'Floozy, Harlot, Hot Mamma, Huzzy, Madam'

The first time I encountered fuck in print was in the May Company department store in downtown Cleveland, sometime in the mid-1960s. I was browsing in a poetry anthology in the book department when I happened on the word in a poem by Allen Ginsburg. I was more shocked than thrilled. I didn’t know you could use that word in public. I probably hadn’t as yet. I straddled eras we might think of as Pre-fuck and Post-fuck. Around the same time, pubic hair was discovered.

I recently watched an action movie which would have been silent without the obscenities. I’m no longer shocked, just disappointed that worthy words have been drained of meaning through overuse and become tiresome. In the chapter titled “Euphemisms and Forbidden Words” in The American Language (fourth edition, 1936), H.L. Mencken approaches the subject from the opposite direction. His was an age of institutional prudery:   

“Hollywood, always under heavy pressure from official and volunteer censors, has its own Index Expurgatorius, augmented from time to time. It includes, as permanent fixtures, broad (for woman), chippy, cocotte, courtesan, eunuch, fairy (in the sense of homosexual), floozy, harlot, hot mamma, huzzy, madam (in the sense of brothel-keeper), nance, pansy, slut, trollop, tart and wench, and of course whore . . .”

Of the words singled out by Mencken, only those referring to homosexuals might raise an eyebrow today; the others, little more than self-congratulatory snickers. How quaint. Our forebears were so unsophisticated. Mencken continues:

“Sex is also forbidden, as is the adjective sexual. Jew may be used only in complimentary connotations, and kike, yid, dago, and nigger are prohibited altogether. God must be used circumspectly, and Gawd is under the ban. So are Lord (‘when used profanely’), Christ, guts, hell, hellcat, Jesus, Geez, son-of-a- --, S.O.B., louse and punk.”

What a sprawling and contradictory assortment of proscribed words, and Mencken doesn’t even mention the big one.