The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

It was an age in which the most innocuous words became unacceptable at a rate that must have been dizzying. Stomach became a euphemism for belly and in its turn was considered too graphic and was replaced by tummy, midriff, and even breadbasket. The conventional terms for the parts of a chicken, such as breast, leg, and thigh, caused particular anxiety and had to be replaced with terms like drumstick, first joint, and white meat. The names for male animals, such as buck and stallion, were never used in mixed company. Bulls were called sires, male animals, and, in a truly inspired burst of ridiculousness, gentleman cows. But it didn’t stop there. Euphemisms had to be devised for any word that had cock in it—haycock became haystack, cockerel became rooster—and for the better part of a century people with cock in their names, such as Hitchcock or Peacock, suffered unspeakable embarrassment when they were required to make introductions. Americans were rather more squeamish in these matters than the British, going so far as to change the old English titbit to tidbit.