The Other Twenty-Three Words
I don’t, as a rule, cuss a whole lot – not because I’m particularly religious or good-natured or anything, but because I’ve taken to heart the whole adage about cussing being the refuge of those with small minds and smaller vocabularies.
It’s not that I don’t know the words, I just don’t use them… much.
In the interests of expanding the minds – and vocabularies! – of you, the readers, I was thinking about the strange fact that we have some words so ubiquitous and well-known that they’ve for whatever reason become the canonical slightly offensive (if only to some!) word associated with their beginning letter.
Consider “the N word”, for example, or “the F word”. Apparently there’s also “the L word”, as well… but what about the other twenty-three letters of the English alphabet? Or dipthongs?
The lack of a widely-understood, say, “H word” among English-speaking peoples seems like a shortcoming whose remediation is long overdue. I can think of a couple fairly obvious additions to the list of lettered-words, which I’ve presented below, in slightly enigmatic quasi-riddle format:
A: (something fat and/or smelly, depending on context)
B: (dog, female)
C: (rhymes with a type of boat that is rarely C-worthy)
D: (Dutch architecture, see also L)
E:
F: (The most flexible four-letter word in the English language)
G:
H:
I:
J:
K:
L: (Grecian islander; see also D)
M:
N: (Rhymes with “bigger”)
O:
P:
Q: (“peculiar”; archaic)
R:
S: (Execra)
T:
U:
V:
W:
X:
Y:
Z:
Anyone have any additional nominations?
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You should be able to find all that you need, and more, at Viz comic’s
Roger’s Profanisaurus, which now has over 8000 “rude” words or phrases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger%27s_Profanisaurus
Some of the euphemisms and puns are strange, but some are very, very funny:
http://www.viz.co.uk/profanisaurus.html
Spiffy, thanks; I’ve just ordered a copy through Amazon.
The issue isn’t a lack of words, rude or otherwise – it’s the lack of widely understood and accepted works that can be represented by one letter…
w: rhymes with witch and has wheels
Having now thumbed through my copy of the Profanisaurus, I still stand by my original belief that we’re lacking in, say, anything like a widely-recognized “E-word” or “J-word”, for example. Having looked through the book – and watched television shows like The Inbetweeners, I also have to wonder where the widespread stereotype of American males as sex-obsessed comes from, but that’s a pondering for another day…
English was my first language, until the age of three and has not been so for about ten times that.
I really have difficulty guessing the words you allude to 🙁
Any change of … a more clear cut version?