I wonder if John Lydon, who used a forbidden word (the editor will not allow me to be more precise) on live television in I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, is a fan of Ian McEwan? In McEwan's novel Atonement, a young girl reads that word in a letter and, although she has never seen or heard it before, she knows immediately what it means. She can tell by the shape of the letters - the hollows in the "c", the "u" and the "n". This is a nice theory, and one that would at least partly stand up if you were reading the book in Basque, Hungarian or Yiddish - where the forbidden word translates into zulo, pina and pierick respectively. But the theory falls down in, for example, German (Fotze), where the word could be assumed by a young girl to refer to the belly button.
I once had a lecturer who muddled the letters in King Cnut during her Anglo-Saxon literature classes, which livened up a rather dull hour about kennings and Old Norse. She wasn't too far off the mark, though. Some etymologists think the word comes from the Old Norse kunta. Others think it is more likely to come from the Latin kuntus, meaning wedge.
Media commentators say this word was the last taboo of British television. But the word in English wasn't always taboo: in the early Middle Ages, both Oxford and London had streets called Gropecunte Lane, the red-light districts of their time (the London one is now home to the Bank of England). And as the word becomes more mainstream (fuck, after all, was taboo not long ago), other swear words will be ready to take on its mantle. I bought a friend Roger's Profanisaurus, a glossary of sexual slang, for his birthday last year. He assures me that "gleech" is the next big taboo word. Although I dare not give the definition here, celebrities looking for a tabloid cover story should try to work the word into their next interview.
