Literature chapter
Polish: the word dupa ("arse"/"ass") is called cztery litery ("the four letters"). Historically, also kiep, which formerly used to be a taboo word meaning "female genitals", but presently is a mild or humorous insult meaning "a fool". There is also a phrase Siadaj na cztery litery (sit down on your four letter), meaning sit on your arse.
Hebrew: another meaning of "four-letter word" (in Greek, tetragrammaton) is the Hebrew name of the Abrahamic God, that is, י-ה-ו-ה (commonly transliterated as "YHW and H", "Yahweh", and "Jehovah"), which many practicing Jews do not speak aloud and protect when written (see Geniza). It is an example of the quadriliteral words of Hebrew.
Good authors too who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words. Writing prose, anything goes.
— Cole Porter, "Anything Goes" (1934)
Common four-letter words (in this sense) that are widely considered vulgar or offensive to a notable degree include: cunt, fuck (and regional variants such as feck, fick and foak), jism (or gism), jizz, piss, twat and tits. Piss in particular, however, may be used in non-excretory contexts (pissed off, i.e. "angry", in US English and British UK English ; pissed, i.e. "drunk" in UK English) that are often not considered particularly offensive, and the word also occurs several times with its excretory meaning in the King James Bible. Several of these have been declared legally indecent under the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) TV and radio open-airwave broadcasting regulations.
A number of additional words of this length are upsetting to some, for religious or personal sensitivity reasons, such as: arse (UK), damn, fart, hell, shit, wang, and wank (UK). Racist, ableist, and slurs pertaining to an individual's sexual orientation may also qualify, such as mong (in the UK not a racial slur, but short for Mongol, or someone with Down's Syndrome - previously called Mongolism), gook, kike, spic, coon, dago and dyke. Several "four-letter words" have multiple meanings (some even serving as given names), and usually only offend when used in their vulgar senses, for example: cock, dick, knob, muff, puss, shag (UK) and toss (UK). A borderline category includes words that are euphemistic evasions of "stronger" words, as well as those that happen to be short and have both an expletive sound to some listeners as well as a sexual or excretory meaning (many also have other, non-vulgar meanings): butt (US), crap, darn, dump, heck, mofo (US), poop (US), slag (UK, NZ, AUS), slut and turd, as several examples. Finally, certain four-lettered terms with limited usage can be considered offensive by some, within the regional dialect in which they are used, such as mong and mary.
Occasionally the phrase "four-letter word" is humorously used to describe common words composed of four letters. Typical examples include the word work, implying that work can be unpleasant, or the game of golf, jokingly referred to as a four-letter word when a player's pastime becomes an exercise in frustration. Charlotte Observer journalist Doug Robarchek noted in 1993 how many politicians have names with four letters, "Ever notice how many U.S. politicians have names that are also four-letter words? Ford, Dole, Duke, Bush, Gore . . . and how many make us think of four-letter words?"[2]
Campaign button used in the 1976 United States presidential election. "My two favorite four lettered words Ford/ Dole
The phrase four-letter word refers to a set of English-language words written with four letters which are considered profane, including common popular or slang terms for excretory functions, sexual activity and genitalia, and (depending on the listener/reader) sometimes also certain terms relating to Hell and/or damnation when used outside their original religious context(s), and/or slurs. The "four-letter" claim refers to the fact that a large number of (but not all) English "swear words" are incidentally four-character monosyllables. This description came into use during the first half of the twentieth century.
Justine, published in 1957, is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's literary tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet. The first in the tetralogy, Justine is one of four interlocking novels, each of which tells various aspects of a complex story of passion and deception from differing points of view. The quartet is set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in the 1930s and 1940s, the city itself as described by Durrell becoming as much of a complex character as the human protagonists of the novels.[1][2] Since first becoming available to the public and reviewers in 1957, Justine has inspired what has been called "an almost religious devotion among readers and critics alike."[3
The Alexandria Quartet is a tetralogy of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1957 and 1960. A critical and commercial success, the first three books present three perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria (Egypt), before and during World War II. The fourth book is set six years later.
As Durrell explains in his preface to Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject–object relation, with modern love as the theme. The Quartet's first three books offer the same sequence of events through several points of view, allowing individual perspectives of a single set of events. The fourth book shows change over time.
The four novels are:
Justine (1957)
Balthazar (1958)
Mountolive (1958)
Clea (1960)
In a 1959 Paris Review interview,[1] Durrell described the ideas behind the Quartet in terms of a convergence of Eastern and Western metaphysics, based on Einstein's overturning of the old view of the material universe, and Freud's doing the same for the concept of stable personalities, yielding a new concept of reality.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Alexandria Quartet #70 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
The Avignon Quintet is a five-volume series of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1974 and 1985. The novels are openly metafictional and reflect the developments in experimental fiction following after Durrell's previous The Alexandria Quartet. The action of the novels is set before and during World War II, largely in France, Egypt, and Switzerland.
The novels range among multiple and contradictory narrators, often with each purporting to have written the others, and the thematic materials range from a form of Gnosticism[1] blended with Catharism, obsession with mortality, Nazism, and World War II to Grail Romances, metafiction, Quantum Mechanics,[2] and sexual identity.
The five novels are:
Monsieur (1974)
Livia (1978)
Constance (1982)
Sebastian (1983)
Quinx (1985)
Durrell often referred to the work as a "quincunx", and the books were only published together as The Avignon Quintet in 1992, two years after Durrell's death in 1990, although they are described as such in the first edition of Quinx. The notion of the quincunx challenges any linear approach to the novels, which is reflected in their stylistic features. The character Livia may be modeled in part on Unity Mitford, a prominent supporter of fascism and friend of Adolf Hitler.
A quincunx is a quadrant/cross
A quincunx is a cross/quadrant made of five dots.
Various literary works use or refer to the quincunx pattern for its symbolic value:
The English physician Sir Thomas Browne in his philosophical discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658) elaborates upon evidence of the quincunx pattern in art, nature and mystically as evidence of "the wisdom of God". Although Browne wrote about quincunx in its geometric meaning, he may have been influenced by English astrology, as the astrological meaning of "quincunx" (unrelated to the pattern) was introduced by the astronomer Kepler in 1604.
James Joyce uses the term in Grace, a short story in The Dubliners of 1914, to describe the seating arrangement of five men in a church service. Lobner[16] argues that in this context the pattern serves as a symbol both of the wounds of Christ and of the Greek cross.
Lawrence Durrell's novel-sequence The Avignon Quintet is arranged in the form of a quincunx, according to the author; the final novel in the sequence is called Quinx, the plot of which includes the discovery of a quincunx of stones.[17]
The Quincunx (ISBN 0-345-37113-5) is the title of a lengthy and elaborate novel by Charles Palliser set in 19th-century England, published in 1989; the pattern appears in the text as a heraldic device, and is also reflected in the structure of the book.[18]
In the first chapter of The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald's narrator cites Browne's writing on the quincunx. The quincunx in turn becomes a model for the way in which the rest of the novel unfolds.[19]
Séamus Heaney describes Ireland's historical provinces as together forming a quincunx, as the Irish word for province cúige (literally: "fifth part") also explicates. The five provinces of Ireland were Ulster (north), Leinster (east), Connacht (west), Munster (south) and Meath (center, and now a county within Leinster). More specifically, in his essay Frontiers of Writing, Heaney creates an image of five towers forming a quincunx pattern within Ireland, one tower for each of the five provinces, each having literary significance.
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