pornography

19 October 2020

Criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

—Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964

Justice Stewart was correct when he opined that exactly what constitutes pornography is difficult, if not impossible, to determine, but the etymology of the word is not. The word pornography comes from the Hellenistic Greek adjective πορνογράϕος (pornographos), literally meaning relating to writing about prostitutes. In modern use, pornographie appears in an 1800 French treatise on prostitution, and this French usage may be the basis for our use of it in English today.

The English word appears in the mid nineteenth century in reference to ancient Greek and Roman art. From William Smith’s 1842 Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, concerning the early Hellenistic period, i.e., after c.325 B.C.E.:

The consequence was, that the artists of those times were under the necessity of trying other fields of art; of attracting attention by novelty and variety: thus rhyparograph (ρυπαρογραφία), pornography, and all the lower classes of art, attained the ascendency and became characteristic styles of the period.

[...]

Pornography, or obscene painting, which, in the time of the Romans, was practised with the grossest licence, prevailed especially at no particular period in Greece, but was apparently tolerated to a considerable extent at all times.

A rhyparograph is an image of a base or sordid subject. Unfortunately, the early users of the word pornography do not cite specific examples, so like Justice Stewart, we are left wondering exactly what constituted the genre.

One relatively early use of the word is in a contemporary Chinese context, not that of ancient Greece or Rome, but it uses the term in reference to the Greco-Roman artistic tradition and the house in question blends European and Asian styles. From the Athenæum of 17 April 1858:

The house into which Dr. Yvan was originally introduced at Canton was of a composite disorder, mingling the European with the Oriental, with a roof of sparkling granite, stores of silk, tea, and musk, and hospitable ranges of apartments hung with silk, separated by ivory and ebony lattices, and, in the harem portions, decorated with a species of pornography that would have shocked Apuleius and given Parrhasius a hint.

The use of harem is also of note. It undoubtedly refers to the private, familial portions of the house, but uses a word Arabic-Turkish origin, showing the orientalist bent of the writer and further emphasizing the blending of cultures in the house.

And for the first several decades, use of pornography was restricted to the art of antiquity. But as the century drew to a close, the word began to be applied to contemporary works. From an 1889 open letter by Robert Buchanan on proposed British legislation to restrict the publication of salacious material:

I have never held (and I do not hold now) the opinion that drainage is a fit subject for Art, that men grow any better by the contemplation of what is bestial and unpleasant; indeed, I have always been puritan enough to think pornography a nuisance. It is one thing, however, to dislike the obtrusion of things unsavoury and abominable, and quite another to regard any allusion to them as positively criminal.

Illustrating Potter Stewart’s difficulty in defining pornography is this 1890 review of Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca, on which the Puccini opera is based:

If anything can be offered as an excuse for such a representation, it can only be the finished and artistic acting of its exponents. Mr. Forbes Robertson, as the Baron, deals with his unsavory part with studied care, but it is questionable whether even so refined a delineation of iniquity justifies the consideration of pornography as one of the fine arts.

It is hard to imagine a world where La Tosca and Deep Throat are both lumped into the same category, and there are those who have tried to distinguish erotic art from pornography. An example is this 1918 editorial that quotes French novelist and critic Andre Beaunier:

The Poilu writes from the front that he’ll be damned if he intends to have the pigwash credited to him. He admits that soldiers’ language is, like the language of the rest of the world, a bit thick at times; but he will have us to understand that prepared and polished Pornography is not what he wants.

“The confusing of Pornography and gaiety is one of the most foolish errors of our day. It has done much to hurt the good reputation of France. Besides, the strangers who came to Paris sought for it with an unhealthy curiosity and then despised us when they returned home. This hypocrisy is well-known. Real gaiety is never nasty; it is a sign of health; while pornography is a disease of the mind.”

Given the difficulty of determining exactly what falls under the rubric of pornography, it was perhaps inevitable that the word would begin to be used figuratively, relating to an appeal to the baser desires and instincts, but not necessarily sexual ones. By 1956 we have Abraham Kaplan referring to the pornography of violence:

The impulses of love and hate may become confused and intertwined and sex patterned into sado-masochistic perversion. In the expression of this content, psychic distance can no longer be maintained, but is submerged in emphatic identifications both with brutality and with its victims. A new category of the obscene emerges: the pornography of violence.

In this type of obscenity, sexual desire finds symbolic release only as transformed into acts of aggression. A phenomenally popular series of novels is constructed according to a rigid pattern of alternation of violence and sex, which coincide only at the climax when the virile hero is allowed to shoot the wicked beauty. More sophisticated in style and structure, but essentially the same in substance, is the work of the “realistic” school sometimes associated with the name of Hemingway. Death in the afternoon prepares for love at midnight. There is no question that writing of this genre is effective; the question is only whether the effect is esthetic—an abattoir can also provide a moving experience. Esthetic or not, the genre is enormously successful; taking into account the “detective” story and crime “comic,” the pornography of violence is more widespread in our culture than all the other categories of obscenity put together.

