language borrowed yoni from ancient Sanskrit around 1800 and today it has been appropriated by various neo-spiritual groups who hope that by calling their ‘duff’ (1880) a yoni they can avoid the horror of cunt and tap into some ancient veneration of the ‘flapdoodle’ (1653). Of course, the irony is cunt and yoni may even have sprung from the same Proto-Indo-European root. Furthermore, cunt is far more feminist than vagina or vulva could ever dream to be.
Vagina turns up in seventeenth-century medical texts and comes from the Latin vagina, which means a sheath or a scabbard. A vagina is something a sword goes into; that’s its entire etymological function – to be the holder of a sword (penis). It relies on the penis for its meaning and function. We may as well still be calling the poor thing ‘cock alley’ (1785) or the ‘pudding bag’ (1653). There are many cunning linguists who rightly get their proverbials in a twist when you confuse vagina with vulva: to be clear, the vagina is the muscular canal that connects the uterus to the vulva, and the vulva is the external equipment (comprising the mons pubis, labia majora, labia minora, clitoris, vestibule of the vagina, bulb of the vestibule, and the Bartholin’s glands). Vulva dates to the late fourteenth century and comes from the Latin vulva, meaning ‘womb’ – some have suggested it comes from volvere, or to wrap. In his 1538 Latin dictionary, Thomas Elyot defined a vulva as ‘the womb or mother of any female animal, also a meat used of the Romans made of the belly of a sow, either that hath farrowed or is with farrow’.{7} So, yet again, the meaning of vulva is dependent on being the container for a penis – or a questionable cut of a pregnant Roman pig.
Cunt, however, predates both these terms and derives from a Proto-Indo-European root word meaning woman, knowledge, creator or queen, which is far more empowering than a word that means ‘I hold cock’. Plus, cunt is the whole damn shebang, inside and out. There’s no need to split pubic hairs when it comes to cunt. Words like vulva and vagina are linguistic efforts to offer sanitised, medicalised alternatives to cunt. And if that wasn’t enough to sway you over to team cunt, in 1500 Wynkyn de Worde defined vulva as ‘in English, a cunt’.{8} Cunt is not slang; cunt is the original. So, cunt is the godmother of all words for ‘the monosyllable’ (1780) – but then the question arises: has cunt always been such an offensive word as it is today?
2
‘Oxford English Dictionary’,