MY CoUNTry

cunt

a disparaging term for a woman, a woman regarded as a sexual object
- The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

an unpleasant or stupid person
- The Oxford English Dictionary
a despicable man
-The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English

“Cunt” seems to be one of the few remaining words in the English language that still has the power to shock.  This was made very clear to me when I began receiving a great deal of spam with the word “cunt” in the subject line, emails which I refer to collectively as “The Cunt Emails.”  So I decided to demystify the word for myself by doing some research.

According to my findings, the word was used extensively from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, but with much less of a taboo than it is used today.
“Cunt” appears many times in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with the spelling “queynte” and “queint”, as in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue “Ye shullen have queint right ynough at eve.”  Shakespeare uses the word “country”, too, with the accent on the first syllable, as when Hamlet says to Ophelia (after she refuses his request to lie in her lap), “Do you think I meant country matters?” Then there’s John Donne’s poem The Good Morrow, which refers to sucking on “country pleasures” and the Restoration comedy’s The Country Wife, which features this same wordplay in its title.

In the 1800s, the word “cunt” fell out of common usage with the rise of Victorian culture, but it was brought back into frequent use in the 20th century, mutatis mutandis, as noun, pronoun, adjective, participle and other parts of speech with a more base connotation and the apparent intent to shock. For example, James Joyce was one of the first 20th century novelists to put “cunt” into print in his Ulysses, “Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.”

More recently, innumerable movies and cable TV shows have used the word… as have the authors of a surprisingly large number of emails to me, such as “Blond teen with big boobs and shaved cunt” from relit763@yahoo.com and “Horny dog licking wet cunt” from reinevmrlvwgnnv@live.fr.

Happily, however, now that I am aware of its rich history, I am pleased to say “cunt” no longer shocks me. You can say I am now at peace with MY CoUNTry.