A Power of Good, Gone Bad

A POWER OF GOOD, GONE BAD

 

Rough expressions carefully excluded by my modest wife from our book A POWER OF GOOD.

TRIGGER WARNING:  NOT SUITABLE FOR ANYONE UNDER 18 OR EASILY OFFENDED BY OBSCENE MATERIAL!

 

 

 

Putdowns and general negatives

 

Full of beans.  (Usually, angry, as if from indigestion; also, full of energy; can also be a euphemism for “full of shit.”)

 

I don’t take no shit.

 

Shit fire!  (All purpose exclamation.)

 

Screwed the pooch.  (Totally messed up.  As in “so-and-so screwed the pooch.”)

 

Cold as a witch’s tit

 

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass baboon (or “monkey”)

 

Colder than a welldigger’s ass (thanks to Chris Chase-Dunn for this one)

 

They’d steal Christ off the cross if He weren’t nailed down.  (Said of chronic shoplifter types, of employees who “liberate” supplies from the company, etc.)

 

Up shit creek without a paddle

 

RF  (Short for “rat fuck”; means a practical joke or similar goofy action—as in “I RF’d the psychologists’ questionnaire by answering the craziest way I could.”)

 

He’s so low he’d have to stand up on his hind legs to kiss a snake’s ass.

From an Okie ex-Marine friend of mine.

 

He’s so low he’d have to use a ladder to harvest potatoes.

 

He’s so low he sucks earthworm dicks.

He’s got a wild hair up his ass.  (He has an attitude–i.e. he is being irrationally negative or aggressive.)

He’s lower than a snake’s navel.  (Classic putdown, leading to the use of “Snakenavel” to mean “the middle of nowhere,” as in “I was offered a job but it was in Snakenavel, Idaho, so I turned it down.”  Compare the use of Podunk—a real town in Iowa—and the academic equivalent, Slippery Rock State, to mean “nowheresville.”  Slippery Rock State is actually quite a good school, and the term is dropping out of use.  Spanish equivalents include “en las Batuecas” in peninsula Spain—the Batuecas are a group of insignificant towns in a backwoods region.  In Mexico, it’s donde no va el Coca—“where even the Coca-Cola truck doesn’t go”; such a place is almost unimaginably remote in that soft-drink-dependent country.)

 

Kiss my ass and growl like a fox.  (our student Matt Des Lauriers quoted this from his grandfather’s usage)

 

Every little bit helps, as the whore said when she pissed in the ocean.

 

Feisty.  (Full of fight, from “feisting,” an old word for farting.  Similarly, a small mutt was called a “feist dog” or just “fice,” especially if it had an attitude.)

 

Brown-nosing.  (Kissing ass.)

 

Snafu.  (Acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up.”  Military slang, satirizing the military’s fondness for acronyms.)

 

That ain’t worth a pee-hole in the snow.  (Very common.)

 

“My daughter thinks the world of him, but, to me, he’s a sluffed-up sack of Siberian sheep shit.”  (Recorded by a folklorist in Texas.  Typical Texan putdown.)

 

I wouldn’t give you the sweat off my balls if you was dyin’ in the desert.  (Learned from my dorm neighbor Richard Sylla in college; he used it as his comprehensive summary of economic theory.  He was summa cum laude in Economics and became a very eminent historian of economics.)

 

Can’t tell shit from Shinola.  (Proverbial stupidity; a phrase notably associated with the military, who had to shine their shoes regularly)

 

Doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.  (Possibly the commonest term in my youth for incompetence and stupidity.)

 

So dumb / incompetent he can’t find his ass with both hands and a flashlight.

 

I’m gonna tear him a new asshole.  (Common threat.)

 

A German story too good to miss, and known in the Midwest where there was German settlement:

The soldier Götz von Berlichingen, a real person who lived from 1482 to 1562, was trapped in a house surrounded by his enemies.  History (not totally unquestioned…but at least written) records that they called to him that his situation was hopeless and he should surrender.  He hung his bare ass out the window and said “Leck mich in arsch” (lick my ass)…and proceeded to fight his way out, single-handed, and survive to fight again.  He became the German national hero, and his line is the German national putdown.  (See Alan Dundes, Life Is a Chicken Coop Ladder, for more.)

 

 

Animal Metaphors

 

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you set out to drain the swamp.  (I prefer to say “…to conserve the wetland.”)

