‘New words sprang up everywhere, like mushrooms in the night.... The mint of words was in the hands of the old women of the tribe, and whatever term they stamped with their approval and put into circulation, was immediately accepted without a murmur by high and low alike, and spread like wildfire through every camp and settlement of the tribe.
‘This is our ethnologist, again, on the Paraguay Indians: but he does not enlighten us as to who held the word-mint of Smut in his own country. It seems probable that the Stock-Exchange was responsible for a greater part of the new coinages, that from the Stock-Exchange they spread to the big business houses, and were distributed by the commercial travellers to the provinces; but the close connection of the Stock-Exchange with the Turf made the book-makers also useful disseminators of the new coinages. A smutty story or a new word-coinage seems to have been, with whisky-and-soda, the usual ceremonial confirmation of a big business deal or the laying of a bet. Other mints of greater or less importance were the major Universities, the Inns of Court, and the Military Academies.
‘The composition of smutty rhymes, chiefly in a strict five-line verse-form, known as the “Limerick”, with the conventional beginning “There once was a ...”, was one of the chief occupations of these high-priests of Smut, and two or three at least of the legitimate poets famous at the end of the twentieth century are known to have added largely to the common stock of tradition.
‘Even in our enlightened times, the sex-taboo and lavatory-taboo linger to a certain extent, owing to the natural reserve men and women feel about these functions. The lavatory-taboo still survives with us at meal-times, but we find it difficult to understand the extraordinary customs to which the morbid enlargement of this natural reserve led. For instance, the playwright Hogg records that not only was it considered obscene for a man to show a woman the way to the lavatory, but that even man to man, or woman to woman, an evasive phrase had to be used: “Would you care to wash your hands?” “Have you been shown the geography of the house?” nor would even intimate friends consent to notice each other if one of them was emerging from the lavatory or entering it; and, if this was the first meeting of the day, would greet each other half-a-minute later on un-tabood ground with every pretence of novelty and surprise. If a woman had a slight contusion on the breast, it was considered most obscene to mention it directly, but tender inquiries would be made after “your poor side”, “your injured shoulder”. So our anonymous ethnologist, in a caustic account of the idea of virgin-birth among primitive tribes, is forced to write:
Nana, the mother of Attis, was a virgin, who conceived by putting a ripe almond in her bosom.
‘The curious alternation of prudishness and prurience in the social life of the time makes strange reading. On one hand were to be found sexual extravagances, so fantastic as to be quite unintelligible to-day even to modern physiologists, on the other such delicacy of feeling that in some classes of Society the word “leg” was actually tabood, and we have it on the authority of the social historian Gilett Burgess that in Boston in the 1880’s it was considered necessary to clothe the naked legs or “limbs” of tables with white cotton pantaloons. Until the decade following the “Great War for Civilization”, the young women of the English moneyed and middle classes lived what was called “very sheltered lives”: which meant that, in the name of modesty, they were left to find out for themselves the simplest facts about the sexual mechanism. These facts, probably owing to a morbidity induced by the lavatory-taboo, they seem to have been frequently unable to grasp. Literature gave them little clue, owing to the custom of writing one part of the body when another was meant; and the use of words like “kiss”, “embrace”, and “hug”, as synonyms for the sexual act confused them so completely that in a majority of cases they were married without having the vaguest idea of what really happens between man and woman, or how babies are born, and the suddenness of the realization frequently caused nervous shock and even madness. The young men, on the other hand, by the time they came to marry, usually had had such a fantastic experience of sex-life among the professional “harlots” of a lower social class that it was most rare for a satisfactory sex-adjustment to be made between them and their wives; and it is computed that at least nine marriages out of ten were completely wrecked before the “honeymoon” was over.
‘Between 1919 and 1929 there was a marked relaxing of the sex-taboos among the educated classes: in art-exhibitions though not in public art-galleries, paintings of female nudes in which the pubic hair was represented were for the first time admitted. There were also great changes during this decade in the fashion of women’s dresses. Skirts, which hitherto had hidden the ankles, now revealed the knees; and “evening dresses” were worn, we are told, “without any backs”, though it is conjectured that the buttocks were still covered. “Bathing-dresses”, garments worn by both sexes, even when actually swimming in the water, became less voluminous, and the use of “bathing-stockings” by women was discontinued. There is record of a novelist James Joyce, whose works, though published in a foreign country, probably France, were smuggled into England, openly read and even regarded as “modern classics” by a literary minority: Joyce appears to have defied all taboos in his writing, and it is a pity that the Universal-Fascismo combination of 1929 succeeded in destroying every copy of his most famous work Ulysses, which would have been a mine of information for our present inquiry.
‘For the rest of the century the taboos continued almost as strongly enforced as in the period preceding the War. Indeed, Fascismo did its work so thoroughly that only tantalizing scraps remain of those few records of Smut made in the post-War decade, and the post-Fascismo records are not particularly helpful. By the edict of 1930 the talking of Smut became a capital offence, and when in 1998 the regulation was relaxed, the tradition had become almost extinct. It is now, therefore, impossible to suggest accurately what were the different degrees of initiation of which Hogg speaks, nor how the different dialects of Smut—Garage Smut, Club Smut, Mess Smut, School Smut—varied. But our knowledge of preceding centuries is no less scanty. We have no critical apparatus for filling in the lacunæ in Marcus Clarke’s account of convict obscenity in his Australian novel For the Term of his Natural Life, or in Benjamin Disraeli’s account of industrial obscenity in the 1830’s given in Sybil; nor can we supplement Alec Waugh’s hints of Public School obscenity in his Loom of Youth (1917). The poets were as timorous as the novelists. James Stephens records a “Shebeen” curse of the 1920 period:
The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there
Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer: