by Mark Easton
All of this has encouraged new interest in the amount of swearing there really is in British conversation. Linguists recently assembled the wonderfully named Lancaster Corpus of Abuse, a huge collection of expletives filtered from the 100-million-word British National Corpus of written and spoken English. The average Brit, it emerges, uses eighty to ninety expletives every day, but some individuals are measured swearing more than 500 times a day. Ten taboo terms make up 80 per cent of swearing (you can work them out): the words ‘bloody’ and ‘god’ are most frequently employed by women, among men the most common expletive is ‘f***ing’.
If there is air in cyberspace, it is probably blue: online chat room conversations have been found to include at least one obscenity every minute. The anonymity of the Internet, coupled with its separation from grounded cultural norms, frees consumers to express themselves in terms they would never use in face-to-face conversation.
Swearing has always been an international phenomenon and, with the spread of global communication, is likely to become more so. There are a handful of places where you are still unlikely to hear expletives: traditionally American Indians don’t swear, nor do the Japanese, Malaysians and most Polynesians. But the use of taboo words crosses continents and cultures. Tracking the origin of two of the most offensive English swear words, for example, involves a journey around Europe and back through centuries: the Old Norse kunta, the Middle Dutch conte, Old Frisian kunte and Latin cunnus suggest a mongrel parentage for one; the Old Icelandic fjuka, Old English firk, German ficken, and French foutre point to similarly cosmopolitan sources for the other.
The British, however, seem to have tapped the power of swearing more enthusiastically than other nations. There are no truly robust international comparisons, but one study looking at the word ‘f***’ in British and American conversation found it to be much more prevalent in the UK than the US. Analysing tens of millions of spoken words used on both sides of the Atlantic, the research found the f-word being employed twenty-eight times as often in Britain as America. What also emerged from the same study is a difference in the way swear words are utilised: the Americans chuck around expletives more forcefully; when they engage the f-word it tends to be violent. In Britain, we often employ taboo words with gentle insouciance; sprinkling them into our conversations in much the same way we splash vinegar onto our chips.
Swearing is part of British culture, with a rich historical and social back story. Long before there was an America, we were honing our skills. As a young boy, like millions who preceded me, I was caught sniggering at Chaucer’s fruity vocabulary, juicy rebellious words that seemed at odds with the chalk-dust desiccation of a strict grammar school classroom. In The Canterbury Tales, the Parson reflects upon the widespread nature of medieval swearing in his discourse on the Seven Deadly Sins, upbraiding those who ‘holden it a gentrie or a manly dede to swere grete othes’ (think it is classy or macho to swear forcefully). Sermons from the period confirm that the clergy were concerned: ‘Horible sweryinge, as the most parte of the pepull dose now-adaies’ railed one priest.
The English historian Julian Sharman presented a vivid picture of medieval profanity in his book of 1884, A Cursory History of Swearing. Britain in the Middle Ages, he suggested, was a country ‘inundated with a torrent of the most acrid and rasping blasphemy’. Swearing was the language of religious rebellion, a reaction against the political and juridical power of the church:
Thus it was that, labouring under the ban of priestly exaction, and confronted on all sides by the ghostly emblems of wrath and condemnation, there descended upon England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a torrent of the hardest and direst of verbal abuse. Not mere words of intemperate anger came bubbling to the surface, but sullen and defiant blasphemies, execrations that proclaimed open warfare with authority and a lasting separation from everything that was tender in men’s faith.
Swearing spanned the social spectrum, with the nobility appearing to take particular pride in a well-chosen expletive. Henry VIII swore regularly and, according to the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, his 10-year-old son Edward VI ‘delivered himself of a volley of the most sonorous oaths’ when ascending the throne in 1547. His half-sister Elizabeth I apparently swore ‘like a man’, with the essayist Nathan Drake suggesting that she made the ‘shocking practice’ fashionable, ‘for it is said that she never spared an oath in public speech or private conversation when she thought it added energy to either.’
As with Chaucer, so there has been much schoolboy mirth in discovering rude words in Shakespeare texts. In Twelfth Night, for example, Malvolio analyses the handwriting in a letter he believes may have been penned by his mistress Olivia: ‘By my life this is my lady’s hand. These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s.’ Elizabethan audiences were expected to respond the same way as pupils in a modern English class, giggling at the c-word secreted in the text, and the reference to Olivia’s ‘great pees’.
Hamlet presents the paradox of sixteenth-century swearing. In Act III, the Prince asks Ophelia: ‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’ When rejected, he responds, ‘Do you think I meant country matters?’ (Cue much schoolboy tittering.) ‘That’s a fair thought, to lie between maids’ legs,’ Hamlet adds, Shakespeare determined no dozy student should miss the crude meaning of the Prince’s question. But in Act II, Hamlet despairs at the obscenities dropping from his lips, horrified that he ‘Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion!’ Swearing was simultaneously the vice of princes and of prostitutes, kings and kitchen maids.
