Latin obscenity

Latin profanity is the profane, indecent, or impolite vocabulary of Latin, and its uses. The profane vocabulary of early Vulgar Latin consisted largely of sexual and scatological words: the rich lodes of religious profanity found in some of the Romance languages is a Christian development, and as such does not appear in Classical Latin. In Vulgar Latin, words that were considered to be profanity were described generally as obsc(a)ena, "obscene, lewd", unfit for public consumption; or improba, "improper, in poor taste, undignified". (Note that the name "Vulgar Latin" simply referred to the common speech, not necessarily profanity, although Vulgar Latin was the form of Latin in which sexual ans scatological expletives existed. In the more formal Classical Latin, no profanity is recorded except in satirical works, or in discussion of the actual words.)

Since profanity, by definition, consists of spoken words that people use very informally, and because Latin is a dead language (occasionally used in written communication as an international language, but no longer in spoken conversation), it is worthwhile to note the sources of Latin profanity. Knowledge of Latin profanity and obscenities comes from a number of sources:

• The satirical poets, particularly Catullus and Martial, use the words in preserved literary works. Indeed, the august Horace resorted to them in his earlier poems. The anonymous Priapeia is another important literary source.
• The orator and lawyer Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares ("Letters to My Friends") discuss Latin profanity, and confirm the "profane" or "obscene" status of many of the words.
• A number of medical or especially veterinary texts use the words as part of their working vocabulary, in which they were not considered obscenity but simply jargon.
• Preserved graffiti from the Roman period uses these words. A rich trove of examples of profane Latin at work was discovered on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Mentula and verpa: the penis

Mentula is the basic Latin word for penis. Its status as a basic obscenity is confirmed by the Priapeia 29, in which mentula and cunnus are given as ideal examples of obscene words:

Obscenis, peream, Priape, si non
uti me pudet improbisque verbis
sed cum tu posito deus pudore
ostendas mihi coleos patentes
cum cunno mihi mentula est vocanda

("I'd rather die than use obscene and improper words; but when you, as a god, appear with your balls hanging out, it is appropriate for me to speak of cunts and cocks.")

Verpa is also a basic Latin obscenity for "penis." It appears less frequently in Classical Latin, but it does appear in Catullus 47:

vos Veraniolo meo et Fabullo
verpus praeposuit Priapus ille?"

("Did that dick, that Priapus, prefer you to my dear little Veranius (erection) and Fabullus?")

Verpus, adjective and noun, referred to a man whose glans was exposed, either by an erection or by circumcision.

An example of a sopio (see below), the god Mercury was depicted with an enormous penis on this fresco from Pompeii.

Etymology

The exact etymology of mentula is somewhat obscure. The word would appear in form to be a diminutive. Mentum is the chin. Cicero's letter 9:22 ad Familiares relates it to menta, a spearmint stalk. Tucker's Etymological Dictionary of Latin relates it to eminere, "to project outwards," and mons, a mountain, all of which suggest an Indo-European *men-.

Verpa probably relates to something "thrust" or "thrown"; compare Dutch werpen, "to throw", and the identical Icelandic verpa, "to throw".

Usage

Mentula frequently appears in the poetry of Catullus. Catullus uses Mentula as a nickname for Mamurra, and uses it as an ordinary name, as in his epigram 105:

Mentula conatur Pipleium scandere montem:
     Musae furcillis praecipitem eiciunt.

("The penis tries to climb the Pipleian mount (of poetry); the Muses drive him out with pitchforks.")

Synonyms and metaphors

The Latin word penis itself originally meant "tail". Cicero's ad Familiares, 9.22, observes that penis originally was an innocuous word, but that the meaning of male sexual organ had become primary by his day. Once it acquired its sexual sense, this sense tarred the word and made it unusable for anything other than the sexual sense; thus penis became the standard medical and scientific jargon word.

