kutlul

There's no way I as a junior school boy (of 8 or 9) would have called a peer (or my brother Jacob, let alone Daniel, who was in nappies at the time) cunt cock (kut lul)

When did I learn to swear?
I recall being shocked when Uncle Paul said 'fuck' during a walk.
I was 16.
Now i swear too much

cunt cock fuck shit piss arse

The Anglo-Saxon ones are the best, though perhaps 'piss' comes from a Romance language.

My kids hear me swear I'm afraid. They copy and that's not good but I do tell them not to use the f-word.

"You're not old enough to use that word" I say "kutlul"

Ted Hughes's poetry conveys the force of Anglo Saxon words brilliantly. He used many short, frequently monosyllabic words, words which are concrete, compact and full of force and violence. Sometimes these words do battle with the Latinate words


Here's a poem of his:


Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.


I wonder if he swore a lot. Cunt.