The lexicographer Eric Partridge once reflected on how the Bard’s use of crudity compared with the profanity of class-ridden post-war Britain:
Sexual dialogue between men is, no less in Shakespeare than in the smoking-room or — compartment, frank and often coarse: between members of the lower classes, both coarse and, often, brutal; between members of the middle class — well, we hear very little of that!; between aristocrats and other members of the upper and leisured class, it is still frank — it is frequently very frank indeed — but it is also witty.
In Shakespeare’s day, taboo words were verbal weaponry engaged to display both the sharp wit of noblemen and the rough earthiness of peasants. Status was revealed, not by whether one swore, but how one swore. That was to change, however, with the arrival of the Puritans.
The dawn of the seventeenth century saw strict Protestant values become increasingly influential, a movement that resulted in the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players. The law made it an offence for any person in an interlude, pageant or stage play to use ‘jestingly or profanely’ the name of God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost or the Trinity. With a fine of £10 a time (£1,000 in today’s money), plays written in the years after this date had little or no obvious profanity, although the legislation is credited with the spread of ‘minced oaths’ — shortened or altered swear words that could slip past the censor.
The linguistic strictures of the Puritans meant that, when the civil war sliced England in two, swearing became associated with the Royalist cause. The landed gentry would use taboo words, not as a rebellion against the authority of the church, but to put two fingers up to Cromwell and his Puritan Commonwealth. From 1660, with the restoration of the monarchy, England revelled in its freedom to curse once more. ‘Odd’s fish, I am an ugly fellow,’ Charles II pointedly remarked on seeing a portrait of himself. A minced oath for God’s face, ‘odd’s fish’ was apparently the king’s favourite expletive of many.
Like much of Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Britain was trying to work out how to maintain national stability in the face of bitterly divided religious communities. The general response was a more influential civil domain that introduced a code of secular values around notions of tolerance and restraint.
The shift of power from church to state also saw a shift in swearing habits. Expletives must offend almost by definition
, so as blasphemy prosecutions dwindled, so did the use of blasphemous oaths. Instead, swearing became a reaction against the emergence of middle-class gentility. Sexual and excremental obscenities, previously regarded as rather mild profanities, became the most offensive.
The new elite middle class still hit its thumb with a hammer and lost its temper, but exasperation was increasingly met by euphemism, not obscenity. By Jingo! To swear publicly was to reveal oneself as uncivilised as the lower orders. Verbal gentility and self-control were the identification marks of high status, modesty central to the new manners.
Writing in The Connoisseur magazine in 1754, the dramatist George Colman revealed the class divide that had emerged.
The shocking practice of Cursing and Swearing: a practice, which (to say nothing at present of its impiety and profaneness) is low and indelicate, and places the man of quality on the same level with the chairman at his door. A gentleman would forfeit all pretensions to that title, who should choose to embellish his discourse with the oratory of Billingsgate, and converse in the style of an oyster-woman.
The fish market at Billingsgate was regarded as the stinking core of British vulgarity. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary explained it as ‘a place where there is always a crowd of low people, frequent brawls and foul language’. The word ‘Billingsgate’ had its own definition: ‘Ribaldry; foul language’, reinforcing the link between swearing and the lower orders.
As the middle-class fashion for modesty spread (see ‘T is for Toilet’), so it seems there was an equal and opposite increase in lavatorial crudity among the working classes. The simple word ‘shit’, which would have raised few eyebrows a century earlier, was scratched into walls of important public buildings by those who resented the power of the bourgeoisie. The word ‘piss’, which appeared in the authorised King James Bible (‘eat their own dung, and drink their own piss’: 2 Kings 18:27), gradually became loaded with vulgar association. The c-word, so casually planted in Elizabethan texts, was effectively exorcised from English literature for two hundred years.
With the Victorian era, concern that potentially offensive words might upset sensitive souls led to ludicrous examples of censorship. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë makes the point when her character Mr Lockwood relates an encounter with Heathcliff: ‘“And you, you worthless—” he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash.’ The c-word on this occasion would appear to be cow.
In fact, Wuthering Heights was regarded as quite shocking: the word ‘damn’ appears twelve times, ‘devil’ twenty-seven times and on four occasions do characters beseech ‘God’s sake’. In the Editor’s Preface, Emily’s sister Charlotte recognises the gamble the novel takes with Victorian sensibilities: ‘A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly at the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only — a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length.’
George Bernard Shaw prompted inevitable outrage in 1914 when he highlighted the linguistic social divide in his lampoon on the British class system, Pygmalion. The character of flower-girl Eliza Doolittle, whose Cockney accent is transformed to that of a duchess, shocked middle-class theatre audiences by announcing in cut-glass tones: ‘Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.’ It was reported how, on the first night, the utterance of ‘the word’ was greeted by ‘a few seconds of stunned disbelieving silence, and then hysterical laughter for at least a minute and a quarter’. Headlines suggested ‘Threats by Decency League’ and ‘Theatre to be Boycotted’. The Bishop of Woolwich was apparently horrified.