 

Chickenshit   (a common extension of “chicken.”  This is a word used focally for a very common and typical state of mind, the results of childhood abuse, VERY common in the old Midwest.  The abused kid was often weak, isolated, resentful, cowardly, and alternating between placating and nastiness.  With maturing, this often took the form of touchy defensiveness and excessive concern for “honor.”)

 

To goose someone  (to strike at the genital region, as an angry goose does to drive people away from its young)

 

Smells like two skunks fucking in an onion patch.  (Black American—at least in so far as I know it—but probably more widespread; alternatively “fighting in an onion patch”)

 

In a pig’s ass.  (I.e. something that won’t happen, or something that’s bullshit.  Bars used to post signs saying “your credit is good here” –with a pointer pointing to the back end of a pig.  Cleaned-up variants:  In a pig’s ear; in a pig’s eye, when pigs fly; when pigs fly to the moon.  “Ears” was and sometimes still is a standard euphemism for “ass,” dating back to the 18th century, when ass was still “arse” and “ears” was pronounced “airs,” so the words were near-homonyms.)

 

Up a pig’s ass:  same as “up shit crick.”  In a hopeless position.  Note that “crick,” not creek, was and is the universal Midwestern pronunciation.

 

Piss like a racehorse  (copiously)

 

Faster than a cat can lick its ass.  (Usually said of unpleasant things, as in “If he gets mad he’ll be on you faster than…”).

 

Hotter’n a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.  (Texanism.)

 

I don’t give a rat’s ass.

 

About as much use as tits on a boar.

 

(Not from our childhood, but too good to miss, is a Malay proverb:  “Even if ten ships come, the dogs have no loincloths but their tails.”  [The ships are understood to be bringing fancy imported fabrics, the Great Luxury of old Malaysia.  The proverb is a comment on the hopelessness of the poor.])

 

 

Euphemisms

 

Today’s forthright speech has cost the English language a vast range of ridiculously creative euphemisms.  Midwesterners needed strong and pungent speech to express their emotions, but were too inhibited to use the blunt words, at least in mixed company.  Children actually got their mouths washed out with soap for “cussin.’”  I was threatened with this periodically, but I was usually too careful to get the actual washing.  This resistance to blunt verbiage led to a lot of nonsense.

Besides the obvious “Gosh!” “Golly!” “Jeez!” “Darn!” and so on, there were more arcane ways to modify taboo words:  “Bushwah!” for “bullshit”; “shucks” and “shoot” for “shit”; “asset” and “yes-yes” (pron. “yas-yas”) for “ass” (“arse”); “for cryin’ out loud” for “for Christ’s sake”; “foot” for “fuck” as an expletive (oh foot!); “Lor’ love a duck” for “fuck” (this is a Cockney one); “peter” for “penis”; and so on.  “Spend a penny” was universal British slang in the first 2/3 of the 20th century for “go to the toilet,” with reference to the cost of the pay toilets in old-time London.  A toilet is a “loo” in England, from French l’eau, “the water.”   The name “John” developed unfortunate connotations, first in French, especially in the nickname form Jacques, whence English “Jack” and Scottish “Jock.”  So “jakes” (from Jacques) and later “John” was used for the toilet.

“John” and “jock” also became standard euphemisms for the penis, whence “jockstrap” as slang for a supporter strap to protect a man’s groin.  “John” was lengthened to “Johnson” for a while in the mid-20th century (when “-son” was a slangy lengthening of anything—“Jack” and “Jackson” were slangy terms of address to men).  “Johnson” inspired a line of double entendre T-shirts (the “Big Johnson” line) that were, for a change, really witty rather than just gross.  “John” gave way to “Dick” (from rhyming slang for “prick,” and not so much euphemistic as universal, in many American dialects).  It seems that the English language requires a boy’s name for the organ in question; I have heard “Aleck,” “Tom,” etc.  (British slang includes excusing oneself to go take a leak by saying “Must go point Percy at the porcelain,” etc.)  And “to roger” was a very standard euphemism for sexual intercourse.

The general lack of intelligence, taste, and good judgement of the organ in question has caused “dick,” “dork,” etc. to be words for a stupid person, like “pendejo” (thing that hangs on) in Spanish.  However, the male genitalia were very commonly referred to as “the family jewels,” so clearly there were more favorable judgments out there.

