Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words is a fascinating and authoritative study of the words used by and about women. The book’s closest equivalent is Womanwords, by Jane Mills, which was published more than thirty years previously.
The first and most interesting chapter covers female anatomical terms including, of course, the c-word. Nuttall writes: “It’s a slur beyond rehabilitation for some of us. For others, it can be reclaimed”. (She also notes that another insult, ‘witch’, “has undergone reclamation, becoming a self-appointed symbol for those of us who find ourselves labelled difficult or nasty women.”)
Discussing the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Nuttall argues that the character’s use of the Latin word ‘quoniam’ “puns on the French word conin meaning ‘rabbit’ which echoes the French con meaning ‘vagina’”. This, according to Nuttall, makes the bawdy Wife sound inappropriately “like some punning intellectual”, though an alternative explanation (put forward by John McWhorter) is that the Wife’s euphemisms have been over-analysed.
The first and most interesting chapter covers female anatomical terms including, of course, the c-word. Nuttall writes: “It’s a slur beyond rehabilitation for some of us. For others, it can be reclaimed”. (She also notes that another insult, ‘witch’, “has undergone reclamation, becoming a self-appointed symbol for those of us who find ourselves labelled difficult or nasty women.”)
Discussing the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Nuttall argues that the character’s use of the Latin word ‘quoniam’ “puns on the French word conin meaning ‘rabbit’ which echoes the French con meaning ‘vagina’”. This, according to Nuttall, makes the bawdy Wife sound inappropriately “like some punning intellectual”, though an alternative explanation (put forward by John McWhorter) is that the Wife’s euphemisms have been over-analysed.