The obscure word sopio (gen. sopionis) seemed to mean a sexualized caricature with an abnormally large penis, such as the Romans were known to draw. It appears in Catullus 37: frontem tabernae sopionibus scribam ("I will draw sopios on the front of the tavern") and in graffiti from Pompeii: ut merdas edatis, qui scripseras sopionis ("whoever drew sopios, let them eat shit!'") The grammarian Sacerdos preserves a quotation about Pompey, that says quem non pudet et rubet, non est homo, sed sopio ("whoever is not ashamed and blushes is not a man, but a sopio.") Sopio would appear to describe drawings such as that of the god Mercury in the illustration.

The word pipinna seems to have been children's slang for the penis; compare English pee-pee. It appears in Martial 11.71:

Drauci Natta sui vorat pipinnam,
collatus cui gallus est Priapus.

("Natta sucks the pee-pee of his Draucus. Compared to him, Priapus is a eunuch.")

The verb arrigo, arrigere meant "to have an erection." Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Augustus 69, contains the line:

An refert, ubi et in qua arrigas?

("Does it make any difference to me who made you horny, or when?")

In the Romance languages

Mentula has evolved into "Minchia", Sicilian for "penis". Verpa is preserved in some Romance dialects, usually with another meaning; verpile is a sort of stirrup and spur in a Calabrian dialect, possibly named for its shape. Most Romance languages have adopted metaphorical euphemisms as the chief words for the penis; as in Romanian vargă, Catalan, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese verga, French verge, from Latin virga, "staff, ship's mast".

Colei: the testicles

The basic word for the testicles in Latin was colei (singular: coleus). It had an alternative, consonant-stem form coleones (singular: coleo), in later Latin sometimes culio, culiones, that is sparsely attested in classical Latin; this, however, is the productive word in Romance.

Etymology

The etymology of colei is obscure. Tucker, without explanation, gives *qogh-sleǐ-os (*k^wogh-sleǐ-os?), and relates it to cohum, an obscure word for "yoke".

Usage

Colei does not appear to have been offensive to the degree that words like mentula or futuo were. Cicero's letters refer to the honesti colei Lanuvini; the chaste Lanuvinian testicles, which may have been a foodstuff, or perhaps wine in a wineskin; his description of them as honesti indicates that the word was acceptable in "decent" company.

On the other hand, a Pompeian graffito quotes what may have been a folk saying: seni supino colei culum tegunt: "when an old man lies down, his balls cover his butthole." This may have been a proverb, and constitutes ribald humour; it does not demonstrate that the word was considered particularly obscene.

Synonyms and metaphors

The primary decent word in Latin for colei was testes (sing. testis). This word was plain Latin for "witnesses;" a man swore an oath upon what he held dearest. Cicero's letter again says "testes" verbum honestissimum in iudicio, alio loco non nimis. ("In a court of law, witnesses is a quite decent word; not so elsewhere.") The diminutive testiculi was entirely confined to the anatomical sense, and supplied the English word testicles and testicular, as well as the Spanish medical term testículos.

In the Romance languages

Coleones is productive in most of the Romance languages: cf. Italian coglioni, French couilles; Portuguese colhões, Catalan collons, Romanian coi, coaie, Spanish cojones.

Cunnus: the vagina

Cunnus was the basic Latin word for the vagina. The Priapeia mention it in connection with mentula, above.

Etymology

Cunnus has a distinguished Indo-European lineage. It is cognate with English cunt, Persian kun "anus" and kos "vulva", and with Greek κυσθος (kusthos). Tucker relates it to Indo-European *kut-nos, which suggests a word meaning "split" (cf. English crack). The Indo-European origin of this word is supported by the fact that it appears in the Slavic languages, as in the Czech kunda (c>k; t>d; a is a suffix implying the feminine gender) also Persian gosha "splitting" and kos "vulva".

Eric Partridge's Origins, by contrast, relates it to a reconstructed IE *kuzdhos, and also calls attention to the Hittite kun, "tail", and suggests cognates among the Afro-Asiatic languages.

