Cunt

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Cunt is a vulgar term that refers to the human female genitals. It is an old and native English word, replaced after the Norman Conquest by the Latin, vagina, originally a Roman slang term meaning, 'scabbard.' 'Cunt' is now used only as a coarse colloquialism. It is also used as a term of abuse: in North American usage, it is mainly directed at women, as in "she's a real cunt", and in British usage mainly directed at men, as in "he's a right cunt". It can also be used more abstractly, as in "I've had a cunt of a day" or even as a word-stem: "I've had a cuntish day", "Bob was in a really cunty mood". The word is generally considered to be more offensive than equivalent words referring to the penis (such as dick). North Americans generally find the word more offensive than the British and Australians, possibly due to the Puritan roots of the US - in Britain, unlike America, it can be used as a jovial term of endearment.

With the growing acceptance of the word fuck in print and broadcast media, cunt is the last genuinely unprintable and unsayable sexual word in mainstream media (the most notable non-sexual word being nigger). Some feminists seek to reclaim cunt as an acceptable word, in much the same way that queer has been reclaimed by homosexuals.

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History

Cunt is an old Germanic word, and appeared as cunte in Middle English and kunta in Old Norse. It has cognates in most Germanic languages, such as the Swedish and Norwegian kunta, Frisian kunte, and Dutch kut. Its original derivation is an Old Germanic stem kunton. See gonads, genital, gamete, genetics and gene. Relationships to similar-sounding Romance language words such as the Latin cunnus, French con, and Spanish coño have not been conclusively demonstrated.

Cunt has been in common use in English since at least the 13th century. It did not appear in any major dictionary of the English language from 1795 to 1961 (when it was included in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, with the comment "usu. considered obscene"). Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1972, which cites the word as having been in use since 1230 in what was supposedly a current London street name of "Gropecuntelane".

Although Shakespeare doesn't use the word explicitly (or with derogatory meaning) in his plays, he still has fun with it, using wordplay to sneak it in. In Act III, Scene 2, of Hamlet, as the castle's residents are settling in to watch the play-within-the-play, Hamlet asks Ophelia, "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?" Ophelia of course, replies, "No, my lord." Hamlet, feigning shock, says, "Do you think I meant country matters?" Then, to drive home the point that the accent is definitely on the first syllable of country, Shakespeare has Hamlet say, "That's a fair thought, to lie between maids' legs." Also see Twelfth Night (Act II, Scene V): "There be her very C's, her U's, and her T's: and thus makes she her great P's."

In a similar fashion, the British band The Sex Pistols recorded a song entitled '"Pretty Vacant", pronounced pretty vay-khunt.

The word quaint, possibly from the Latin for 'known', has also been used in historical times in much the same way as cunt and probably had a similar pronunciation. A notable early use of quaint was from Chaucer in his Miller's Tale "Pryvely he caught hir by the queynte".

The historical normality of Cunt can be shown by the existence of the River Kennet which derives its name from the same source. The Kennet flows forth from a cunt-shaped opening.

Testimonials

"I'm a really big fan of cunt over words like pussy, and especially, vagina. The word has this great guttural sound that lets you get right into it. Pussy and vagina are really dirty words - you only ever hear really greasy men saying things like that. Cunt lets women be vulgar without being derogatory."

Calista Flockhart, at a staging of The Vagina Monologues