Other common terms for the penis included dong, tool, joystick, rod, and so on.  In addition, almost anything can be used, as limericks and dirty jokes prove.  There was a similarly vast corpus of euphemisms for sexual intercourse, but most of the ones that were widely used are still around.  Anal intercourse in the Midwest was “cornholing,” from “corn hole” for anus.

There is a whole genre of English and American folksong that uses rural metaphors for sexual intercourse, beginning with a medieval one in which our hero grafts his pear tree for his ladylove, and more recently a song in which “I showed her the works of my threshing machine” (an implement of modern invention).  Studies show that metaphors involving tools and weapons can be constructed right back to Proto-Indo-European.  Other languages (notably Spanish and Cantonese, from my experience) have equally complex vocabularies and metaphors.

“Cock” was never a euphemism.  It is a translation gloss from various European languages.  Several languages over the world use the male chicken as a metaphor.  The euphemism came in when Americans coined “rooster” for the bird!  The British really laugh at us for that one.

Meanwhile, in deep southern US English, “cock” means the female genitalia, not the male; it’s a completely different word, from French coquille, “shell,” via New Orleans French.  “Poontang” is another southern localism for the female parts.  I know it only from Virginia and the Appalachians, but it may be elsewhere in the south.  It centers on Black English, so is probably an African word originally.

Another set of euphemisms surrounded teaching kids about sex.  Parents were often too ashamed to discuss human sexuality directly, so referred to it as “the facts of life.”  They had recourse to explaining the sex lives of animals first.  This gave rise to the expression “tell them about the birds and the bees,” and thus to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for human sex in general.

Yet more terms referred to courting (itself a term covering a wide range of activities).  Most of these were teenage slang referring to stages of intimacy.  “Necking” was kissing and other above-the-neck action.  “Petting” and “spooning” covered more bodily contact.  “Making out” was definitely more serious: foreplay-like activity that could, and often did, lead to what was known in that euphemistic age as “going all the way.”  Somewhat similar, later in time (somewhat after our day), were baseball images—variously defined, but the following seems fairly typical:  “first base” for kissing and the like, “second base” for fondling breasts (these days it covers fellatio too), “third base” for genital touching or digital sex, and, significantly, “home base” or “getting home” for sexual intercourse.

Not so much euphemisms as folk speech were various words for male erections (bone, boner, hard-on, rod-on, stiff, etc.) and words for masturbation.  Teenaged boys being often fascinated with both masturbation and colorful speech, there were plenty of phrases.  Standard was “jacking off” (equivalent to British “frigging” and “wanking” or “whanking,” which can be either male or female).  “Jerking off” was also heard, but “jacking off” comes from “Jack” for penis (see above) rather than from “jerk.”  More poetic were “beat your meat” (as common as “jacking off”) and  “flog your log.”  Some Southernisms that I never heard in youth, but learned in early adulthood, were “jerk your jewels,” “slam your ham” and “choke your chicken” (as in “chokin’ his chicken”; there was actually a blue grass band called the Blue Ridge Chicken Chokers).  Masturbating was not considered particularly intelligent, hence use of “jerk,” “wanker,” etc. to mean a dumb person.  Compare Spanish “freguer” and “joder” (rub, i.e. masturbate or, sometimes, have sex) and the countless phrases derived from it, e.g. the folk rhyme “La ley de Herodes: o te fregues o te jodes” (“the law of Herod: either you fuck up or you screw up”—one of a vast number of Spanish rhyming “laws,” but in this case one that achieved immortality when “La Ley de Herodes” became the title of a short story that was made into a successful film).

Prostitutes were “ladies of the evening,” “soiled doves,” “in the trade,” “in the oldest profession” (incidentally a wildly inaccurate claim), or just “professionals.”  “Floozy” could mean a prostitute or just a loose woman who looked or acted like one.

Pissing and shitting got their share: taking a leak, taking a crap, taking a squat, etc.

There is also “I’ve got to see a man about a horse” (said to excuse self from present company, usually to go to the toilet).  Another was “Gotta drain the water off the potatoes.”  Another common politeness (if such it can be called) was “Your barn door is open,” meaning your fly is unzipped.  Of course, all these were man talk or boy talk.  I confess to ignorance of specialized female terms.

In addition to the above, there were the usual obscenities and ethnic, religious, and other insults and offensive words, but most are still around, and to list them would be tedious and unedifying.