Usage

Cicero's letters confirm once again its obscene status. Cicero writes:

. . . cum autem nobis non dicitur, sed nobiscum? quia si ita diceretur, obscenius concurrent litterae.

("We don't say cum nobis, but rather nobiscum; if we said it the other way, the letters would run together in a rather obscene way.")

The word cunnilingus also occurs in literary Latin, and is found once in Catullus and more frequently in Martial. It eventually became fully standard with no obscene connotation, and survived in technical usage. It has even been adopted into English, and is used as a technical term to this day.

Horace's Sermones I.2 and I.3 use the word:

Nam fuit ante Helenam cunnus taeterrima belli
causa. . .

which attributes the cause of the Trojan War to Helen of Troy's cunt.

Synonyms and metaphors

These include sinus, "indentation", and fossa, "ditch."

The modern polite or scientific word, vagina, is the Latin word for scabbard or sword-sheath, its military nature explaining the masculine gender of the French vagin.

In the Romance languages

Cunnus is preserved in almost every Romance language: e.g. French con, Catalan cony, Spanish coño, Portuguese cona. In Portuguese it has been logically transferred to the feminine gender; the form cunna is also attested in Pompeian graffiti and in some late Latin texts.

Landica: the clitoris

The ancient Romans had medical knowledge of the clitoris, and their native word for it was landica. This appears to have been one of the most obscene words in the entire Latin lexicon. It is alluded to, but does not appear, in literary sources, except in the Priapeia 79, which calls it misella landica, the "poor little clitoris". It does, however, appear in graffiti.

Etymology

The ultimate etymology of landica is unknown.

Usage

Not even the poets Catullus and Martial, whose frankness is notorious, ever refer to landica. Cicero hints at it, but refuses to write it out plainly, in his Epistolae ad Familiares, discussing which words in Latin are potentially obscene or subject to obscene punning:

. . . hanc culpam maiorem an illam dicam.

("It would be a greater fault if I were to say the name of that thing," with illam dicam echoing the forbidden word.)

The word landica appears in Roman graffiti: Peto landicam Fulviae ("I seek Fulvia's clitoris") appears at Pompeii, as does the derivative Eupla laxa landicosa; it is not clear here whether landicosa meant that Eupla had an unusually strong libido or a large clitoris. A large clitoris was an object of horror and fascination to the ancient Romans; Martial's epigram I.90 alludes to a woman who uses her clitoris as a penis in a lesbian encounter.

Synonyms and metaphors

Allusions to the clitoris in the Satires of Juvenal call it crista, "crest".

In the Romance languages

Landica survived in Old French landie, and in Romanian lindic.

Culus: the buttocks

The basic Latin word for the buttocks was culus. The word was not considered quite as offensive as mentula or cunnus, but does appear in Roman ribaldry. The word is relatively common, and is productive in Romance. Some of its derivatives, such as the Spanish cola ("tail") are fully standard and have no obscene meaning.

Etymology

Culus may be an o-grade of Indo-European kel-, which describes a covering; compare Latin celare, "to conceal." This etymology is problematic, though, and Adams says that its origin is obscure.

Usage

Culus was applied to the buttocks of both man and beast; the culus of a horse is described in Cato the Elder's De Agri Cultura. Martial 11.21 speaks of a culus aeni, the bronze buttocks, as on a statue.

Synonyms and metaphors

The more seemly Latin word for the buttocks was clunes (singular clunis); this word was generally more decent than culus, and older, as well: it has several Indo-European cognates. Anus was the name for the posterior opening of the digestive tract; the word is not specific to that usage, but instead originally meant "ring". Its anatomical sense drove out its other meanings, and for this reason the diminutive annulus became the usual Latin name for a ring as an item of jewelry.

A curious example of the usage of "ring" as a metaphor being kept (or most likely, having resurfaced) in a modern Romance language can be found in Brazilian Portuguese slang, as the word anel can have the same double meaning, especially in the expression o anel de couro (the leather ring). "Ring" is also British slang for "anus".

