Page:The Letters of Cicero Shuckburg III.pdf/327

 "Am I to say that this or that is the greater culpability?" Could it have been expressed more obscenely ? "Not so," you say, "for he did not mean it in that sense." Therefore obscenity does not consist in the word used: I have shewn that it does not do so in the thing meant: therefore it does not exist anywhere. How entirely decent is the expression: "To exert oneself for children"? Even fathers beg their sons to do so, though they do not venture to mention the name of the "exertion." Socrates was taught the lyre by a very famous musician named Connus: do you think the name obscene? When we use the numeral terni, there is no suggestion of obscenity: but if I speak of bini, there is. "Only to Greeks," you will say. That shews that there is nothing obscene in a word, for I know Greek and yet use the word bini to you; and you assume that I am speaking Greek and not Latin. Again, we may speak without impropriety of "rue" (ruta) and "mint" (menta); but if I wish to use the diminutive of menta (mentula)—as one can perfectly well use that of ruta (rutula)—that is a forbidden word. So we may, without a breach of good manners, use the diminutive of tectoria (tectoriola); but if you try to do the same with pavimenta (pavimentula), you find yourself pulled up. Don't you see, then, that these are nothing but empty distinctions? That impropriety exists neither in word nor thing, and therefore is non-existent?

The fact is that we introduce obscene meaning into words in themselves pure. For instance, is not the word divisio beyond reproach? Yet in it there is a word (visium or visio, "a stench") which may have an improper meaning, to which the last syllables of the word intercapedo (pedo [Greek: perdô]) correspond. Are we, therefore, to regard these words as obscene? Again, we make a ridiculous distinction: if we say, "So-and-so strangled his father," we don't prefix any apologetic word. But if we use the word of Aurelia or Lollia we must use such an apology. Nay, more, words that are not obscene have come to be considered so. The word "grind," he says, is shameful; much more the.]