'It Deserves Hard and Prayerful Study'

Like most kids and even more adults my first act when encountering a new dictionary was to look up the forbidden words, the often four-lettered smut we all knew but seldom acknowledged (in the company of adults). I realize I haven’t done that lately, probably because such words are no longer tref and, thus, not especially noteworthy. Through overuse, we have enervated a potent portion of our vocabulary. The foul-mouthed have become merely tiresome and no longer shocking. In his 1937 review of A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by the New Zealand-British lexicographer Eric Partridge (1894-1979), H.L. Mencken notes: 

“Unlike most of his predecessors, Mr. Partridge does not evade the dreadful vocabulary of the schoolyard. All the four-letter unmentionables that everybody knows but nobody (save the proletarian novelists) ever writes are listed, and though some of them have their vowels replaced by sanitary stars, they are discussed at length and their etymology and moral history are set forth boldly.”

 

In The American Language (1919; second ed., 1921) Mencken treads more genteelly than Partridge. Contrasting American and English in a section titled “Expletives and Forbidden Words,” he writes:

 

“The Victorian era saw a great growth of absurd euphemisms in England, including second wing for the leg of a fowl, but it was in America that the thing was carried farthest. Bartlett hints that rooster came into use in place of cock as a matter of delicacy, the latter word having acquired an indecent significance, and tells us that, at one time, even bull was banned as too vulgar for refined ears. In place of it the early purists used cow-creature, male-cow and even gentleman-cow.”

 

The most amusing passages in Mencken’s endlessly re-readable volumes are such Homeric catalogues of words. He notes that Partridge includes words of American origin only if they have taken root in the U.K., though they are “not always the most vivid and saucy”:

 

“An idle tour of the book shows that whoopee, roadhog, hornswoggle, cutie, necking, fantods, attaboy, hoodoo, and speed-cop have been taken in, but that dingbat, pushover, hoosegow, palooka, harness-bull, jinx, hot-spot, jitney, corn-fed, bughouse, rumdumb, rabble-rouser, and nerts have yet to be admitted. Fanny, in England, still lacks the American sense of backside; it signifies, over there, an even more confidential area of the female anatomy, and is thus, as Mr. Partridge says, ‘low.’ It is certainly not low in this country, though one can hardly imagine a bishop using it in a pastoral letter.”

 

Mencken might have cited one of his favorite books, Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 8, to illustrate the use of fantods: “By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most give me the fantods.” An English professor once helpfully annotated for me the name of a minor but critical character in another great American novel, Henry James’ The Golden Bowl. Fanny Assingham contains three synonyms for derriere in a single name.

 

Mencken can be silly. His occasional anti-Semitism is stupid and beneath him, and like most writers he knew almost nothing about politics, but racy prose remains the reason we read him. He concludes his review:

 

“His book is not to be reviewed in a column or two. It deserves hard and prayerful [!] study, and not only for its naughty words. It is a serious contribution to a difficult subject, and greatly surpasses all its predecessors.”