By Anatoly Liberman
The Infamous C-Word. This is the letter I received soon after the publication of the post devoted to our (formerly) most unpronounceable word: “…I am writing to ask you if you have run across it [this word] as a nautical term. I am a former sailing ship mariner (a.k.a. “tall ships”) and sailmaker and currently maritime historian/editor for the National Maritime Historical Society. I have always understood that the word c**t in our slang usage comes from the nautical term for the groove between the twisted strands that make up rope. That groove is called a cuntline or just cunt for short. I used to teach undergraduates maritime history and literature aboard wooden traditionally rigged sailing ships on semester-at-sea programs, and they were always shocked to learn that cunt was a legitimate nautical term to use. It gets worse because when you teach slope splicing, you have to show them how to insert a wooden fid between the cunt to open up the strands. You can just imagine their faces. In any case, I did not see this come up in your column and thought that, if there is a chance you hadn’t heard this variation, you might like knowing about it.”
I am aware of another nautical term, and, if it has anything to do with the one under discussion, its etymology stops being a riddle. Cunt may have begun its life in English as cant. Under cant, The Century Dictionary lists “a ship’s timber or frame near the bow or stern whose plane makes an acute angle with the vertical longitudinal plane of the vessel” (hence also a corresponding verb). The OED gives a slightly different definition: “A piece of wood laid on the deck of the vessel to support the bulkheads, etc.” Apparently, this cant also has a variant rhyming with runt rather than rant. Alongside cuntline, there is cantline, though here again the senses do not match. Cantline “the space between the sides or ends of barrels where they are stowed side by side.” Cantline, also spelled contline, has a synonym cutline. Is it possible that we are dealing with two descendants of the same etymon? Cant “ship’s timber” goes back to cant “edge, border,” a borrowing from Middle Low (= northern) German or Dutch. In case cunt “splice cut” also descends from German kant (Kant), the term retained its original German pronunciation in sailors’ language either because this way it kept its distance from all other borders or because the association evoked by thrusting the fid into the splice cut was too obvious to miss. I am sorry if I found myself in a position described in Mark Twain’s short story “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper.” Be that as it may, cunt “splice cut” is not the source of its much older homophone meaning “vagina”; it must have been the other way around.
For my database I have screened the entire run of The Mariner’s Mirror. To the best of my knowledge, the word c**t has not turned up in any of its numerous articles and notes on the origin of special terms. As to the students’ embarrassment, I can draw on my own experience. For many years I taught English to foreigners. Adults were not sure whether to laugh or feign indifference when they came across poop “the stern of a ship,” while schoolchildren blushed vigorously at learning the words male screw and female screw, especially those who also knew the meaning of the verb screw.
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