 

There were literally thousands of dirty jokes, songs, and limericks in circulation.  Most of them, but not the rawest, were captured by Gerson Legman in his series of books of erotic folklore and in Vance Randolph’s book Pissing in the Snow.  Good dirty song collections include Ed Cray, The Erotic Muse, and the pseudonymous Snatches and Lays for British/Australian material.  I fear the heavy-duty stuff I know is so raw that I would never repeat it even in unmixed company.  I have even, alas, found it necessary to remove some wonderfully colorful short standard phrases from the above list.

A POWER OF GOOD, GONE BAD

Rough expressions carefully excluded by my modest wife from our book A POWER OF GOOD.
Putdowns and general negatives

Full of beans. (Usually, angry, as if from indigestion; also, full of energy; can also be a euphemism for “full of shit.”)

I don’t take no shit.

Shit fire! (All purpose exclamation.)

Screwed the pooch. (Totally messed up. As in “so-and-so screwed the pooch.”)

Cold as a witch’s tit

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass baboon (or “monkey”)

Colder than a welldigger’s ass (thanks to Chris Chase-Dunn for this one)

They’d steal Christ off the cross if He weren’t nailed down. (Said of chronic shoplifter types, of employees who “liberate” supplies from the company, etc.)

Up shit creek without a paddle

RF (Short for “rat fuck”; means a practical joke or similar goofy action—as in “I RF’d the psychologists’ questionnaire by answering the craziest way I could.”)

He’s so low he’d have to stand up on his hind legs to kiss a snake’s ass.
From an Okie ex-Marine friend of mine.

He’s so low he’d have to use a ladder to harvest potatoes.

He’s so low he sucks earthworm dicks.

He’s lower than a snake’s navel. (Classic putdown, leading to the use of “Snakenavel” to mean “the middle of nowhere,” as in “I was offered a job but it was in Snakenavel, Idaho, so I turned it down.” Compare the use of Podunk—a real town in Iowa—and the academic equivalent, Slippery Rock State, to mean “nowheresville.” Slippery Rock State is actually quite a good school, and the term is dropping out of use. Spanish equivalents include “en las Batuecas” in peninsula Spain—the Batuecas are a group of insignificant towns in a backwoods region. In Mexico, it’s donde no va el Coca—“where even the Coca-Cola truck doesn’t go”; such a place is almost unimaginably remote in that soft-drink-dependent country.)

Kiss my ass and growl like a fox. (our student Matt Des Lauriers quoted this from his grandfather’s usage)

Every little bit helps, as the whore said when she pissed in the ocean.

Feisty. (Full of fight, from “feisting,” an old word for farting. Similarly, a small mutt was called a “feist dog” or just “fice,” especially if it had an attitude.)

Brown-nosing. (Kissing ass.)

Snafu. (Acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up.” Military slang, satirizing the military’s fondness for acronyms.)

That ain’t worth a pee-hole in the snow. (Very common.)

“My daughter thinks the world of him, but, to me, he’s a sluffed-up sack of Siberian sheep shit.” (Recorded by a folklorist in Texas. Typical Texan putdown.)

I wouldn’t give you the sweat off my balls if you was dyin’ in the desert. (Learned from my dorm neighbor Richard Sylla in college; he used it as his comprehensive summary of economic theory. He was summa cum laude in Economics and became a very eminent historian of economics.)

Can’t tell shit from Shinola. (Proverbial stupidity; a phrase notably associated with the military, who had to shine their shoes regularly)

Doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. (Possibly the commonest term in my youth for incompetence and stupidity.)

So dumb / incompetent he can’t find his ass with both hands and a flashlight.

I’m gonna tear him a new asshole. (Common threat.)

A German story too good to miss, and known in the Midwest where there was German settlement:
The soldier Götz von Berlichingen, a real person who lived from 1482 to 1562, was trapped in a house surrounded by his enemies. History (not totally unquestioned…but at least written) records that they called to him that his situation was hopeless and he should surrender. He hung his bare ass out the window and said “Leck mich in arsch” (lick my ass)…and proceeded to fight his way out, single-handed, and survive to fight again. He became the German national hero, and his line is the German national putdown. (See Alan Dundes, Life Is a Chicken Coop Ladder, for more.)
Animal Metaphors

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you set out to drain the swamp. (I prefer to say “…to conserve the wetland.”)

Chickenshit (a common extension of “chicken.” This is a word used focally for a very common and typical state of mind, the results of childhood abuse, VERY common in the old Midwest. The abused kid was often weak, isolated, resentful, cowardly, and alternating between placating and nastiness. With maturing, this often took the form of touchy defensiveness and excessive concern for “honor.”)

