Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (2 page)

To put it another way, as some linguists do, swearwords are often employed in a
nonliteral
sense. “He fucked her” is a literal or denotative use—they had sex. “The fuck you are!” is a nonliteral use—nobody is having any kind of sex here, or referring to it; it is simply a vigorous denial. The
f
-word here serves as an intensifier, important for the connotation it carries and not for its literal meaning. Our strongest offensive words can almost always be used nonliterally (except, as we will see, the racial epithets).

Historically, swearwords have been thought to possess a deeper, more intimate connection to the things they represent than do other words.
Shit
, to put it another way, is more closely connected to the thing itself in all its smelly, sticky yuckiness than is
poop
or
excrement
. These words vividly reveal taboo body parts, actions, and excretions
that culture demands we conceal, whether by covering with clothing, shrouding in privacy, or flushing down the toilet. A version of this theory was given legal sanction by the United States Supreme Court in 2009, when it heard a case on “fleeting expletives,” including that of the musician Bono, who accepted an award at the Golden Globes ceremony with “This is really, really fucking brilliant.”
The Court agreed
with the Federal Communications Commission that the use of the
f
-word “invariably invokes a coarse sexual image.” Even when a happy rock star uses the word to describe his surprise, it “inherently has a sexual connotation.” The idea is that when Bono says “fucking,” you cannot help picturing people (who?) getting it on.
Some language experts have criticized
the FCC’s and the Court’s argument, and it would seem that this case pretty obviously involves a nonliteral use, employed for its connotation. It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with expressing how happy and surprised the singer feels. But this does not change the point that
fucking
acquired its intense emotional power and its status as one of the worst words in the English language from its ability to access one of our deepest taboos and bring it to light in a way that no other word could or can.

It is fairly easy for us today to see how obscenities fit the physiological, linguistic, and historical criteria that we’ve laid out. But what about oaths, which were the most highly charged, most offensive language in English for centuries? Swearing an oath can mean two different things, one positive and one negative. In the “good” sense, an oath means promising before God to tell the truth—this is sincere oath swearing. Such oaths are an important part of society today: witnesses swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, public officials swear oaths of office, businessmen swear to their wives that they are not shtupping (Yiddish for “to push, shove”) their secretaries. In the past, such oaths could be a matter of life and death. People were imprisoned and even executed because they refused to swear before God, or swore in some wrong way. In the “bad” sense, an oath means blasphemous or vain swearing, words or
phrases that take God’s name in vain, mention his body parts, or otherwise detract from his honor. This includes everything from making God witness a lie—swearing that you are not shtupping when you are—to exclaiming “Jesus Christ!” when you are upset.

Oaths have come a long way from the days of the Middle Ages, when
by God’s bones
would have been more shocking than
cunt
. Today,
God
and
damn it
are probably too mild to increase the heart rate of many people, but, I would argue, they would have in the past. Empirical evidence for this is hard to come by—there was obviously no medieval skin conductance testing, and though the Victorians discovered the galvanic skin response in the late nineteenth century, they did not use it to investigate swearing. Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that oaths were carriers of and triggers for great emotion, like obscenities today, and were stored in the same “lower” regions of the brain. We have already encountered Baudelaire and his “cré nom”; other evidence comes from early reports of people suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. Tourette’s syndrome is characterized by a variety of motor and vocal tics including, most famously,
coprolalia
, the apparently uncontrollable utterance of obscene words.
The patient with the first reported case
of Tourette’s syndrome (1825) compulsively called out oaths as well as obscenities. She was a French aristocrat, the Marquise de Dampierre, who apparently shocked society with periodic outbursts of
sacré nom de Dieu
as well as
merde
(“shit”) and
foutu cochon
(best translated as “fucking pig”). This balance is exactly what we would expect in the nineteenth century. Her brain had stored a mix of oaths and obscenities with which to offend when the irresistible urge came on.

Linguistically, vain oaths were used in the same ways and for the same reasons that we employ obscenities today. A fourteenth-century tailor who pricked himself with his needle would have shouted “By God’s bones!” (or nails, blood, eyes, etc.), not “Shit!” Oaths in the past offered the catharsis we now seek in obscene language. Medieval insults too were often prefaced with an oath—“By God …
thy drasty rhyming is not worth
a turd,” the Host of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
(1386) tells another pilgrim when he wants him to shut up. The Host uses his oath for emphasis, to make clear how much he hates the other pilgrim’s poetry. Just like
fuck
or
cunt
, here “by God” has an offensive power in excess of its literal meaning. It is used for its connotation, not its denotation.

Lastly, we have the historical idea that swearwords possess a closer connection to the things they represent than do other words, and this is also true for oaths. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, oaths were thought to have direct and automatic effects on God—this is what gave them their power. An oath forced God to look down from heaven and witness that a person’s words were true. And as surprising as it sounds, oaths in certain forms—those by God’s bones and other such body parts—were thought to rip apart Christ’s body as it sat in heaven. They had an extremely close connection to what they represented—they could in certain respects control God and even injure him.

English has many other terms with which to define and describe swearing. Racial slurs and epithets are the most important of these. (An
epithet
indicates a quality that is supposed to be characteristic of the person or thing being described, or is simply an abusive term.) To many people, words such as
nigger
and
paki
are now the most offensive words in the English language. Certainly for me, the sections on racial slurs in
Chapter 6
and in the epilogue were the hardest to write. I found surprisingly little problem in writing
fuck
over and over and over, but I balked at thinking about and discussing the
n
-word. In 1970, the editor in chief of
Webster’s New World Dictionary
was likewise more uncomfortable with epithets than with the old sexual vocabulary,
referring to “terms of racial or ethnic opprobrium”
as “those true obscenities.”

