Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (53 page)

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W.O.1
stands for “warrant officer first class,”
C.O
. for “commanding officer.”

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Wanker
is quite taboo in Britain, though almost unused in the United States. The etymology is unknown; it was first employed around 1950, and means “masturbator,” or figuratively “loser” or “jerk.”
Jerk
(
jerk off
) is one of our few contributions to the “masturbation as insult” category, while Brits also have
tosser
and
frig
, which, as we have seen, are obscene terms for the act.

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Ezra Pound had censored the first few sections, taking out Joyce’s phrase “the grey sunken cunt of the world” and removing Leopold Bloom’s trip to the outhouse—perhaps the first noncomical depiction of defecation in literary history. It is possible that these would have brought down the censors earlier.

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The British ban was lifted in 1936, largely as a result of the American court cases.