The clipped form porn appears by 1962, and within ten years we have figurative uses of that too. First horror-porn from 1973:

[S. Clay] Wilson is the creator of the most outrageous of all the New Comix. A real innovator in horror-porn, he was the first underground cartoonist to revel in atrocity, to pack his pages with entrails and a crew of frenzied characters who enjoy nothing so much as chewing on a bit of warm bowel.

And today we have weather-porn, war-porn, gastro-porn / food-porn, and all sorts of other ‑porns.

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Sources:

Buchanan, Robert. On Descending into Hell: A Letter Addressed to the Right Hon. Henry Matthews, Q.C., Home Secretary, Concerning the Proposed Suppression of Literature. London: George Redway, 1889, 6. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Editorial Note.” The Mask: A Quarterly Illustrated Journal of the Art of the Theatre, vol. 8, no. 4, 1918, 13. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Inside Canton.” The Athenæum, no. 1590, 17 April 1858. 491. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kaplan, Abraham. “Obscenity as an Esthetic Category.” American Philosophers at Work (1956). Sidney Hook, ed. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968, 414-415. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, s.v. pornography, n., porn, n.2.

Schechter, Harold. “Kali on Main Street: The Rise of the Terrible Mother in America.” Journal of Popular Culture, 7.2, Fall 1973, 257. ProQuest Scholarly Journals.

Smith, William, ed. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, vol. 2 of 2. London: Taylor and Walton, 1842, 694. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Through the Opera Glass.” Pick-Me-Up, 4 January 1890, 230. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

gargoyle

A gargoyle of a leopard-like animal with a human face jutting from a wall of Bayeux Cathedral, France

16 October 2020

A gargoyle is a decorative carving of an animal, human, or humanoid on a building with a waterspout to carry rainwater away from the building’s walls. The word enters English from the Anglo-Norman French gargole or gargoule and the medieval Latin, gargola. The word has the same root as gargle and gurgle, an echoic reference to water passing through a pipe.

The word is attested to in English as early as 1286 in a construction inventory that lists two gargurl made for the great gate of Cambridge Castle. And there are many medieval references to gargoyles. As an example, one later use of the word, in John Lydgate’s c.1425 Troy Book, uses it more poetically in this description of the city of Troy:

And euery hous cured was with led;
And many gargoyl & many hidous hed
With spoutis þoruȝ, & pipes as þei ouȝt,
From þe ston-werke to þe canel rauȝt,
Voyding filþes low in-to þe grounde,
Þoruȝ gratis percid of yren percid rounde.

(And every house was covered with lead; and many gargoyles and many hideous heads, through spouts and pipes reaching out from the stonework to the canal, voiding filth low into the ground through round grates of pierced iron.)

According to myth, in the seventh century a dragon, named Gargouille rose from the waters of the Seine River in France. Unlike the typical dragons of mythology, this one did not breathe fire, but rather was a water dragon. The monster proceeded to lay waste to the countryside around Paris by drowning it. St. Romanus (Romain), the Archbishop of Rouen, accompanied only by a condemned prisoner, set out to stop the beast. Upon confronting the monster, the saint formed a cross with his two index fingers, taming Gargouille. The dragon was led back to Paris, where it was slain and burned. In some versions, the head, however, was saved and mounted on a building, giving rise to the practice of mounting gargoyles on buildings.

It’s a neat story, but it is not the origin of the word gargoyle. Almost nothing is known of St. Romanus, and the story of Gargouille the dragon doesn’t appear until some seven centuries after his death and after the architectural practice and the term were well established. It’s more likely that the gargoyles on buildings inspired the story rather than the other way around.

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Sources:

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol. 4 of 4. Herbert Thurson and Donald Attwater, eds. Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1956, 183. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. gargola. Brepols.

Lydgate, John. Troy Book (c. 1425), vol. 1 of 4. Early English Text Society (EETS), Extra Series 97. London: K. Paul, Trench, & Trübner, 1906, lines 2.695–700, 164. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. gargoile, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gargoyle, n.

Salzman, L.F. Building in England, Down to 1540: A Documentary History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, 108. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Jebulon, 2015, public domain image.

frog march

Four London police carrying a man face down, by the arms and legs, with the caption “Death from the ‘frog’s march,’ Eastend.”

15 October 2020

Frog-marching is a police tactic for moving a recalcitrant prisoner from place to place. The name seems odd to us today because the present-day tactic doesn’t seem to have anything to do with frogs. But that’s because exactly what frog-marching consists of has changed.

The tactic originated in London, and the earliest reference to it is in the 18 April 1871 Evening Standard:

They did not give the defendant the “Frog’s March.”

While that snippet doesn’t tell us what frog-marching was, we fortunately do have this better description from a New York newspaper on 27 March 1874

The “Frog’s March.”

The London police have a method of dealing with prisoners, which has not yet been introduced here, though it doubtless will be as soon as it is known. The London method is called the “frog’s march” in which the prisoner is carried to the station, with the face downwards and the whole weight of the body dependent on the limbs. This has called forth severe remarks, and has done much to embitter the relations between the “police and the public,” but the barbarous proceeding still continues.

