drawing-rooms, people more familiar with books than with the realities of
life, now laid down the rules of modesty, and were ever enlarging it, ever
inventing new subtleties of gesture and speech, which it would be immodest
to neglect, and which are ever being rendered vulgar by use and ever
changing.

It was at this time, probably, that the custom of inventing an
arbitrary private vocabulary of words and phrases for the purpose
of disguising references to functions and parts of the body
regarded as immodest and indecent, first began to become common.
Such private slang, growing up independently in families, and
especially among women, as well as between lovers, is now almost
universal. It is not confined to any European country, and has
been studied in Italy by Niceforo (_Il Gergo_, 1897, cap. 1 and
2), who regards it as a weapon of social defence against an
inquisitive or hostile environment, since it enables things to be
said with a meaning which is unintelligible to all but the
initiated person. While it is quite true that the custom is
supported by the consciousness of its practical advantages, it
has another source in a desire to avoid what is felt to be the
vulgar immodesty of direct speech. This is sufficiently shown by
the fact that such slang is mostly concerned with the sacro-pubic
sphere. It is one of the chief contributions to the phenomena of
modesty furnished by civilization. The claims of modesty having
effected the clothing of the body, the impulse of modesty finds a
further sphere of activity--half-playful, yet wholly
imperative--in the clothing of language.

Modesty of speech has, however, a deep and primitive basis,
although in modern Europe it only became conspicuous at the
beginning of the eighteenth century. "All over the world," as
Dufour put it, "to do is good, to say is bad." Reticences of
speech are not adequately accounted for by the statement that
modesty tends to irradiate from the action to the words
describing the action, for there is a tendency for modesty to be
more deeply rooted in the words than in the actions. "Modest
women," as Kleinpaul truly remarks, "have a much greater horror
of saying immodest things than of doing them; they believe that
fig-leaves were especially made for the mouth." (Kleinpaul,
_Sprache ohne Worte_, p. 309.) It is a tendency w