words Lewd

Lewd

HUGH GRANT's arrest in Hollywood for "an act of lewd conduct" reminds us that the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers is still alive in the States today. It's not so much that Americans are more easily scandalised than we are. That old word lewd is what makes for the Mayflower touch. It has a nice 17th-century ring to it, and must have been heard often enough on the lips of those earnest dissenters.

On the other hand, it carried less weight of disapproval in those days than it does now - but this was only because it meant so many more things. Certainly it covered what we in Britain would call indecent behaviour. But it had begun as a word for "lay" as opposed to "clerical" (a lewd friar was not a randy monk, just a lay brother). Later in the Middle Ages it came also to be used of the ignorant and the unlettered, which was fair enough, since the Church had the monopoly of learning. It then rapidly progressed to mean unworthy, then to mean vile, and in Chaucer's time, by a curious semantic jump, to be a euphemism for lascivious as well. For quite a time it had all those meanings at once. Now all have gone except the last.

So here we have a word which began in one specific place and, after wandering for centuries in various directions, ended up miles from home. Words are only words, and do what people tell them, but this one seems to have had a life of its own. Its later career in Britain has become rather sad. You'll find it working in the changing rooms of rugger clubs or with the lower sort of stand-up comic, where lewd songs are sung and lewd jokes cracked - but hardly anywhere else. It's good to know that it is still doing a proper job in the States.

Nicholas Bagnall