To goose someone (to strike at the genital region, as an angry goose does to drive people away from its young)

Smells like two skunks fucking in an onion patch. (Black American—at least in so far as I know it—but probably more widespread; alternatively “fighting in an onion patch”)

In a pig’s ass. (I.e. something that won’t happen, or something that’s bullshit. Bars used to post signs saying “your credit is good here” –with a pointer pointing to the back end of a pig. Cleaned-up variants: In a pig’s ear; in a pig’s eye, when pigs fly; when pigs fly to the moon. “Ears” was and sometimes still is a standard euphemism for “ass,” dating back to the 18th century, when ass was still “arse” and “ears” was pronounced “airs,” so the words were near-homonyms.)

Up a pig’s ass: same as “up shit crick.” In a hopeless position. Note that “crick,” not creek, was and is the universal Midwestern pronunciation.

Piss like a racehorse (copiously)

Faster than a cat can lick its ass. (Usually said of unpleasant things, as in “If he gets mad he’ll be on you faster than…”).

Hotter’n a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire. (Texanism.)

I don’t give a rat’s ass.

About as much use as tits on a boar.

(Not from our childhood, but too good to miss, is a Malay proverb: “Even if ten ships come, the dogs have no loincloths but their tails.” [The ships are understood to be bringing fancy imported fabrics, the Great Luxury of old Malaysia. The proverb is a comment on the hopelessness of the poor.])
Euphemisms