In the Romance languages

Culus has been preserved with its original meaning intact in most of the Romance languages. It yields the expected forms culo in Spanish and Italian; in French and Catalan it becomes cul, in contemporary Romanian cur (but before the rotacism process took place: "cul"), in Vegliot Dalmatian čol, and in Portuguese cu. Its offensiveness varies from one language to another; in French it was incorporated into ordinary words and expressions such as culottes, "breeches", and cul-de-sac.

Merda: excrement

Merda is the basic Latin word for excrement. Frequently used, it appears in most of the Romance languages. Excreta, literally "things expelled", referred most frequently to feces but could describe any bodily excretion. In its modern technical use, excreta is generally used to encompass fecal matter and urine.

Etymology

Merda represents Indo-European *s-merd-, whose root sense was likely "something malodorous." It is cognate with German Mist and Polish śmierdzieć ( "to stink").

Usage

The word merda is attested in classical texts mostly in veterinary and agricultural contexts, meaning "manure". Cato the Elder uses it, as well as stercus, while the Mulomedicina Chironis speaks of merda bubula, "cattle manure". But Martial 3.17 uses it in its typical metaphorical sense, speaking of inedible cooking:

Sed nemo potuit tangere: merda fuit.

("But nobody could touch it: it was shit.")

Synonyms and metaphors

The politer terms for merda in classical Latin were stercus (gen. stercoris), "manure" and fimus, "filth." Stercus was used frequently in the Vulgate, as in its well known translation of Psalm 113:7:

Suscitans a terra inopem, et de stercore erigens pauperem.

("He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill." KJV)

In the Romance languages

Merda is productive in the Romance languages, and is the obvious original of French merde, Spanish mierda, Catalan merda and Vegliot Dalmatian miarda. It is preserved unaltered in Italian and Portuguese. It was preserved in Romanian too, not for feces, where căcat (derived from caco) is used instead, but in the word "dezmierda", originally meaning "to clean the bottom of (an infant)"; subsequently becoming "to cuddle" or "to fondle"[1]

Futuere: to copulate

Futuo, infinitive futuere, perfect futui, past participle fututum, Latin for "to copulate", is richly attested and useful. Not only the word itself, but also derived words such as perfututum, which could be translated "totally screwed", and defututa, "exhausted from intercourse", are attested in classical Latin literature. The derived noun fututio, "act of intercourse", also exists in classical Latin, and the nomen agentis fututor, corresponding to the English epithet "fucker", also derives from that word.

Etymology

Futuo is believed by many to be akin to battuere, "to beat"; this metaphor has a long Indo-European heritage, and is believed to underlie the English word "fuck" as well. Tucker's dictionary invites comparison with confuto, "suppress" or "beat down".

Usage

Futuo is richly attested in all its forms in Latin literature. It is in itself used metaphorically in Catullus 6, which speaks of latera ecfututa, funds exhausted, literally "fucked away." Catullus 41 speaks of a puella defutata, a woman exhausted from sexual activity; while Catullus 29 similarly speaks of a mentula diffutata, a penis similarly worn out.

Futuo, unlike "fuck", was more frequently used in erotic and celebratory senses rather than derogatory ones or insults. A woman of Pompeii wrote the graffito fututa sum hic ("I got laid here") and prostitutes, canny at marketing, appear to have written other graffiti complimenting their customers for their sexual prowess: Felix bene futuis ("Felix, you have fucked well"); Victor bene valeas qui bene futuis ("Victor, best wishes to one who has fucked well.") Please note that the grammar of these graffiti is not Classical Latin, Cicero, for instance, would have written futuisti instead of futuis. It is famously used erotically in Catullus 32:

sed domi maneas paresque nobis
novem continuas fututiones.

("but stay at home and prepare for us nine acts of coitus, one after the other.")

Futuo in its active voice was used only of women when it was imagined that they were taking the active role thought appropriate to the male partner by the Romans. The woman in Martial VII:

Ipsarum tribadum tribas, Philaeni
recte, quo futuis, vocas amicam

is described as a tribas, a lesbian.