Shaw’s provocative tweaking of bourgeois verbal propriety heralded a period in which the coarse vocabulary of the working man became an international political issue. In 1923 Leon Trotsky wrote in Pravda of ‘The Struggle for Cultured Speech’: ‘Swearing in our lower classes was the result of despair, embitterment, and above all, of slavery without hope and escape. The swearing of our upper classes, the swearing that came out of the throat of the gentry and of those in office, was the outcome of class rule, of slave-owners’ pride, and of unshakeable power.’ He encouraged Russian workers to ‘do away radically with abusive speech’.
In France, the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu argued that, since French lower classes had neither the time nor the money to acquire refined speech, verbal gentility was used by the bourgeoisie to maintain the social hierarchy. But he also suggested that the working classes were, in a sense, complicit. ‘Groups invest themselves totally, with everything that opposes them to other groups, in the common words which express their social identity, i.e. their difference.’
In pre-war Britain, the same things were happening. The middle classes were using their educational and financial advantage to clip their accent and vocabulary to shape their status. The working classes were asserting their identity by proudly demonstrating rich and often fruity vernacular. Swearing was recruited to the class struggle.
Key battles would be fought in the 1960s. The uncensored edition of D. H. Lawrence’s explicit novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in 1960, three decades after it was written, included repeated examples of the f-word and the c-word. The obscenity trial that followed saw the jury return a ‘not guilty’ verdict.
In 1965, on a late night television arts show called BBC-3, the critic and literary manager of the National Theatre, Kenneth Tynan, was asked if he would allow a play in which sexual intercourse took place. ‘Oh I think so certainly,’ Tynan replied nonchalantly. ‘I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word “f***” is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.’ He was wrong. The BBC’s switchboard was jammed with indignant callers and, as Tynan’s widow Kathleen noted later, ‘the episode for a few days eclipsed all other news, including the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia and the war in Vietnam.’ There were motions in the House of Commons demanding Tynan be prosecuted for obscenity and calls for the BBC’s Director-General Sir Hugh Greene to resign. Despite the vehemence of the outcry, however, no heads rolled and the 1960s carried on swinging. In the Guardian, the journalist Stanley Reynolds asked why ‘that one simple word of four letters can provoke a greater reaction in us than long and complex words like apartheid, rebellion, illegal, police state and treason’.
Deference to the Establishment and its bourgeois values was disintegrating. The alarm of the conservative middle classes was personified in the redoubtable Mary Whitehouse, a Shropshire schoolmistress who founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and accused the BBC’s Sir Hugh of being, more than anyone else, responsible for the ‘moral collapse in this country’. But the wave of liberalism sweeping over Britain ultimately washed such protests aside. The taboos of the old order became the freedoms of the new; obscenity was, once again, employed as a weapon in the battle for social change.
In the February 1970 edition of the subversive Oz magazine, Germaine Greer described the fight for women’s rights in deliberately provocative terms: ‘The c*** must take the steel out of the cock and make it flesh again.’ Feminist groups employed what were called ‘semantic shock tactics’, using acronyms like SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and advocating revolution by ‘f***ing up the system’.
In his Anatomy of Swearing, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu noted:
Until recently swearing in women was negatively sanctioned as unfeminine and bypassed by the resort to emotional expression through weeping. With the growing emancipation of woman from her inferior status she has now altogether abandoned the privilege of swooning and has reduced the potential oceans of tears to mere rivulets. Today, instead of swooning or breaking into tears, she will often swear. It is, in our view, a great advance upo
n the old style.
Swearing had become the argot of political and intellectual defiance, employed by a wave of British poets and writers including Philip Larkin, Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterson. As well as being stockpiled in the armoury of the liberals, expletives also became ammunition in a generational struggle.
The 1960s had given a voice to teenagers and from their young mouths poured some ancient oaths. When the Sex Pistols appeared on television in 1976, the band was encouraged to demonstrate their ‘punk’ credentials by presenter Bill Grundy. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘say something outrageous.’ When guitarist Steve Jones replied by calling him a ‘dirty bastard’, Grundy urged him to go further. ‘Go on, again,’ he goaded.
‘You dirty f***er,’ Jones duly responded.
It was a sign of how the balance of power had shifted that Bill Grundy’s career was effectively destroyed by the incident while the Sex Pistols went on to have a string of hits and a number one album, Never Mind the Bollocks. Vulgarity was in vogue, an easy way for those who made money from the teenage market to connect with rebellious youth.
In the United States, where the language of the ghetto had a more aggressive tone, taboo words were increasingly exploited by the rap and hip hop groups of the 1980s and 90s. Members of the Miami-based band 2 Live Crew were arrested by a Florida sheriff on charges of obscenity after performing songs from their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. Among the tracks were ‘Get The F*** Out Of My House (Bitch)’ and ‘The F*** Shop’, the lyrics of which were defended at the trial by the prominent literary critic and black intellectual Henry Louis Gates. He argued the profanity had important roots in African-American vernacular speech and should be protected. The band was acquitted.