American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Regarding the etymology of the euphemism darn, with its variants dern and durn, there is a difference of opinion among lexicographers. Noah Webster, in his “Dissertations on the English Language,”1 sought to identify it with the Old English word dern or derne, meaning secret. He said:

  For many years I had supposed the word dern, in the sense of great or severe, was local in New England. Perhaps it may not now be used anywhere else, but it was once a common English word. Chaucer used it in the sense of secret, earnest, etc.

  This clerk was cleped Hende Nicholas,

  Of derne love he could and of solas.

  The Miller’s Tale, 1. 3200.

  Ye mosten be full derne, as in this case.

  do. 1. 3297.

  The word is in common use in New England and pronounced darn. It has not, however, the sense it had formerly; it is now used as an adverb to qualify an adjective, as darn sweet, denoting a degree of the quality.

  This etymology was accepted by the late George Philip Krapp, and argued for with great learning in his excellent work, “The English Language in America,”2 and it is adopted by the DAE and mentioned favorably by the NED Supplement. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is considerably more plausibility in Dr. Louise Pound’s theory, launched in 1927,3 that darn and its congeners, dern and durn, are really derived from tarnal, an American contraction of eternal that arose during the Eighteenth Century and was in wide use as an intensive by the time of the Revolution. There are, to be sure, some difficulties in this theory, but they are not as great as those which confront the Webster-Krapp etymology. Tarnal, at the start, was a mere intensive, but it quickly gave rise to tarnation as a euphemism for damnation, and in a very short while tarnation was in use as an expletive. By 1798 it had assimilated the initial d of damnation, and in the course of time tarnal and its direct derivatives in t dropped out of use, and only darn remained. The evidence against the Webster-Krapp etymology and in favor of that of Dr. Pound is somewhat complicated and rather too technical to be summarized easily; it may be found in the Pound article before mentioned, and in a later discussion by Woodford A. Heflin in American Speech.1

  Darn as a mere intensive, as in Webster’s darn sweet, is traced by the DAE no further back than his mention of it in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” but it must have been in use in America for some time before that. Tarnal, as an intensive, is traced to 1775. Both words took on the special sense of damned very soon afterward. The DAE’s first example of darnation is dated 1825, but Thornton, cited by Heflin, traced the word to 1798. Tarnal and all its derivatives, whether in t or in d, are Americanisms. Visiting Englishmen found them piquant, and took them home. Dickens reported darn as an expletive in his “American Notes,” 1842, and made one of his Americans use it in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” 1843. But it never really took hold in England. Not by a darned sight is traced by the DAE to 1834 and marked an Americanism. It was preceded by not by a jugful, 1833, and has been followed by various euphemisms of the second degree, e.g., not by a considerable sight, used by Mark Twain in “Huckleberry Finn,” 1884, and not by a long sight, used by Joel Chandler Harris in “Sister Jane, Her Friends and Acquaintances,” 1896. Darn seems quite innocuous to most Americans today, but so recently as 1941 a Federal judge sitting in New York was objecting to its use in his courtroom, and threatening a lawyer who used it with punishment for contempt of court.2 Rather curiously, Webster 1934 does not list either darn as an expletive or its variants, dern and durn. Damn is listed, and also goddam (the latter in the French sense of an Englishman), but not darn. The verb to darn, meaning to repair a hole in a fabric, may come from the old English derne or dierne to which Webster and Krapp sought to lay the expletive, but it is much more probable that it is derived from derner, a French dialect verb which likewise means to repair.

