Bawdy Language

There’s something in the air today, marking a scientific breakthrough of sorts. Scientists out of the University of Exeter insist that smelling farts could actually prevent cancer, among other diseases. Uh, okay.

“Although hydrogen sulfide gas”—produced when bacteria breaks down food—”is well known as a pungent, foul-smelling gas in rotten eggs and flatulence, it is naturally produced in the body and could in fact be a healthcare hero with significant implications for future therapies for a variety of diseases,” Dr. Mark Wood said in a university release.

Although the stinky gas can be noxious in large doses, the researchers seem to think that a whiff here and there has the power to reduce risks of cancer, strokes, heart attacks, arthritis, and dementia by preserving mitochondria. Researchers are even coming up with their own compound to emulate the stinky smell’s health benefits.

“‘We have exploited this natural process by making a compound, called AP39, which slowly delivers very small amounts of this gas specifically to the mitochondria,” Professor Matt Whiteman, who worked on the study to be published in the Medicinal Chemistry Communications journal, said.

Isn’t it time you too got a whiff of the truth? Check out the brief history of the much-maligned fart from “Bawdy Language.”

Gone With the Wind

The fart’s fine lineage not withstanding, other reference works have been more standoffish. The esteemed Oxford English Dictionary unequivocally declared fart “not fit for proper use.” Nobody knows why the OED chose to close down this innocuous form of personal expression or how the decision was made. One can only imagine a group of eminent scholars gathered in their ivory tower, deliberating upon the fate of words, having a beer or two, and shooting the breeze.

Having to give us something to do, they finally agreed to let us have the vapors (16thC–19thC), “supposed emanations from internal organs or from substances within the body.”

Does the Australian gurk sound any better? Yet etymologist Richard Spears, in his classic dictionary of slang and euphemism, organized his synonyms (all 76 of them) for breaking wind under that particular obscurity, defining the category as “to release intestinal gas audibly.” Anything to avoid giving the fart its proper due.

And so the fart fell from grace—expelled from polite society and relegated to second-class status. Farting around (c. 1900) came to signify purposelessness; anything overly pretentious was arty- farty.” Farting off (c.1968) made you inattentive and neglectful, leading to one blunder after another, causing you to fart away (c.1928) or squander your opportunities.

Or

What’s In a Name?

Few people remember that Warren G. Harding was ever President of the United States; those that do, could care less. The obscure early 20th-century president died two years into office after achieving little that was worth remembering. Count him among the worst of our nation’s chief executives who was best known for the scandals and corruption that marked his tenure in office. But that was until a few days ago when we got a sneak preview of the racy love letters between President Harding and his mistress, Carrie Fulton who also happened to be the wife of one of his best friends.

The Library of Congress this month will release more than 100 of these breathlessly passionate notes written by Harding to his mistress of 15 years… and they are “hot.”

Check out this one: “I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts.”

Most interesting of all was Harding’s on-going reference to his upright member as “Jerry”, describing it like an insistent friend who would arrive without warning and stay beyond his welcome. “Jerry came and will not go, says he loves you, that you are the only, only love worthwhile in all this world,” Harding wrote. “He is so utterly devoted that he only exists to give you all. I fear you would find a fierce enthusiast today.” In one letter penned just before the end of the First World War, Harding said simply: “Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry”.

Harding’s namesake, however, is pretty small pickings compared to a later chief executive, Lyndon Johnson who nicknamed his member “Jumbo” and was fond of showing it to other members of Congress; though it was a quite gratuitous gesture given how everyone already knew what a prick the President was.

It’s not unusual for men to name their organ, a fact I have recorded already in Bawdy Language, marking the special relationship men appear to have with their organ.

Isn’t it time you too got a whiff of the truth? Check out the brief history of the penis from “Bawdy Language.”

You Can Call Me…

On a first-name basis, Peter, Dick, and John stand out. Peter began as St. Peter, who held the keys to heaven, but after he had used them regularly for a few hundred years, and clearly was no longer a saint, he was reduced to just plain Peter, a long-time favorite name for the prick.

But Peter is nowhere as popular as he once was, having hit his stride among America’s teenagers in the 1940s and ’50s. In the Ozarks, however, he’s still the word for the family organ. Vance Randolph, the noted folklore specialist, tells the story of a novice minister who both embarrassed and flabbergasted his congregation by innocently inquiring as to how many Peters were out there. It was a real gaffe. In that part of the country, one never refers to Peter in mixed company. A son is never named Peter. And nothing, but nothing, ever peters out.

John, the commonest name in the English language, has often given his name to the commonest organ, as has Johnnie, a favorite of “cultured” nineteenth-century females. We are told that women have also been hot for a man’s Jones (20thC, U.S.), John’s family name. But our featured performer is John Thomas (c. 1840), an old pet name for a flunky or a servant, an important figure in world literature who was also the hero of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and without whom there would not have been a story.

Jack (19thC), a nickname for John, has also stood for the penis and its erection, as has Jock (before 1790), from which we got the jockstrap by which today’s male supports his hanging Johnny. Nothing—well, almost nothing—could contain a roaring jack. A jack-in-the-box (19thC) was your pop-up surprise, the box being the likeliest place in which a man might place it.

Man  has  always  been  of two minds  in dealing  with  his  prick.  It’s been  both  an  object  of great  pride  and  of great  shame. In ancient times  it was  treated with  reverence, worshipped as  the  source  of fecundity and  perceived to be the  power  behind motherhood, fertility, food and  the  seasonal cycles.  In Egypt and  Greece  symbolic representations of it, huge  phalluses (late  18th–20thC From  the Greek  for prick),  were  carried  about in  solemn religious  processions.  In  Rome,  images  of pricks  could  be  found  everywhere. There  were  pricks  at the  doors  of shops, pricks  at the  city gates, and  pricks  attached to the chariots of famous generals. Even drinking  glasses  and  goblets  were cast in their shape.

A Brown University medical sociologist reports that proctologists are commonly referred to in the profession as “Rear Admirals.” Coincidentally, Dr. Reinhold Aman, editor of Maledicta, noted that when former President Jimmy Carter was treated for a hemorrhoidal condition in 1978, the attending physician was Dr. William Lukash, a  real  Rear  Admiral  in  the U.S. Navy.

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