s*x and the High Command

INFORMATIONWife, from the Celtic word cwif, reflects the history of female degradation. It is easy to imagine some wedge-headed cave man swaggering up to a peacefully grubbing band of girls and yelling “Cwif,” until, from fear of a clubbing, a helpless female comes forth to be dragged away to a cave. If some bully favored a girl, more timid males avoided her as hus cwif, his wife. Eventually, for the male’s convenience, the hus cwif was kept in his cave or hovel for other chores as well. Thus we evolved the Old English huswif which mothered both the words housewife and hussy. Cwif, with its Celtic pronunciation, was too pungent for the male to let die, and the word survived virtual epochs in his linguistic underworld as quiff, a derogatory synecdoche for a woman. It surfaces in formal Old English as cwean, the cwif of a king, from which is derived the modern queen, used as a synonym for prostitute by Elizabethans. Thus, etymologically, the male’s use of wife or queen in reference to the female expressed his pride of possession in her organs of regeneration. It is therefore suggested that wife and queen are not suitable words for polite discourse. —Excerpt from a report by the Federal Bureau of Language Reform