Is 'spew' a rude word, and if so, why?

Can you have too many books as a child? I grew up in a household with many books but few that I chose myself – which may explain why I favoured those few that did not come heralded with heavy parental recommendations, but as presents from distant relations or family friends. One of these was the Ladybird book What to Look for in Autumn (1959), by E L Grant Watson, with illustrations by C F Tunnicliffe, which I read often, the illustrations becoming fixed in my memory. Only many years later I read the other books in the series, including What to Look for in Winter, which currently sits in a place where it is certain to be opened, more or less daily.

In describing yew berries, Watson talks about them being eaten by thrushes and blackbirds, which ‘usually spew them up again. If you look near yew trees, you will see their spewings’.

The Oxford English Dictionary currently describes the word ‘spew’ as ‘Not now in polite use’. It was once polite enough to feature in the King James Bible, in four locations, notably the well-known ‘because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth’, in the Revelation of St John, and the lesser known, but more generally relevant ‘Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and fall, and rise no more’, in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.

In passing, as an indication of how polite the word once was, the OED cites Alexander Pope’s Epistle to the Earl of Burlington (1731).  

The rich Buffet well-colour'd Serpents grace, 

And gaping Tritons spew to wash your Face.

Lucky Earl of Burlington.

Farmer and Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present (1905) offers only the obscene application of the term, and only in the spelling ‘spew’, with no indication that the word in the sense of vomiting was dubious. H C Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (first published in 1931) had no concerns regarding acceptability, offering the definitions 1 To vomit. 2 (of gun) To sink at the muzzle after too quick firing. And as a transitive verb To vomit up, eject. 

There are two questions here, first regarding its degree of impoliteness, and second regarding spelling. The term does not feature in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but seems now to sit at the edge of acceptability. When did it start to become dodgy? Presumably some time after 1960.

The spelling ‘spue’ emerged during the Middle English period, but according to the OED faded in the 19th century, while the –ew spelling survived throughout from the ninth century to the present.

Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1730 edition) gives only ‘spew’, as does the abbreviated edition of Johnson’s dictionary (1788). Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1852 edition) gives ‘spew’, and though Webster did change his mind about spellings, this was the spelling used in the first edition, of 1828, and further back in his The American spelling book: containing the rudiments of the English language : for the use of schools in the United States, of 1809. 

Nuttall’s Standard Dictionary of 1926 gives only ‘spew’, but Wyld’s Universal Dictionary gives two spellings – spew and spue; these two spellings were offered also in the 1980 edition of The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary. The current online OED gives only ‘spew’. 

The dictionaries seem to have preferred the spelling ‘spew’ alone up till around 1930, and dropped ‘spue’ after 1980, which roughly coincides with the point at which the word came to be deemed impolite. Is a connection fanciful? Does the spelling ‘spew’ somehow mimic the sound of the action more closely than ‘spue’, and thus render the whole thing unpleasant? Do analogous spellings help? Flue, glue, blue, true, are completely neutral, contrasted with chew, threw, blew, flew, and the possibility of graphically physical associations. These are selected to make an entirely unscientific point, but another approach might be more fruitful. Given the choice of two spellings in the two sentences following, which spelling looks more appropriate, ‘spued’ or ‘spewed’?

The animal …. its guts out on the ground.

The locomotive …. fire and sparks out onto the track.

It is noticeable too that in the scientific citations from after 1800 given in the OED the spelling ‘spue’ strongly outnumbers the spelling ‘spew’. 

All of these are tiny influences, but tiny influences can have strong effects in language change. After a conversation with friends regarding whether ‘-ize’ or ‘–ise’ is preferable, it is clear that the slightest thought that ‘-ize’ might be an Americanism turns out to be an absolute decider. No matter that the spelling may have originated in the British Isles.

Gone West, and other places

Over the winter of 1914/15 there was in The Times letters page a correspondence concerning the origin of the phrase ‘gone west’. The question ‘Does any one know the origin or meaning of the soldiers' curious phrase for death, ‘Going West’?’, posed on New Year’s Eve, firmly placed the phrase as one that was associated with, and possibly originated by, soldiers, the association continuing at the beginning of Israel Gollancz’s answer, published on 8 January. Gollancz, at the time Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College London, and a Shakespeare scholar, quoted in his letter lines from a poem from the time of Chaucer:

Women and mony wilsome wy

As wynd and wattir ar gone west

(Women and many a good man

Like wind and water are gone west)

Gollancz’s letter leads down a path linking going west to travelling clockwise and its association with luck, as opposed to travelling widdershins; but more usefully mentions the wide association with the setting sun. But there are also regional origins supposed – including the idea of the condemned felon’s trip from London’s Newgate Prison westwards to the gallows at Tyburn. While the poem is identified as either originating in the West Midlands, or heavily influenced by the dialect of that area, Gollancz also questions whether the phrase was being used more by soldiers from particular areas of the British Isles – Scotland, Ireland or the West of England – noting that a previous correspondent had heard the phrase used by soldiers from Munster, the south-west of Ireland. All of these areas may be seen as having Celtic cultural influences (though what this actually means is difficult to determine), which links to the current definition of ‘gone west’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The sense became widespread during the First World War (1914–18). The relationship between quot. a1532[the poem quoted by Gollancz]  and the later evidence has not been firmly established. Apparently ultimately with reference to the west as the place of the setting sun and perhaps also to its identification (esp. in Celtic traditions) as the abode of the dead. 

The idea of a connection between death and the setting sun continued to be referred to by people fascinated by the phrase during the war, bringing references to other potential sources: the ‘Miscellany’ writer for the Manchester Guardian 25 September 1917 wrote that he had discovered the Chinese phrase hui-hsi, meaning ‘returned west’, or ‘gone to heaven’. The connection seems so natural that it perhaps needs to be pointed out that it is not universal; when Homer’s Odysseus decides to visit the land of the dead he is driven by a wind taking him southwards; and current American slang proposes ideas and processes that fail as having ‘gone south’.

Equally though it is worth wondering why its colloquial use early in the First World War had such a strong take-up. It is notable that the phrase does not appear in Farmer and Henley’s 1905 edition of A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial Usage; Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937) dates its popularization to the First World War, but notes the general idea appearing centuries earlier in English with the reference to the journey to Tyburn. Partridge believed this to be ‘the operative origin of the phrase’ but extended the referential field widely, noting associations he described as romantic, that connected the setting sun to the end of life, quoting a Greek proverb that translates as ‘life draws towards its evening, the west, the setting sun’. Partridge's trajectory of the phrase through five centuries cemented the link to death, from the 15th century to the 16th (‘55 women … are gone west’ [sadly with no reference but possibly a reference to religious or superstitious persecutions]), through the penal irony of the 17th and 18th, to a revival in America in the 19th with associations of the failure of many pioneering adventures; and finally to the cynicism of the trenches in Flanders. It must be said that Partridge ends this chapter of Words! Words! Words! (1933) with uncharacteristic emotion – ‘too many of our friends and our people meet their death like a gallant sun dipping over the western horizon that a better day might be born’. Perhaps the present tense use of ‘meet’ indicates the ongoing nature of the mental experience, but it is rather different in tone from the soldiers’ related terms offered on the same page – ‘pushing up the daisies’ and ‘copping a packet’.