ABSTRACT
Inveterate readers, conditioned by journalistic habits, develop an irrepressible curiosity, especially about people-in-the-news in history. How did they speak? How would they look and sound if one could press them in the course of an interview? Would they get irritated or cross at close, if not impudent, questioning? What boisterous and indeed bawdy words did they use? Why did some expletives stubbornly persist in the language throughout centuries and others fall into desuetude? These are the standard rhetorical questions of etymologists, philologists, and other students of language, faced with the thorny problems of popular speech and demotic style in olden times when taboo-words were rather more prohibitive than they are in our own permissive journalistic days. As one scholar of the fifteenth century has written: When Chaucer wrote "pisse" would his audience have been shocked or titillated? Or would they have considered the word innocent enough? Was it in fact a neutral term?.