  Dog-gone is marked an Americanism by the DAE and traced to the middle of the last century. Its origin is said to be uncertain, but there seems to be reasonable ground for believing that it is simply the Scotch dagone, of exactly the same significance and use, changed in spelling and pronunciation by some vague association with going to the dogs.1 In the common speech, indeed, it is often dag-gone, with the first syllable rhyming with drag. As adjectives both it and darn have produced superlatives by analogy with damndest, to wit, doggondest and darndest (derndest, durndest). As we have seen, they are by no means the only American euphemisms for damn. The Linguistic Atlas of New England2 lists many others in use in that region, e.g., dem, dum, dim, dean, dan, dang, ding, dash, dast, dag, dad, drat, blame, blast, bust, burn, bother, bugger, butter, confound, condemn, consarn, condarn, curse, cuss, crump, gast, gum, hang, rat, ram, rabbit, shuck, torment, plague, dunder and tarn. Dem was brought from England, where it is recorded in the Seventeenth Century; it has produced, in its turn, several derivatives, e.g., demme, demmy and demnition, the last of which may have been invented by Charles Dickens. Dum is traced to 1787 by the DAE and marked an Americanism. Ding, first recorded in America in 1834, did not appear in England until twelve years later, and then only in dialect use. Dad, usually combined, as in dad-fetch and dad-gum, is also apparently of American origin. The DAE suggests that blame, which is traced to 1829, is “probably a substitute for blast,” but this seems improbable, for blast itself is not recorded before 1854. Consarn is traced to 1825. Curse the fellow is in “Tristram Shandy,” 1761, but the NED’s first example of to give a curse is from a letter of Thomas Jefferson, 1763. Gum, which is also a euphemism for God, as in by gum, is traced by the DAE, in the latter use, to c. 1815 in the United States; it did not appear in England until 1832. Shuck, in the plural, is commonly used as an exclamation of disgust or regret without any reference to damn, and in that use the DAE traces it to 1847, but it is also apparently employed in the form of shucked as a euphemism for damned. Tormented is traced by the DAE to 1825.

  Damn is a borrowing from the Old French dampner, which in turn was a borrowing from the Latin damnare. It goes back to the Ages of Faith, but it did not come into use in England as an expletive until just before Shakespeare’s time. As a noun it is traced to 1619. The NED says that it is “now very often printed d—n or d—; in pa. pple. d—d.” From this reluctance to spell it out, I suppose, arose the English dashed and dash it, which sound effeminate to most Americans and have never had any vogue here. Goddam is first recorded in English use in 1633, and soon afterward the French were using it to designate an Englishman, apparently because it was often on the lips of English soldiers and travelers. The once celebrated Baron Amable Guillaume Prosper Brugière de Barante put it into the mouth of Joan of Arc in his “Histoire des ducs de Bourgoyne,” 1824, which won him membership in the French Academy. Her use of it, if authentic, would be a fit match for Jahveh’s oath to Ezekiel, already mentioned, for she has been a canonized saint of Holy Church since 1919, but there is no evidence in support of Barante. Toward the middle of the Seventeenth Century the Puritans began calling the Cavaliers goddammes, but the term seems to have passed out at the Restoration. Many euphemisms for goddam have flourished in America, e.g., goshdarn, goldarn, goshdad and goshdang.1 Gosh itself was borrowed from England, but all these combinations are Americanisms, and so are goshamighty, goshwalader and goshawful. The DAE records the astonishing goy blame it as in use in 1829, long before the influx of European Jews had converted Christian Americans into goyim. Golly is not an Americanism, but gravy, as in by gravy, is, and the DAE traces it to 1851. I swan (for I swear) and I vum (for I vow) are now obsolete save in a few remote country districts. The former is traced to 1823 and the latter to 1785. Both are apparently of American origin. The DAE’s first example of by the great horn spoon, also an Americanism, is from “The Biglow Papers” I, 1848, but Miss Mamie Meredith has traced it to “The American National Song Book,” 1842.2 Its original meaning has been discussed by contributors to American Speech, but remains a mystery.1