So, the phrase comes from the resemblance of the prisoner to a frog crawling on its belly.

Being frog-marched in this fashion is, as the above quotation notes, rather painful, especially if done over a distance. Outcry against this tactic eventually caused police to abandon it, but the term stuck around, being applied to a different method, as described in John Ferguson’s 1931 crime novel Death Comes to Perigord:

Cæsar slewed him round, and forcing both arms behind his back, got ready to frog-march him to the door.

While still far from gentle, the present-day version of frog-marching is comparatively more humane.

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Sources:

“The ‘Frog’s March.’” Commercial Advertiser (New York), 27 March 1874, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. frogmarch, v., frogmarch, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. frog-march, v., frog-march, n., frog-marching, n.

Image credit: Illustrated Police News (London), 6 April 1889, 1. Public domain image. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

French kiss

14 October 2020

A French kiss is a deep, open mouth kiss that uses the tongue as well as the lips. The term dates to the early twentieth century, and the earliest known use of the term is by a U.S. soldier in France during World War I—but we cannot say that the term was invented during that war. It likely predates the war in oral use.

On 30 December 1918, Private Clarance Lindner wrote home to his family:

So I have decided to become a linguist. Being able to read French fluently and speak it wretchedly, and to speak German connectively but not to read it at all, I am taking up Luxembourg, which is a wonderful blend of the two, a sort of laison [sic] between tongues. (Not to be confused with French kissing.)

The OED has an 1858 citation for French kissing, but this is a reference to the practice of greeting someone by kissing them on both cheeks, not a tongue kiss.

It’s possible that Lindner’s parenthetical reference to French kissing is a later editorial intervention. Lindner’s letters were collected and privately published by his family in 1939. We do not have the originals. Questions of accuracy and originality are generally an issue with collections of letters and papers that have been published by interested parties. Scholarly collections are more likely to scrupulous in noting where they make editorial interventions.

But we get a fuller description of French kissing a few years later in Elliot Paul’s 1922 Indelible, so the 1918 date isn’t far off in any case:

When it was real dark we began kissing each other. We stayed there quite a while, and I hugged her as best I could, although I remembered afterwards what the book said about not doing it, so you could look your wife in the face.

She showed me the French kiss where you stick your tongue out, but I did n’t [sic] like it. Ethel was as restless as could be, and all of a sudden she burst out crying. She said nothing was the matter, and as soon as she quieted down, I went home, as it was late.

We suspect the term is older than these recorded citations because the adjective French has a long history of association with things sexual. This association dates to the Restoration of the seventeenth century, as found in an anonymous satirical poem from 1682 that describes the sexual proclivities of various women in the English court:

Vernon, to say the truth’s a bouncing wench,
She swears and fucks and all the while’s so French!

There you have it, from the court of Charles II to American soldiers in WWI.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, French kiss, n.

Lindner, Clarence R., Private Lindner’s Letters, edited by Gladys Dudley Lindner (San Francisco, 1939), 119.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. French kiss, n., French kiss, v., French, adj. and n.

Paul, Elliot H. Indelible. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922, 60–61. HathiTrust Digital Library.

“Satire ((April,) 1682).” Court Satires of the Restoration. John Harold Wilson, ed.. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1976, 82. HathiTrust Digital Library.

gam

13 October 2020

Gam is a slang term for a leg, in current usage usually referring to a woman’s leg. It comes from the French jambe (gambe in earlier dialect) and the Italian gamba, both also meaning leg, probably via nautical slang and the pidgin Mediterranean Lingua Franca. It’s recorded in English in the late eighteenth century.

The earliest English use of the word is in the form gambo and appears in Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser for 1–8 September 1781. That paper, based in Kolkata, was the first newspaper printed in Asia. It ran for two years before being shut down by the East India Company because of its criticism of the company, its provocative style, and subjects it dealt with. In this case, the paper printed a 6 January 1777 letter allegedly written by a sailor aboard the Royal Duke to a shipmate:

Ruisle [?] by the help of the Cobbler of Bones, can walk. ——As for me D—n my E—s if I e’nt Hobbling only a little tender in the Larboard side my Starboard gambo a little shattered however. I think I shall be able with little Repairs to receive your broadside.

The English word is probably borrowed from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin of various Italian dialects, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Berber, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic, that was spoken in the Mediterranean region from the eleventh through nineteenth centuries, and was also common among British sailors.

The word is recorded in Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue with the spellings of both gambs and gams:

GAMBS, thin, ill shaped legs; a corruption of the French word jambes.

SHANKS, legs, or gams.

Gamb is also a heraldic term for an animal’s leg as it appears on a coat of arms. And the French root is also the source for jamb, the side posts on a window or door. These uses are older. Heraldic use dates to the seventeenth century, and jamb for a door’s side post can be found as early as 1334.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, gam, n.1.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, vi, 145. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser, 1–8 September 1781, 1. British Library, Eighteenth Century Journals 3.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. jaumbe, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2013, s.v. gam, n.2, gamb, n.; second edition, 1989, jamb, n.