Today’s forthright speech has cost the English language a vast range of ridiculously creative euphemisms. Midwesterners needed strong and pungent speech to express their emotions, but were too inhibited to use the blunt words, at least in mixed company. Children actually got their mouths washed out with soap for “cussin.’” I was threatened with this periodically, but I was usually too careful to get the actual washing. This resistance to blunt verbiage led to a lot of nonsense.
Besides the obvious “Gosh!” “Golly!” “Jeez!” “Darn!” and so on, there were more arcane ways to modify taboo words: “Bushwah!” for “bullshit”; “shucks” and “shoot” for “shit”; “asset” and “yes-yes” (pron. “yas-yas”) for “ass” (“arse”); “for cryin’ out loud” for “for Christ’s sake”; “foot” for “fuck” as an expletive (oh foot!); “Lor’ love a duck” for “fuck” (this is a Cockney one); “peter” for “penis”; and so on. “Spend a penny” was universal British slang in the first 2/3 of the 20th century for “go to the toilet,” with reference to the cost of the pay toilets in old-time London. A toilet is a “loo” in England, from French l’eau, “the water.” The name “John” developed unfortunate connotations, first in French, especially in the nickname form Jacques, whence English “Jack” and Scottish “Jock.” So “jakes” (from Jacques) and later “John” was used for the toilet.
“John” and “jock” also became standard euphemisms for the penis, whence “jockstrap” as slang for a supporter strap to protect a man’s groin. “John” was lengthened to “Johnson” for a while in the mid-20th century (when “-son” was a slangy lengthening of anything—“Jack” and “Jackson” were slangy terms of address to men). “Johnson” inspired a line of double entendre T-shirts (the “Big Johnson” line) that were, for a change, really witty rather than just gross. “John” gave way to “Dick” (from rhyming slang for “prick,” and not so much euphemistic as universal, in many American dialects). It seems that the English language requires a boy’s name for the organ in question; I have heard “Aleck,” “Tom,” etc. (British slang includes excusing oneself to go take a leak by saying “Must go point Percy at the porcelain,” etc.) And “to roger” was a very standard euphemism for sexual intercourse.
The general lack of intelligence, taste, and good judgement of the organ in question has caused “dick,” “dork,” etc. to be words for a stupid person, like “pendejo” (thing that hangs on) in Spanish. However, the male genitalia were very commonly referred to as “the family jewels,” so clearly there were more favorable judgments out there.
Other common terms for the penis included dong, tool, joystick, rod, and so on. In addition, almost anything can be used, as limericks and dirty jokes prove. There was a similarly vast corpus of euphemisms for sexual intercourse, but most of the ones that were widely used are still around. Anal intercourse in the Midwest was “cornholing,” from “corn hole” for anus.
There is a whole genre of English and American folksong that uses rural metaphors for sexual intercourse, beginning with a medieval one in which our hero grafts his pear tree for his ladylove, and more recently a song in which “I showed her the works of my threshing machine” (an implement of modern invention). Studies show that metaphors involving tools and weapons can be constructed right back to Proto-Indo-European. Other languages (notably Spanish and Cantonese, from my experience) have equally complex vocabularies and metaphors.
“Cock” was never a euphemism. It is a translation gloss from various European languages. Several languages over the world use the male chicken as a metaphor. The euphemism came in when Americans coined “rooster” for the bird! The British really laugh at us for that one.
Meanwhile, in deep southern US English, “cock” means the female genitalia, not the male; it’s a completely different word, from French coquille, “shell,” via New Orleans French. “Poontang” is another southern localism for the female parts. I know it only from Virginia and the Appalachians, but it may be elsewhere in the south. It centers on Black English, so is probably an African word originally.
Another set of euphemisms surrounded teaching kids about sex. Parents were often too ashamed to discuss human sexuality directly, so referred to it as “the facts of life.” They had recourse to explaining the sex lives of animals first. This gave rise to the expression “tell them about the birds and the bees,” and thus to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for human sex in general.
Yet more terms referred to courting (itself a term covering a wide range of activities). Most of these were teenage slang referring to stages of intimacy. “Necking” was kissing and other above-the-neck action. “Petting” and “spooning” covered more bodily contact. “Making out” was definitely more serious: foreplay-like activity that could, and often did, lead to what was known in that euphemistic age as “going all the way.” Somewhat similar, later in time (somewhat after our day), were baseball images—variously defined, but the following seems fairly typical: “first base” for kissing and the like, “second base” for fondling breasts (these days it covers fellatio too), “third base” for genital touching or digital sex, and, significantly, “home base” or “getting home” for sexual intercourse.
Not so much euphemisms as folk speech were various words for male erections (bone, boner, hard-on, rod-on, stiff, etc.) and words for masturbation. Teenaged boys being often fascinated with both masturbation and colorful speech, there were plenty of phrases. Standard was “jacking off” (equivalent to British “frigging” and “wanking” or “whanking,” which can be either male or female). “Jerking off” was also heard, but “jacking off” comes from “Jack” for penis (see above) rather than from “jerk.” More poetic were “beat your meat” (as common as “jacking off”) and “flog your log.” Some Southernisms that I never heard in youth, but learned in early adulthood, were “jerk your jewels,” “slam your ham” and “choke your chicken” (as in “chokin’ his chicken”; there was actually a blue grass band called the Blue Ridge Chicken Chokers). Masturbating was not considered particularly intelligent, hence use of “jerk,” “wanker,” etc. to mean a dumb person. Compare Spanish “freguer” and “joder” (rub, i.e. masturbate or, sometimes, have sex) and the countless phrases derived from it, e.g. the folk rhyme “La ley de Herodes: o te fregues o te jodes” (“the law of Herod: either you fuck up or you screw up”—one of a vast number of Spanish rhyming “laws,” but in this case one that achieved immortality when “La Ley de Herodes” became the title of a short story that was made into a successful film).
Prostitutes were “ladies of the evening,” “soiled doves,” “in the trade,” “in the oldest profession” (incidentally a wildly inaccurate claim), or just “professionals.” “Floozy” could mean a prostitute or just a loose woman who looked or acted like one.
Pissing and shitting got their share: taking a leak, taking a crap, taking a squat, etc.
There is also “I’ve got to see a man about a horse” (said to excuse self from present company, usually to go to the toilet). Another was “Gotta drain the water off the potatoes.” Another common politeness (if such it can be called) was “Your barn door is open,” meaning your fly is unzipped. Of course, all these were man talk or boy talk. I confess to ignorance of specialized female terms.
In addition to the above, there were the usual obscenities and ethnic, religious, and other insults and offensive words, but most are still around, and to list them would be tedious and unedifying.

There were literally thousands of dirty jokes, songs, and limericks in circulation. Most of them, but not the rawest, were captured by Gerson Legman in his series of books of erotic folklore and in Vance Randolph’s book Pissing in the Snow. Good dirty song collections include Ed Cray, The Erotic Muse, and the pseudonymous Snatches and Lays for British/Australian material. I fear the heavy-duty stuff I know is so raw that I would never repeat it even in unmixed company. I have even, alas, found it necessary to remove some wonderfully colorful short standard phrases from the above list.

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