SOCIETY — 151/262 — Invective
Although the more educated or higher-born tried to keep invective and vulgarities out of their speech, swearing has been part of the vernacular since time immemorial. Profanity was not only verbal, but often appeared in written form in documents that sought to defame and humiliate those addressed. Some of the slurs arose by corrupting foreign-language expressions, others were derived from animals and their attributes. Often used as insults were onomatopoeic words (articulated noises) or metaphors, words derived from adjectives, attitudes towards work, criminal offences, political stances, professions, psychological malaise or people’s names. The worst kind of insult questioned the honour of the individual – such swearwords quite often led to court cases or duels. It was common practice that anyone not prepared to defend their honour would indeed lose it in the eyes of the public.
TRIVIA
— Medieval insults or "sins of the tongue" were a largely gendered speech. While a man's social reputation depended mostly on his honour and honesty, a woman's standing was reliant on her virtue and her compliance. The worst insults for a man were therefore those targeted at his integrity (being “false” or “a filthy liar”), while women were mostly sexually defamed (“shameful woman”, “whore”), or accused of gossip or “scolding”. Since all of these accusations could have serious consequences – if they were indeed seen as indicators for perjury or fornication for example – insults like these were often brought to court, leaving records for us to observe nowadays. Yet, not everything that we consider vulgar in modern times was viewed as obscene in the Middle Ages. In his 10th century Bible gloss, the priest Aldred the Scribe translates Matthew's “you shall not commit adultery” bluntly with “you shall not fuck another man's wife”, and in John Wyclif's 1380 translation, Moses threatens diseases onto “the part of the body by which turds are shat out”. And even personal insults would not always be prosecuted, as long as they served the general entertainment. Such was the case in the practice of flyting, a kind of verbal jousting, or the medieval equivalent of battle rap. Practiced between the 5th and the 16th centuries in northern Europe and on the British Isles, flyting was a public event in which nobles would invite contestants to their court to throw rhyming insults at each other's heads, while the audience's reaction would decide over the winner. A famous case of such a court flyting was “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” that took place at King James IV's court in the early 16th century. A contest which did not only produce such colourful insults as “loathsome and lousy, as wet as a cress (…) your balls droop below your dress”, but also the first recorded mention of “shit” as an insult, in the line “you shit without a wit”.
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