Synonyms and metaphors

The aggressive sense of English "fuck" and "screw" was not strongly attached to futuo in Latin. Instead, these senses attached themselves to pedicare and irrumare, "to sodomise" and "to be sucked", respectively, which were used famously and hostilely in Catullus 16:

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.

("I will sodomise and receive fellatio from you, O you faggot Aurelius and pervert Furius, because you thought me indecent because my poems are somewhat prissy.")

Pedicare, like much of the vocabulary for homosexual acts, is a Greek loanword in Latin. Other more neutral synonyms for futuo in Latin include coeo, coire, literally "to go with," whence Latin and English coitus.

Note: Irrumare, which in English is denoted by the passive construction "to be sucked" but is an active verb in Latin.

The word "irrumatio" is similar to the act of fellatio, but involves the receiver of oral sex thrusting into the mouth of the giver.

In the Romance languages

Futuo, a core item of the lexicon, lives on in most of the Romance languages, sometimes with its sense somewhat weakened: Catalan fotre, French foutre, Spanish joder, Portuguese foder, Romanian fute (futere), Italian fottere. The Romanian phrase cum venii futui is almost identical to the Latin cum veni futui (meaning "as soon as I came I fucked").

Ceveo and criso

Ceveo (cevēre, cevi) and criso (crisare &c.) are basic Latin obscenities that have no exact English equivalents. Criso referred to the actions of the female partner in sexual intercourse; as in English, futuo, often translated "fuck", primarily referred to the male action. Ceveo referred to the similar activity of the passive partner in anal sex.

Etymology

Both of these verbs are of fairly obscure origin.

Unlike most of the vocabulary of homosexuality in Latin (paedicare, pathicus, cinaedus), ceveo seems not to be of Greek origin. Francis A. Wood relates it to an Indo-European root *k^weu- or *qeu-, relating to a variety of back and forth motions.

Crisare may relate to Indo-European *(s)kreit-, *(s)ker-, "to twist, turn, or bend".

Usage

Ceveo always refers to a male taking the passive role in anal sex. Martial 3.95 contains the phrase "sed pulchre, Naevole, ceves." ("But you wiggle your arse so prettily, Naevolus.") On the other hand criso appears to have had a similar meaning, but to have been used of the female. Again Martial 10.68:

Numquid, cum crisas, blandior esse potes?
Tu licet ediscas totam referasque Corinthon,
Non tamen omnino, Laelia, Lais eris.

("Could you possibly be prettier as you grind? You learn easily, and could do everything they do in Corinth; but you'll never be Lais, Laelia.")

Note: Corinth was the site of a major temple of Aphrodite; the temple employed more than a thousand cult prostitutes.

Synonyms and metaphors

These words have few synonyms or metaphors, and belong almost to a sort of technical vocabulary.

In the Romance languages

Both words seem to have been lost in Romance.

Caco: to defecate

Caco, cacare was the chief Latin word for defecation.

Etymology

The word has a distinguished Indo-European parentage, which may perhaps relate to nursery words or children's slang that tends to recur across many different cultures. It would appear to be cognate with the Greek adjective κακος, "bad", which is the source of English cacophony and many other caco- words. It also exists in Germanic; English poppycock derives from Dutch pappe kak, "diarrhea". It exists in Spanish, Portuguese and French as well, caca being childish slang for excrement (similar to English poop), and in Spanish and Portuguese it also derives in the verb "cagar" [to shit], a word whose level of obscene loading varies from country to country. German "kacken", Dutch "kakken", Czech "kakat", Russian "какать" (Kakat'), Icelandic "kúka" etc. are all slang words meaning "to defecate", most of them having roughly the same level of severity as the English expression "take a dump".

Usage

Catullus 23 contains the lines:

Culus tibi purior salillo est,
nec toto decies cacas in anno.

("Your arse is purer than the salt-cellar; you probably only take a dump ten times a year.")

