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As a professional populariser perhaps she was right. English has fallen between two stools, as it were. Native words for sexual items (the F-word and the C-word) or scatological ones (the S-word and the P-word) have long been taboo. Technical words, in Latin or derived from it, coitus, copulation, vagina, even pudendum muliebre or excrement, faeces and urine, seem almost more obscene than the taboo words. The Latin terms sound like something from a medical textbook, thus pathologising normal human functions.
It was from this dilemma — either too crude or too technical — that neologisms or nursery language delivered us. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne noted 20 years ago that the invention of the word bonking had made the activity far easier to talk about, particularly in print. Emma Soames wrote in Saga recently that Sir Peregrine had claimed the word’s invention for her. It was a gallant compliment, but to clinch the claim she must show evidence of its use before 1975, the earliest year from which the OED has a written example.
Bonking seems old-fashioned now, like groovy. But poo and wee have flown up the popularity charts. The Natural History Museum recently advertised with posters about dinosaur poo. If poo was first noticed in a dictionary of American slang in 1960, it is thoroughly British now. Wee seems to have supplanted pee as the favoured nursery term, but, as I learnt from my film-poster error, it is not always the royal wee.
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