Made In America - Bill Bryson [196]
Blue stocking, for a woman of pedantry and attendant lofty mien, is more easily explained. It comes from the Blue Stocking Society, a name derisively applied to a group of intellectuals who began meeting at Montagu House in London in about 1750. Although the congregation was mostly female, the inspiration for the pejorative name appears to have been a male member, one Benjamin Stillingfleet, who wore blue worsted stockings instead of the customary black silk hose, a mode of dress so novel as to be considered both comical and slightly risqué. And speaking of risqué, why off-colour jokes are called blue is another mystery, but it may be connected to the eighteenth-century slang use of blue meaning to blush.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century users of English, Puritan and non-Puritan alike, had none of the problems with expressive terms like belly, fart and give titty (for to suckle) that would so trouble their Victorian descendants. Even the King James Bible contained such subsequently indecorous terms as piss, dung and bowels.11 But as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, people suddenly became acutely – and eventually almost hysterically – sensitive about terms related to sex and the body. No one knows exactly when or why this morbid delicacy erupted. Like most fashions, it just happened. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler, an Edinburgh physician, offered the world an expurgated version of Shakespeare’s works suitable for the whole family, and in so doing gave the world the verb to bowdlerize. Bowdler’s emendations were nothing if not thorough. Even the most glancing reminder of the human procreative capacity – King Lear’s ‘every inch a king’, for example – was ruthlessly struck out. His sanitized Shakespeare was such a success that he immediately embarked on a similar treatment of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which had been completed only a quarter of a century before but already needed careful scrubbing. But Bowdler’s fastidious editing didn’t inaugurate the change of mood. It merely reflected it.
Even before Bowdler began scratching away at the classics people were carefully avoiding emotive terms like legs, blouse and thigh. By the time Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare appeared, belly buttons had become tummy buttons, breast had become bosom, and underwear had become nether garments or small clothes (and later unmentionables).
Though the practice began in Britain, it found its full flowering in America, where soon the list of proscribed words extended to the hundreds. Any word with an unseemly syllable in it like ‘cock’ or ‘tit’ became absolutely unutterable, so that words like titter, titbit, cockerel and cockatoo – all still unobjectionable in Britain – either disappeared from the American vocabulary or were altered to a more sanitised form like tidbit, rooster or roach. There is at least one recorded instance of coxswain being changed to roosterswain. Even bulls became male cows. Before the century was half over, the list of unspeakable words in the United States had been extended to almost any anatomical feature or article of apparel associated with any part of the human form outside the head, hands and ankles. Stockings, for instance, was deemed ‘extremely indelicate’ by Bartlett in 1850; he suggested long socks or hose as more comely alternatives. Even toes became humiliating possessions, never to be mentioned in polite company. One simply spoke of the feet. After a time feet too became un-endurably shameful, so that people didn’t mention anything below the ankles at all. It is a wonder that discourse didn’t cease altogether.
Anxiety stalked every realm of life. It may be apocryphal that some families dressed their piano legs in little skirts to avoid moral distress to visitors, but it is certainly true that chamber-pots came with