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The Allusionist

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A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

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The Allusionist

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Allusionist 125. Swearalong Quiz

November 10, 2020 The Allusionist
A125 swearalong quiz logo.jpg

Fill your lungs and get ready to shout out some profane answers: it's the Swearlusionist Swearalong Quiz!

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Fill your lungs and get ready to shout out some profane answers: it’s the Swearlusionist Swearalong Quiz! Every answer is a swear word. Swearing, as we know, is good for your health, plus helps vent stress, and you’ll learn many etymological facts along the way, so this is a very wholesome and educational quiz.

CONTENT NOTE: this episode contains swears. Surprise!!

Scroll down the post for an interactive quiz sheet if you want to play here rather than aloud.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

  • There’s more swear-related content on the Allusionist feed: the C-Bomb episode about the C-swear; Take a Swear Pill, about how swearing is good for you; Susie Dent talks about euphemisms and false etymologies of swears in To Err Is Human; there’s stuff about testicles in Shark Week, ‘the Swiss army knife of cussing’ in Zaltzology, and the etymology of ‘shit’ is in the Vestiges episode.

  • I’ve already been to a few of these places; should we plan a road trip?

  • Or a world tour of rude place names?

  • About ‘shit’ in place names.

  • About windfuckers.

  • Oh Roger Fuckebythenavele, what did you do?

  • Why do we say ‘rooster’?

  • How Robert Browning got the meaning of ‘twat’ wrong.

  • Counting the swears in The Wolf of Wall Street.

  • How ‘bollocks’ was found in court not to be indecent.

YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
drabble

drabble, verb, archaic: make wet and dirty in muddy water. Origin Middle English: from Low German drabbelen ‘paddle in water or mire’.

drabble, verb, archaic: make wet and dirty in muddy water. Origin Middle English: from Low German drabbelen ‘paddle in water or mire’.

CREDITS:

  • This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with editorial help from Hrishikesh Hirway.

  • The Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com and hear more of his composition on the new science podcast for kids Maddie’s Sound Explorers.

  • Let me know your score - find the show at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/helenzaltzman and instagram.com/allusionistshow. Sorry about the recent hacking trouble on the Facebook page! It’s back in my control now.

  • The Allusionist has left the Radiotopia network, and if you’re able and inclined to support the show, head over to patreon.com/allusionist.

Back in a couple of weeks with a new episode. - HZ

Swearalong quiz sheet:

balls

Balls of the feet are so-called because they look like balls. The dance balls are from the Latin verb ballare, to dance.

bollocks!

In the 18th century, there were some clergy who were called ‘bollocks’ because they talked a load of rubbish. Which is probably how the term ‘talking bollocks’ came about.

I don’t want to break the rules of my own quiz, but ‘bollocks’ was actually found in court NOT to be a swear word, in 1977, in the trial of the record store owner who had been accused of violating the 1899 Indecent Advertising Act for displaying the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks. Professor James Kingsley from the University of Nottingham testified for the defence that the word ‘bollocks’ couldn’t be indencet because it had previously appeared in place names, veterinary texts and the Bible - prior to the King James version substituting it with the word ‘stones’. The word over the preceding thousand years had variously referred to small ball-shaped objects, weights for drawbridges, rubbish, and priests. Verdict: not indecent. 

spunk

Spunk has the same origin as the word ‘sponge’.

shit

Lalochezia translates to ‘shitting out of your mouth.’

fuck

The Wolf of Wall Street contains 569 fucks in all their variants! 358 Fuckings, 169 fucks, 18 motherfuckers, 16 fuckeds, 4 Fucksvilles, and one each of fuckers, fuckface, fuckheads and fuckity.

bullshit…

cunt

theallusionist.org/c-bomb

Then, owls and bats, Cowls and *****

twats

Here’s how Robert Browning made that mistake: he had read the word in a 1659 poem ‘Vanity of Vanities’, which contained an anti-Catholic joke: 

They talk't of his having a Cardinall’s Hat,
They'd send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat.

Robert Browning thought, what would be insulting to someone who was hoping to wear a cardinal’s headgear? A nun’s headgear! What could be more of a diss than that. They didn’t have Urban Dictionary then - Robert Browning couldn’t look up unfamiliar words; just did his best.

piss

Piss-a-bed. In French, it was called pissenlit. 

knobweed

Also known as false ironwort.

cock

So unfair! The word meant a bird long before it had any other connotation - ‘cocc’ was an Old English word, probably imitating the sound of a cockcrow. Also in Old English, ‘cocc’ was a nickname for someone who strutted around like a cock, confident-looking I suppose, and from there it became a more general term for a guy, a chap, a bloke. And thence, the penis.

In the 19th century, cock-shy Americans substituted the word - haystack instead of haycock, roach instead of cockroach, but even rooster-roach, weather roosters instead of weather cocks, and the rooster of a gun instead of cock - although people still say “cocking a gun”, not “roostering a gun”.

windfucker

Or sometimes a fuckwind. But not because the kestrels fucked the wind, sorry. It might have been from an Old Icelandic word fjúka meaning ‘drifted on the wind’ or blown away. Or, there was an old sense of ‘fuck’ that meant ‘to beat’, perhaps referring to the kestrel beating as in besting the wind.

There’s a name recorded in 1290, ‘Simon Fockebotere’, who was likely somebody who churned butter, beat the butter. Though who can say what he got up to in his own dairy.

shitepoke

And also, shiterow.

Twatt

This place name is from the Old Norse þveit, meaning 'small parcel of land'. The same word turns up as ‘thwaite’ in a lot of place names, but only a couple of Twatts.

Crap

Crapstone. It was nice! Lovely holiday. Apparently the town was named after a local family.

Shitterton

It’s a very old place name, Shitterton, more than 1000 years old, and named for the river that flows through the town, which people used to shit in. 

In the Victorian era, they tried to rename it ‘Sitterton’, but you can’t deny Shitterton its linguistic heritage. 

Wank

Wank Mountain. You can go up it in the in the Wank lift or Wankbahn. Well, actually in German it’s pronounced vank - Vank mountain, vankbahn, and it’s from an old word for slope, sorry to ruin the fun. Although Wank mountain scores 4.5* on Tripadvisor so it probably is still fun.

crap

’Crap’ is from the medieval Latin word ‘crappa’ meaning chaff. It is not from the name of Thomas Crapper, the Victorian sanitation engineer who popularised indoor toilets for the home. He was only ten in 1846, the year of the first recorded written instance of the word crap meaning defecation, so would have had to have been a real prodigy of plumbing to get the eponym.

Well done! Fucking brilliant.

In episodes, quiz Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, swearing, swears, profanity, Bible, court cases, law, legal, Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks, indecency, bollocks, shit, spunk, balls, ball, lalochezia, The Wolf of Wall Street, birds, films, movies, poets, bullshit, TS Eliot, twat, Robert Browning, piss, dandelion, plants, flowers, nature, botany, ornithology, cocks, rooster, knobweed, mountains, Wank mountain, guns, kestrels, windfucker, herons, shitepoke, geography, place names, Twatt, Crapstone, crap, Shitterton, Thomas Crapper, drabble, quiz, swear words
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