ALAN ASHTON-SMITH

Must it always be rampant?

Last night I went to see Shame, a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been hit in the head with an iron bar and then left to think about the implications of what has happened to you.  Plenty of films manage the iron bar part, but not the left to think part, so I suppose Shame is quite remarkable in delivering not just an immediate blow, but also a sense of prolonged trauma.  It doesn’t leave you reeling as though from some kind of brutal attack; rather it makes you feel as though you’ve suffered such an attack in the relatively recent past, and are now going through a process of recovery characterized by numbness, anxiety and occasional twinges of pain.

Enough about the film though: I want to talk about what happened when I got home and my girlfriend asked me if it had included lots of rampant sex.  I hesitated, then said that there had been a lot of sex, but most of it was not rampant.  ‘Rampant’, I pointed out, means standing up.  She immediately recounted this brief exchange on Facebook, concluding that I am a pedant.

This morning it became apparent that she had mistyped ‘pedant’ as ‘pendant’.  The error provoked amused reactions, but it also made me wonder whether I too had made an error in my declaration that ‘rampant’ means standing up.  Of course, the word ‘rampant’ has more than one meaning: it can signify either the position of being upright on two legs, or something that is wild and uncontrolled.  I had meant that standing up was the primary definition, but by now I was uncertain whether that was the case.

Clearly, the two definitions are connected.  I understood ‘rampant’ to mean standing upright, having read about heraldic terminology as a child.  On coats of arms, an animal is said to be rampant if it is portrayed rearing up on its hind legs.  I confirmed this by running a Google image search for ‘rampant’; lots of drawings of animals appeared on my screen, of which the goat I’ve reproduced here is obviously the coolest.  I then repeated the search with Safe Search disabled, and was pleased to see that the screen remained filled with lions, unicorns and the occasional goat, rather than pornographic photos.  It’s easy to see how the rampant animal might lead to ‘rampant’ meaning uncontrolled or fierce; the beast rearing up on its hind legs is manifestly ready to release his wildness.  If you don’t believe me, just look into that goat’s eyes.

My image search confirmed that ‘rampant’ can definitely mean standing up, but I still needed to check whether rampant meant standing up before it meant wild and uncontrolled.  So I turned to the OED.  Here I found my suspicions to be correct.  The first definition cited is, ‘Of an animal, esp. a lion: rearing or standing with the forepaws in the air, esp. in a threatening manner’, and the earliest recorded usage is c.1300.  It’s not until 1609 that we arrive at the definition, ‘Of a person: violent of unrestrained in action, performance, opinion, etc.; unchecked, holding sway.’  Meanwhile, the third definition – ‘Lustful’ – was recorded as used in 1596 in the lines, ‘Thus began the holie warres of Sion Against the rampant Hagg and whoore of Babylon’.

Having browsed the dictionary, I felt that I was justified in declaring authoritatively that ‘rampant’ means standing up.  Yet it is also clear that it’s possible to have rampant sex in any number of positions.  This troubles me – not for prudish, sentimental reasons, but because the idea of ‘rampant sex’ has become so ubiquitous.  A flick through the tabloids and trashy websites shows that everyone, from the Beckhams to the Osbournes to Benito Mussolini, is having ‘rampant sex’.  It seems that no one ever has sex that isn’t rampant any more.  Must it always be rampant?

One fact that’s evident from the OED’s entry for ‘rampant’ is that the meanings of words change.  The heraldic image of a lion rearing up fiercely has given rise to ‘rampant’ referring to unchecked aggression or lust.  But more recently it seems to have become a word loaded with innuendo.  I am all in favour of the natural evolution of the English language; however, I do think it’s a shame that describing a lion or a goat as ‘rampant’ will more than likely elicit giggling.

There is one abjectly memorable moment in Shame in which the sex-addicted protagonist played by Michael Fassbender spies a couple going at it while standing against a plate glass window, and then engages a prostitute to help him reenact the scene.  I can accept that this is ‘rampant sex’, and am happy to condone it: whatever does it for you.  But I do wish that sex wasn’t described as ‘rampant’ so often that the word ‘rampant’ has come to signify sex.