Etymological Scholarship on C-Word

[Michael Adams]

 The "Gropecuntelane" evidence is from Eilert Ekwall's Street-Names of the City of London (Oxford, 1954). It's the only pre-14th-century evidence of the c-word, and it's slippery evidence: note that "grope" n, "lane," and "cunt" are all synonyms in one sense or another -- without context, it's impossible to determine whether the name recorded is an official name, a folk name, a joke, even. The 1230 evidence is used by some to suggest a continuous history from a hypothetical Old English etymon, but it's too thin a peg to hold that heavy hypothesis, and the c-word is really in the same situation as the f-word -- most Germanic languages include cognates, and one would like to assume an Old English reflex among them, but one can't. In the c-word's case, early Middle English borrowing from Danish (Danish "kunte" being more likely the source of the London street name element than Old Norse kunta) can't be ruled out.

 Michael

 -----Original Message-----
 From: wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
 Sent: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 1:59 PM
 Subject: Re: Etymological Scholarship on C-Word

  HDAS includes the term.

  Is it OED that cites "Gropecuntelane" as a street name in Medieval England ?

  Beware of the speculations in Partridge's _Origins_.

  JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: Etymological Scholarship on C-Word
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I am posting on behalf of Pat O'Conner, author of _Woe Is I_. She is
interested in finding out about books or articles or other scholarship, by
linguists or etymologists or scholars of Sanskrit or Hinduism,
about the etymology of _cunt_. She is familiar with the OED entry and
with P. H. Reaney's _The Origin of English Surnames_, which mentions some
old surnames incorporating _cunt_ or _cunte_.

If people respond to the list or to me privately, I will make sure to pass
on the information to Pat.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press
Yale Law School ISBN 0300107986
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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