Why Do We Say Screw
Screw up, get screwed, screw someone over, screw the pooch, screw it.
Screw is such a delicious word because it’s both the verb and the noun, which we don’t always get the luxury of having in English: for example, we don’t hole our holes, we drill our holes; we don’t axe with our axe, we chop with our axe. But we do screw our screws. And screw and get screwed by a lot of other things too.
I had heard rumours about where this word comes from before, and I refused to believe it. It seemed too outrageous, too convenient. It also seemed strange that the French word for screw, which is vis, is totally unrelated to the word screw. Considering that, so far, the majority of our tradeswords come from a Gallo-Latin and Norman root, this added to my confusion. So before I tell you where the word screw comes from, let me say that I went down a lot of rabbit holes to put my doubts to rest, so in this one glorious instance, the rumours were true.
Pig dicks.
That’s it. That’s where the word screw comes from. Pig. Dicks.
Let’s see how we get there.
First of all, spoiler alert: this is not the only word we use in building that comes from female pig genitalia. I’ll leave you wondering what the other is. But in the case of screw, this comes from the Latin word scrofa, which essentially means...female pig parts. Now if you remember from your time on the farm, you’ll recall that male pig genitalia is corkscrewed, just like their freaky little tails, and therefore the assumption is that the receiving end of this bizarre wine-opener-penis would be shaped in the inverse.
Now to be fair, the ancient Romans and the romance languages that followed did NOT use scrofa to refer to a screw. Like the sweetly innocent people they are, they used the word vis, which comes from the Latin word for the twirly tendrils on grape vines (which look like pig penises) because of course the French would find a way to connect something to fine wine.
No no, it was the Germans who took the word scrofa and ran with it. Considering the Germans usually have a word for everything, they probably were a little embarrassed that they didn’t have a specific word for pig vag and adopted the Latin word instead. From there, they made inferences, and to this day the German word for screw is Schraube. The joke caught on in the Germanic and Nordic languages, so they also adopted the word into their respective languages (skru in Norwegian, skruva in Swedish, skrúfa in Icelandic) and in English, screw.
Me: “The word screw: in English it’s screw, which is also the word for the act of fucking. Does it have the same connotation in French?”
Him: “LOL LOL LOL”
So, is this where we also get the connotation of “screw” as a sexual act? I can’t say for sure. I think humans will be humans and make sexual inferences from almost anything, and screwing a screw into wood is pretty low-hanging fruit. BUT--the word does make a huge difference. I don’t believe it’s as much of a double-entendre in French or Spanish, where the words aren’t connected to a sex act. In fact, for part of my research on this, I asked a carpenter friend in Québec if the word vis had any sexual connotation and he couldn’t stop laughing. As in, no.
In conclusion, I hope when you use a corkscrew to open a bottle of wine, you will think of the etymological significance of both items--one being related to a pig prick, one being related to a grape vine--and appreciate that somehow they both ended up relating to the word for screw.
And that’s why we say screw.
Side note: this one took a lot of research just because it’s so insane. If you’d like to follow my tracks, I ended up deep in the German equivalent of the OED, the French wikipedia etymology page, and multiple Nordic-language sources: https://www.sprakradet.no/, http://no2014.uib.no/perl/ordbok/no2014.cgi, https://nordeniskolen.org/da/om-norden-i-skolen-siden/lydordbog/, http://no2014.uib.no/perl/ordbok/no2014.cgi
Also, in case you weren’t fully convinced of my commitment to this issue, I also unfortunately looked up other animals that have corkscrew penises and the answer is ducks. Ew.
