"Many words we consider, at best, crude were medieval common-or-garden words of description..."

"... arse, shit, fart, bollocks, prick, piss, turd – and were not considered obscene. To say ‘I’m going to piss’ was the equivalent of saying ‘I’m going to wee’ today and was politer than the new 16th-century vulgarity, ‘I’m going to take a leak’... Sard, swive and fuck were all slightly rude words for sexual intercourse.... Frig and jape were also on the cusp of offensiveness.... For a phrase to express unfortunate circumstances that seem impossible to overcome (‘we’re fucked’), the Historical Thesaurus of English tells us that they would have proclaimed themselves to be ‘in hot water’ (first use 1537), ‘in a pickle’ (1562), ‘in straits’ (1565) or, in the most extreme predicament, at one’s ‘utter shift’ (c.1604). To ‘fuck up’ or spoil something, they’d have used ‘to bodge’ or ‘to botch’. To say something was codswallop, baloney, bollocks, they’d have gone with trumpery, baggage, rubbish or the wonderful reduplicating terms that appear in the 1570s and 80s: flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, or fible-fable."

Writes Suzannah Lipscomb in "Explicit Content/Rude words are a constant, but their ability to cause offence is in flux. Historians should know their flim-flam from their fiddle-faddle" (History Today).