It was not too long for me to read at all.
Actually I read we should blame the French for Jack being a nickname of John.
A lot of English weirdness can be attributed to the French. It's why low class words in English typically have Anglo-Saxon origins while upper class words typically have a French origin.
Compare:
Pig (Anglo-Saxon) and Pork (French)
Cow (Anglo-Saxon) and Beef (French)
Chicken (Anglo-Saxon) and Poultry (French)
Sheep (Anglo-Saxon) and Mutton (French)
Those who worked the fields and raised the animals were Anglo-Saxon peasants ruled over by a Norman French aristocracy, who benefited from their labor. So the animal of the field and the animal of the table are divided along these lines.
This actually is part of a long history of Anglo-Saxon words often being regarded as vulgar or even obscene. Hence why it's considered obscene to call excrement by a certain four letter word, but words such as excrement and feces, which have French and Latin origins, are considered acceptable speech. The very word "vulgar" is from Latin
vulgaris, meaning "common" as in "the common people"; which is why the Vulgate is so-called; it is called the
Vulgata, the Bible in the common tongue (at a time when Latin was the common tongue of Western Europe). However over time, in English aristocratic--and the emerging middle class which would often seek to imitate the aristocracy--vulgarity (association with the common people, e.g. the poor and the lower working classes) essentially became associated with the obscene.
It was obscene to speak of certain things and to employ a commoner's tongue, because these are the things said down at the docks, and in the mills, and factories. It's how blue-collar people spoke.
And we've inherited a lot of this still. Most common people throughout history haven't been adverse to talking about common and ordinary things; though upper classes typically stigmatize these and reckon them as impolite. It's also a lot easier to avoid talking about certain things if you are removed from those circumstances. You never have to complain about cleaning up human *bleep* off the street if you don't have to clean human excrement off the street and then deal with all the potential disease of lots of cities having literal open sewers. Where people literally were throwing buckets of human waste onto the street below, and relied on people to clean it and rain to wash it away.
Anyway, mini-rant over. I just think it's fascinating the way that not only does culture shape language, but in turn language shapes culture. Our cultural taboos and the way that, very often, such things arise from a disparity in class and social station within a society.
-CryptoLutheran