In what sense are racial slurs obscenities?
Obscene
is the term we use to describe our worst, most offensive words, which up until the recent past have been the sexual obscenities. Racial slurs access a taboo that is now as strong as or stronger than those against mentioning or revealing certain body parts, and so we call them obscene
too. But racial slurs have a deeper kinship with sexual and excremental obscenities as well. Using or even hearing them makes us feel dirty, morally impure. As Steven Pinker puts it: “
To hear
nigger
is to try on
, however briefly, the thought that there is something contemptible about African Americans, and thus to be complicit in a community that standardized that judgment by putting it into a word.” Words such as
fuck
and
cunt
represent what must be concealed in clothing or in privacy; words such as
paki
and
nigger
represent what must be concealed in the mind, what cannot be thought. (Though it must be said that in some communities of speakers, not only can
nigger
be thought, it can be a compliment, a sign of affection, and a term of respect—
it helps create a sense
of group identity among those, mostly young, African American men, who employ it in positive ways, as Randall Kennedy, author of
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
, points out.)

Cursing
in its most literal sense invokes a deity to make something bad happen to someone. But the bloggers who give advice about “how to stop cursing in front of your children” are not explaining how to stop calling the wrath of God down on your neighbors while your kids watch. They are explaining how to reduce the frequency of your
fuck it
s and
shit
s.
Profane
is the opposite of
sacred
—it is blasphemous, irreverent.
Profanity
, however, in an ironic twist, now refers almost exclusively to obscenities, as Hunter S. Thompson demonstrated in an exchange of letters: “I was particularly struck by the fact that
you ‘take exception to the profanities
utilized in (my) letter’ … and to that I can only say Fuck Off.” That these words now pick out obscene language is vocabularial testimony that religious swearing is not as powerful as it once was—linguistic functions that once were performed by words and phrases that called on God or blasphemed him are now performed mostly by words for taboo human body parts and actions.

Expletives
were originally words or phrases that didn’t add anything to the meaning of a sentence or a poem but merely served to fill up space. When Samuel Johnson says of Alexander Pope, “
Expletives
he very early ejected from his verses,” he doesn’t mean that the juvenile Pope sounded like the rapper Eminem until he cleaned up his act; he means, rather, that Pope got rid of meaningless fillers—descriptions such as
sweet gentleman
, affectations such as
thereby
and
therein
—in his poetry. The term
expletive
came to refer to swearwords because they likewise often contribute little literal meaning to a sentence, though they can add a big emotional punch—think Bono, not Pope.

Vulgar
language makes a class distinction—it is that spoken by ordinary, uneducated folk. It has become a synonym for swearing because “the common people” have through the centuries been thought to be more likely than others to employ profane or obscene language. This is borne out by the old phrase “to swear like a tinker” (a tinker is a craftsman who wandered around fixing metal utensils, one step up from a vagrant). The equally old phrase “to swear like a lord,” however, suggests that the upper classes were thought to use their fair share of profane language too. (We will examine the class dimensions of swearing in
Chapter 5
—Victorians worried a great deal about vulgarity and social class.)

The terms
blasphemy, abusive language, dirty language
, and
bad language
can also all indicate swearing, in some form or another. English has no shortage of ways with which to refer to the words we’re interested in. As we can see even from this brief discussion, however, there is also a lot of slippage in these terms. When you curse, you could be calling someone a “shithead,” or you could be going for something more elaborate, like this traditional Yiddish one: “May all your teeth fall out except one—and that should give you a toothache.” “Shithead” is swearing, “May your teeth fall out” is not, though it is related to swearing, as I’ll show. We will discuss when necessary these other categories that might or might not contain swearwords, but we will focus on oaths and obscenities. These two terms best reflect the historical reality of how people have sworn over the centuries—all the words and phrases we’ll discuss fit into these two overarching categories, though each may also count as abusive language, profanity, an expletive, or what have you.

For most of the very long period covered by this book, only oaths were referred to or considered to be “swearing”; obscenities occupied a separate category of “wanton” or “obscene” language. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that “swearing” began to indicate both oaths and obscene words, some time after the
f
-word and its relatives had become shocking and offensive and had begun to be used as swearwords. I have tried to reflect this historical practice in my own use of the word
swearing
. For periods before the twentieth century, I have tried to preserve the distinction between oaths and obscenities; from the twentieth century on, I use the word
swearing
in its contemporary sense, which includes both kinds of “bad words,” religious oaths and sexual/excremental obscenities.

Why write a book about swearing at all? When I was seven years old, a friend told me that after school she would show me something terrible. I was filled with curiosity. We were in second grade—what could be so awful, at school? She took me outside after class, onto the playground. There, on a piece of climbing equipment shaped like a caterpillar, some clever soul had written “fuck shit.” I knew what the second word was but not the first. She didn’t either, it turned out. I asked her what it meant, and she confided, “If you put those two words together, it’s really bad.” (Apparently we were more sheltered than the majority of American children. Psychologist Timothy Jay has studied childhood swearing patterns and has found that “
swearing really takes off
between [ages] three and four.” Perhaps the child at my son’s preschool was not so precocious after all.)

This book in some ways is an attempt to explain how my friend and I came to be staring at that caterpillar, interested, scandalized, and confused. At seven I didn’t understand what the
f
-word meant, but I recognized that it had power; today I know more than anyone needs to know about it, yet I am truly shocked when I hear it used (though, as you have already seen, I refer to it a lot—that is what philosophers call the “use-mention” distinction). It is a testimony to their power that I can still be offended by these words that I have been thinking and writing about for years.