  Profanity has never had a scientific historian, though the literature on the subject is not inconsi
derable.2 The ancient Jews, like any other levantine people, must have had a large armamentarium of cuss-words, but the admonitions and threats of the Old Testament seem to be directed principally to perjury, which was regarded by the early sages as a kind of blasphemy. The more orthodox Quakers, in our own time, forbade all oaths, even on the witness-stand, as savoring of blasphemy. This prohibition was based upon the words of Jesus as reported in Matthew V, 34: “I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne.” Profanity, like any other art, has had its ups and downs — its golden ages of proliferation and efflorescence and its dark ages of decay and desuetude. Medieval England appears to have had a large répertoire of foul language, much of it obscene and the rest highly blasphemous to modern ears. The Puritans, when they began to make themselves heard and felt in the 1560s, opened a bitter war upon this vocabulary, and with considerable success. By 1611 the somewhat prissy Thomas Coryat, in his “Crudities,” the first English book of travel, was denouncing the French postillions for their “most diabolical custom” of urging on their horses with the cry of Allons, diable! The fact that so mild a phrase could strike an Englishman as profane shows how far the Puritan crusade had gone at home, though the hard-swearing Elizabeth had been dead only eight years. Two years after her death Parliament passed an act providing a fine of £10 for anyone who should “in any stage play, interlude, show, etc., jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy Name of God, or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost, or of the Trinity.” This law greatly cramped the style of the playwrights of the Bankside, including Shakespeare. The quartos of his plays had been full of oaths and objurgations, but when his friends Heming and Condell assembled the First Folio in 1623 they undertook a prudent bowdlerization, and the editors of the bard in later years had the exhilarating job of restoring the denaturized expletives.

  At the Restoration there was naturally a revival of profanity, but it was apparently confined within rather cautious metes and bounds. The NED shows that the forthright God’s wounds of 1535 became the euphemistic zounds by the beginning of the next century and then vanished altogether, and that the numerous old oaths naming the Virgin Mary were diluted down to the innocuous marry. Wyld1 lists a number of the fashionable oaths of the 1650–1700 period: they run to such banal forms as strike me dumb, rat me, split my windpipe, by the universe, gadzooks, gads my life and dag take me. Lord was reduced to lard, devil to Harry, Jesus to Jeminy and various resounding appeals to God to dear me.

  It is highly probable that, during the Seventeenth Century, English swearing really moved from England to America. Even in the heart of Puritan New England there was a large population of non-Puritans, some of them sailors come ashore and others wastrels and fugitives of a dozen varieties, and it was hard for the magistrates and clergy to dissuade them from sulphurous utterance, just as it was hard to dissuade them from drunkenness and fornication. The frequency of prosecutions for profane cursing and swearing, as reported in the town records, shows that the offense must have been a common one. Allen Walker Read has exhumed some interesting contemporary evidence to that effect.2 Ned Ward, an English visitor in 1699, reported of the New Englanders that “notwithstanding their sanctity, they are very profane in their common dialect.” Sixty years later the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, writing from Maryland, said that “obscene conceits and broad expressions” were heard constantly there, and that “no sex, no rank, no conduct” could save a visitor from them. The Revolution, like any other general war, greatly prospered both obscenity and profanity. In 1775 John Adams, assigned by the Continental Congress to draw up “rules for the regulation of the Navy of the United Colonies,” was moved to authorize commanders to punish profane and blasphemous sailors “by causing them to wear a wooden collar or some shameful badge,” and a year later George Washington issued a general order to the Army deploring the growth of “the wicked practise of profane cursing and swearing.” But these admonitions had no effect, and at the end of the century an English visitor named Richard Parkinson was recording that “the word damned” was “a very familiar phrase” in the new Republic, and that even the clergy used language that was “extremely vulgar and profane.” Washington himself, despite his order to his men, used both damn and hell with considerable freedom, as have several other American officers since.

