Endangered Profanity: Mutton Monger
As a public service, Cruel.Com is fighting to save archaic profanity and other abusive language before it is lost to future generations. Please incorporate this verbal filth into your own conversations, particularly if you are one of the tittering twats who uses Twitter, so that it may spread to others across the antisocial network.
The first profanity we’d like to rescue is mutton monger, an Elizabethan era term that describes a pimp. The term mutton once was used to describe prostitutes, so the mutton monger was the guy selling those nice cuts of meat.
The term can be found in Thomas Dekker’s 1604 play The Second Part of the Honest Whore, which is about a prostitute named Bellafront, her husband (and former john) Matheo and her father Orlando Friscobaldo. Orlando and Matheo aren’t getting along:
Orlando: She like a quean, thou like a knave; she like a whore, thou like a thief.
Matheo: Thief? Zounds! Thief?
Bellafront: Good, dearest Mat! — Father!
Mat: Pox on you both. I’ll not be braved. New satin scorns to be put down with bare bawdy velvet. Thief?
Orl: Ay, thief, th’art a murderer, a cheater, a whoremonger, a pot-hunter, a borrower a beggar –
Bell: Dear father –
Mat: An old ass, a dog, a churl, a chuff, an usurer, a villain, a moth, a mangy mule, with an old velvet footcloth on his back, sir.
Bell: Oh, me!
Orl: Varlet! For this I’ll hang thee.
Mat: Ha ha, Alas!
Orl: Thou keepest a man here, under my nose –
Mat: Under thy beard.
Orl: As arrant a smell-smock, for an old mutton-monger as thyself.
Mat: No, as yourself.
Matheo and his father-in-law go on insulting each other like this for pages. I don’t know if it ends with them killing each other or making out.
Here’s a modern usage of the term for instructive purposes: Jessica Simpson’s dad talks about her breasts like a mutton monger.
Comments to this post will be deleted if they do not use mutton-monger in a sentence.
8 Responses to “Endangered Profanity: Mutton Monger”
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I’d like to nominate the word ofay for resurrection. I love that word. And there just aren’t any really nasty epithets currently in use for white people.
Things look kind of dead around here, rcade. You should find ways to mutton-monger Cruel.com more effectively.
You’re right that we lack good words to denigrate white people that have any bite to them. “Cracker” and “honky” are practically affectionate.
I think this will change when the U.S. becomes majority-minority.
When that happens, I’m going to change careers and become a mutton monger.
It’s a shame you two mutton mongers feel the need for more effective insults to put yourselves down for being White.
Well, there’s so much hatred and fear around, and sometimes I feel left out.
Sorta like a mutton-monger in a gay bar.
Mutton-monger porksword!
You deleted my comment? Why, you mutton mongering tool pouch.
I didn’t want to delete it, you syphilitic son of a mutton monger, but rules are rules.
Ahhh, tough love.