From veres vágás ‘red slit’ to Vörösvágás

Risqué euphemism in the correspondence of kuruc general Sándor Károlyi

Abstract

The phrase veres vágás ‘red slit’, occurring in the correspondence of Sándor Károlyi, a kuruc field-marshal, has hitherto been either misunderstood or left unresolved. This paper is an attempt to interpret this phrase convincingly and successfully. In several letters that are peppered with jovial double entendres, Károlyi uses the phrase presumably as a euphemistic reference to ‘female genitalia’. He does not use it to talk about obscene matters, but to express his disapproval of soldiers and leaders who want to stay by their wives. There are several letters in which he reprimands his subordinates or his equals that instead of completing their military or other patriotic duties, they devote themselves to their personal matters, i.e., the safety of their families and wives. The phrase, of which these are the first known written uses, occurs with this meaning in Károlyi’s letters of 1706 and 1711 (as well as in a letter that was a reply to him from one of his subordinates), and in two other cases the phrase is alluded to playfully through a risqué double entendre using the place name Vörösvágás
(today called Červenica, Slovakia). We cannot know for sure whether we are dealing with slang that was in common use during the time or Károlyi’s own expression that was recognizable as such by others, but the fact that vágás ‘slit’ has the same meaning even in our modern slang dictionaries makes the former hypothesis more likely.