10. Scatolinguistics: Scatolinguistics started out as meaning the study of words related to excrement. The word was coined by James McCawley who was an influential linguist and, for much of his life, professor of linguistics at Chicago University. He wrote his scatolinguistic treatises under the pseudonyms of Quang Phuc Dong and Yuck Foo of the nonexistent South Hanoi Institute of Technology.
For want of appropriate terms, scatolinguistics has now come to mean the study of the etymology and usage of all vulgar and profane expressions. To my mind, there ought to be special area of study within this for the distinction between British and American profanity. In some areas the words are identical, which is fine, but there are jarring differences. For example, fanny in America is a mild alternative to ass, whereas in the UK it is a profanity only slightly less severe than the c-word.
The British use both wanker and tosser as insults (meaning masturbator) and America simply has no equivalents. The British don’t use motherf*cker, which has to do with tradition. The word was coined by African slaves to describe the slave owners who had raped their mothers. While Americans are likely to say butt-naked, the British equivalent is bollock-naked. Americans say bullshit when Brits would say bollocks. This is odd because the word bollocks is from the Old English word beallucas, meaning testicles. One can only assume that the word bollocks was regarded as offensive to idealistic Protestants and thus didn’t make it onto the Mayflower.
10 Words You Didn’t Know Were Eponyms
10 Insulting Words You Don’t Know
10 Nonsense Words You Don’t Know
10 Words You Don’t Know With Limericks
10 Units of Measure You Don’t Know
Click here for the full list of postings: Words You Dont Know
Click here to BUY the book: Words You Don’t Know on Amazon
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
