I was looking through my old A-Level English set books from 1989 at the weekend. We had to study the Canterbury Tales and I can still remember our delight when we discovered that 'queynte' was the 13th Century form of a certain four-letter obscenity beginning with 'c', used to describe the female regenerative organs.
Unlike its modern counterpart, 'queynte' was not, it seems, an obscenity back in Chaucer's time. I was wondering if anyone knew when it morphed into 'c*nt' and became a taboo word. And, by extension, the earliest usages of it and 'f*ck' as obscene, taboo and/or abusive words. Off the top of my head, I seem to recall reading somewhere that the earliest example of the eff-word is in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but I may be mistaken.
Also, I know a lot of swearing in our times is based on what are referred to as 'Anglo Saxon' words/usages. Why is this? And were the Angles and Saxons a ruder lot than the Vikings?
UPDATE:
From the Wikipedia article
The word in its modern meaning is attested in Middle English. Proverbs of Hendyng, a manuscript from some time before 1325, includes the advice:[9]
'Ȝeue þi cunte to cunnig and craue affetir wedding.'
(Trans: Give your cunt wisely and make (your) demands after the wedding." )
So it would appear it was acceptable at least around the 13th/14th century.
Best Answer
The use of fuck as an expletive and cunt as a term of abuse date only from the early twentieth century. Fuck itself is first recorded as a verb in 1528 and as a noun in 1663. Cunt is considerably earlier, the OED’s oldest citation being the name of the street in London once known as Gropecuntelane.
Both words have Germanic origins and were not taboo words to begin with. What might have happened is that, following the Norman Conquest, French words for bodily parts and fuctions took the place of the Old English equivalents in respectable contexts, leaving the Old English words to be used in less respectable ones.
As for swearing generally, it seems likely that there have always been taboo words, but that their nature has varied. Some research has suggested that swearing is processed in a different part of the brain from other language. It’s a fascinating topic which can’t be covered adequately in a few lines here.