torian, "was an open insult."[1] Mrs. Trollope, writing in 1832, tells of "a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners" who "offended one of the principal families…by having pronounced the word corset before the ladies of it."[2] The word woman, in those sensitive days, became a term of reproach, comparable to the German mensch: the uncouth female took its place.[3] In the same way the legs of the fair became limbs and their breasts bosoms, and lady was substituted for wife. Stomach, then under the ban in England, was transformed, by some unfathomable magic, into a euphemism denoting the whole region from the nipples to the pelvic arch. It was during this time that the newspapers invented such locutions as interesting (or delicate) condition, criminal operation, house of ill (or questionable) repute, disorderly-house, sporting-house, statutory offense, fallen woman, felonious attach, serious charge, and criminal assault. Servant girls ceased to be seduced, and began to be betrayed. Syphilis became transformed into blood-poison, specific blood-poison and secret disease, and it and gonorrhea into social diseases. Various French terms, enceinte and accouchement among them, were imported to conceal the fact that careless wives occasionally became pregnant and had lyings-in.
White, between 1867 and 1870, launched several attacks upon these ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon enceinte, limb and female, but only female succumbed. The passage of the Comstock Postal Act, in 1873, greatly stimulated the search for euphemisms. Once that amazing law was upon the statute-book and Comstock himself was given the inquisitorial powers of a post-office inspector, it became positively dangerous to print certain ancient and essentially decent English words. To this day the effects of that old reign of terror are still visible. We yet use toilet, retiring-room and public comfort station in place of better terms,[4] and such idiotic
- ↑ John Graham Brooks: As Others See Us; New York, 1908, p. 11.
- ↑ Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols.; London, 1832; vol. i, p. 132.
- ↑ Female, of course, was epidemic in England too, but White says that it was "not a Briticism," and so early as 1839 the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill "to protect the reputation of unmarried females," substituting women, on the ground that female "was an Americanism in that application."
- ↑ The French pissoir, for instance, is still regarded as indecent in America, and is seldom used in England, but it has gone into most of the Continental languages, though the French themselves avoid it in print, and use the inane