Catullus 36 contains the lines:

Annales Volusi, cacata carta,

("Annals of Volusus, letters which have been defecated on,")--i.e. "worthless writings".

Synonyms and metaphors

While caco, like any other word relating to malodorous bodily functions, is used scurrilously and abusively in Latin literature, the word cacare in its literal sense may not have been deeply offensive to the Romans. Few synonyms are attested in Classical Latin; the word defecare comes much later. (In Classical Latin, faex, plural faeces, meant the dregs, such as are found in a bottle of wine; the word did not acquire the sense of feces until later.)

In the Romance languages

Cacare is preserved with little alteration in Italian. It becomes Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese cagar, in Vegliot Dalmatian kakuor, and in Romanian as a (se) căca. (Feces are referred to as "caca" in French, Catalan, Romanian and Spanish childhood slang, while Portuguese uses the very same word with the general meaning of anything that looks or smells malodorous or reminiscent of excrement.)

Pēdo (or peto): fart

Pēdo (later peto), pedĕre, pepedi (or pepidi), peditum is the basic Latin word for fart.

Etymology

The word's antiquity and membership in the core inherited vocabulary is made manifest by its reduplicating perfect stem. It is cognate with Greek περδομαι, English fart, Czech prd, Polish pierdzieć, Russian perdet', Sanskrit pardate, and Avestan pêrêδêm. all of which mean the same thing.

Usage

The word podex was synonymous with culus, "buttocks" (see above); this o-stem version of the root identified it as the source of flatulence. In the Sermones 1.8, 46, Horace writes:

Nam, displosa sonat quantum vesica, pepedi
diffissa nate ficus. . .

Christopher Smart translates this passage as “from my cleft bum of fig-tree I let a fart, which made as great an explosion as a burst bladder”. The ‘I’ of this satire is the god Priapus, and Smart explains that he was made of fig-tree wood which split through being poorly prepared.

Synonyms and metaphors

Peto was the core word for the act of "farting". The noise made by escaping flatulence was usually called crepitus, vaguely "a noise" or "a creak".

In the Romance languages and English

Peto survives in Romance, and is quite productive in French péter and the noun pet. In Catalan, the verb is petar-se and the noun is pet. In Spanish the noun pedo as well as the verbs pederse and pedorrear are similarly derived. In Portuguese peido and peidar are related, but the language has also an extensive derivation from them, like peidar (to fart), peidorreiro (one who farts too often) and peidorra (a very loud fart).

The English word petard, found mostly in the cliché "hoist with his own petard", comes from an early explosive device whose noise was likened to the sound of breaking wind.

English also has petomania for a performance of musical farting, and petomane for the performer, after Le Pétomane, a French performer active in the early 20th century. These terms are not yet recognised by the OED, but featured in an article in The Guardian in the 1960s, and are discussed here.

Mingo and meio: urination

Mingo (infinitive mingere) and meio (infinitive meiere) are two variant forms of what is likely a single Latin verb meaning "to urinate", or in more vulgar usage, "to take a piss." The two verbs share a perfect mixi or minxi, and a past participle mictum or minctum. It is likely that mingo represents a variant conjugation of meio with a nasal infix.

In classical Latin, the form mingo was more common than meio. In some late Latin texts a variant first conjugation form meiare is attested. This is the form that is productive in Romance.

The classical Latin word micturire, a Greek loanword, became the accepted medical word meaning "to urinate". It is the source of the English medical term "micturition reflex".

Etymology

Meiere is an inherited Indo-European word. It likely relates to Indo-European *meigh-, "to sprinkle" or "to wet"; compare Old English miscian, "to mix", or Modern English "mash" (infusion of malt in water for brewing). Sanskrit has mehati, "it urinates"; Persian miz, "urine"; Greek omeikhein, "to urinate"; Polish miazga, "sap".

Usage

Martial's epigram 3.78 uses meiere and urina to make a mixed language pun:

Minxisti currente semel, Pauline, carina.
Meiere vis iterum? Iam Palinurus eris.

