Old words that should be brought back: swive

Today we begin a new series: Old Words That Should Be Brought Back.

This series addresses the imbalance created by our Words That Should Be Banned Series. If you take words away from a language, then you are duty-bound to give back.

And so, I give you our first old word in this series: swive.

In the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue "to swive" is defined as: to copulate.

Middle Ages scribe (they didn't type back then) Geoffrey Chaucer brought us "swive" in The Manciple's Tale of his Canterbury Tales when he wrote "For on thy bed thy wife I saw him swive."

What Chaucer's narrator is doing here is breaking the news that someone's wife was getting into a little bit of the old rumpy pumpy with someone who was not her husband. Furthermore, the person who was not her husband was swiving the wife on the bed of the husband.

And who said the Middle Ages were boring?

This typist thanks a very learned typist for offering up "swive" for this series.