("Once you pissed off the side of a boat, Paulinus. Do you want to piss again? then you will be Palinurus.")

(Note that palin is a Greek root meaning "once again." Palinurus was Aeneas's navigator who was thrown overboard in the Aeneid.)

Synonyms and metaphors

The basic Latin noun for "urine" was lotium. This word relates to lavare, to wash. The Romans, innocent of soap, collected urine as a source of ammonia to use in laundering clothes. The word urina, of course, is also attested in Latin, and became the usual polite term; it appears to have been borrowed from Greek οὔρον.

In the Romance languages

Though mingo represents the most common Classical Latin form, meiare seems to have been the popular form. This underlies Portuguese mijar and Spanish mear. *Pissare represents a borrowing from the Germanic languages, and appears elsewhere in the Romance territory, as in French pisser, Catalan pixar and Romanian a (se) pişa.

Latin words relating to prostitution

Compared to the anatomical frankness of the Roman vocabulary about sexual acts and body parts, the Roman vocabulary relating to prostitution seems euphemistic and metaphorical.

The most unambiguous Latin word for "to prostitute oneself" is scortor, scortari, which occurs chiefly in Plautus. This word may relate to Latin scorteus, "made of leather or hide", much as English refers to the skin trade; or it may be a pure pejorative related to Greek σκατος, "shit". Plautus illustrates its use in Amphitryon:

Quando mecum pariter potant, pariter scortari solent,
Hanc quidem, quam nactus, praedam pariter cum illis partiam.

("When they go out drinking and whoring, I'll certainly want a piece of that action myself.")

Prostitutes were called meretrix, "earner", and lupa, "she-wolf"; a brothel was a lupanar; these words referred to the mercantile and perceived predatory activities of prostitutes. The Latin word prostituo had a root meaning simply of "to expose for public sale." The word glubo, glubere, glupsi, gluptus meant "to peel", and by extension, "to rob"; it was often used of prostitutes; compare English she took him to the cleaners.

The important and productive words for a prostitute, *puta or *putana, are not attested in Classical Latin, despite their many Romance derivatives: French putain, Italian puttana, Spanish and Portuguese puta. They seem to relate to Latin puteo, putere, "to stink," and thus to represent yet another metaphor.

Latin Profanity in popular culture

Graffiti seen in the HBO/BBC2 original television series Rome:

ATIA FELLAT, meaning "Atia sucks" (fellat being the Latin root for today's word "fellatio")

ATIA AMAT OMNES

CINAED - pejorative term for "gay"

CAESARI SERVILIA FUTATRIX

An example of sopio

See also

• Profanity
  • Spanish profanity
  • Portuguese profanity
  • Quebec French profanity
  • Italian profanity
• Vulgar Latin

References

Primary literary sources are discussed in text. Many of the graffiti discussed are found in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th edition, 2000)
• James N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Johns Hopkins, 1990) ISBN 0-8018-2968-2
• Dictionnaire Hachette de la Langue Française (Hachette, 1995) ISBN 0-317-45629-6
• T. G. Tucker, Etymological Dictionary of Latin (Halle, 1931, repr. Ares Publishers, 1985) ISBN 0-89005-172-0
• Francis A. Wood. "The IE. Root '*Qeu'-: 'Nuere, Nutare, Cevere; Quatere, Cudere; Cubare, Incumbere.' II" In Modern Philology, vol. 17, p. 567 ff. (Univ. Chicago, 1905)
• Fisher, John. The lexical affiliations of Vegliote (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976) ISBN 0-8386-7796-7
• Smart, Christopher. Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera, with a literal translation into English Prose (London, Sampson Low, 1882)

External links

• Obscena verba (Latin and French)
• The Priapeia (Latin and English)
• Poems of Martial (Latin)
• Poems of Catullus (Latin)
• Poems of Horace (Latin)
• Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (German and English; partial)
• Latein-Online List of Swear Words (German)