  All recent writers upon the subject seem to be agreed that profanity is now in one of its periods of waning. This is the melancholy thesis, for example, of “Lars Porsena, or, The Future of Swearing and Improper Language,” by Robert Graves.1 Graves believes that there has been a steady decline in England, marked by ameliorations in war time, since the age of Elizabeth.2 In 1920 H. W. Seaman had come to the same conclusion. “True oaths,” he said, “are rare among the English. There are a number of ugly words, probably descendants of true religious oaths, and a few that are merely dirty, and beyond that practically nothing.” Ten years later, returning to the theme, Seaman reiterated this judgment, and added that all the surviving English expletives, save only bloody, had been reduced to a pansy-like insignificance, and were quite devoid of either zip or wow. He said:

  Most of us, even experts at the art of imprecation, find some difficulty nowadays in distinguishing between forbidden and permitted words. The social rule is to wait for the cue from your hostess. If she says what the captain of the Pinafore did not say,3 you are at liberty to go a little farther.4

  Six years later, in 1936, the London Sunday Dispatch reported that swearing had gone altogther out of fashion in London, at least in circles pretending to any elegance. “Instead of full-blooded expletives,” it said, “young bloods of Berkeley square and Belgravia use the names of flower, fish or plant.… Conversations run like this: ‘Hullo, you old baked walnut. How goes the mackerel-footed flea?’ ” To this the Dispatch added a speech by a youth in training for the R.A.F.:

  Did fifty blue-belled miles on Monday, but had to come down to turbotting terra firma as some sweet-williamed wallah had pinched my mistletoe maps, and I was afraid of getting lost in the wallflowered wilds.1

  Seaman, as a patriotic Englishman, warned his countrymen against adopting American profanity, but he must have known that it was almost as feeble as their own, despite the continued prosperity of hell and its derivatives, for he had but recently returned from a visit to the United States, and while here had traveled widely. All American treatises on the subject agree that there has been a marked decline in the Republic since the Civil War, with only faint revivals during the two World Wars. Writing in the North American Review in 1934, Burges Johnson declared that American profanity was fast losing its punch. He said:

  When man began to lose his belief in a petty-minded interfering God, then oaths and curses began to lose their true value.… At their worst, when they were made up of words which were socially ostracized, they became maledictions, or bad words. A malediction is an invocation of evil from no omnipotent source, but a sort of homemade defilement.… [Now] even the surviving cuss-words, maledictions and execrations of ancient and half-forgotten lineage are dying of anemia, sharing the fate of zounds and gramercy and odsblood. There seems to be little left that a man might use against his adversary except logic, and that of course is out of the question.2

  Johnson noted that a number of intrinsically innocuous words, e.g., plutocrat, capitalist, bolshevik, communist, fascist, pacifist, radical, Rotarian and bourgeoisie, were coming into use for purposes of invective, and predicted that they would gradually take on the dignity of general expletives. This prediction has been borne out by the event, and to them have been added many other terms, e.g., isolationist and Nazi. But this process, of course, is old in English, and does not lead to the production of true profanity. Another American observer, writing in 1935,1 reported the results of a thirty-day “campaign of listening,” carried on with the aid of “a small clique of men and women who live anything but cloistered lives.” His conclusion was that Americans had become “a trifle disgusted with their one-time penchant for cursin
g,” and were turning to such puerile words and phrases as dad-gummed, dad-slapped, fathead, for the love of Mike, and go climb a tree. This tendency, I have no doubt, has been helped by the extraordinary prudishness of the American newspapers, which always hesitate to report genuine profanity in full, or even any harmless discourse quoting its more familiar terms. I had a curious personal experience of this in 1939, when, in the course of a lecture delivered at Cooper Union, New York, I ventured to observe: “American grammar is fast going to hell, which is where all grammars will land, I hope and pray, soon or late.” In the New York Journal-American’s report of the lecture the next morning hell was printed h—l.2 Some American newspapers even hesitated to use such euphemistic forms as damfino, damphool and helluva.3 Hollywood is still more prudish. As we have already seen, Article V of its official code of morals prohibits the use of “pointed profanity (this includes the use of God, Lord, Jesus Christ, unless used reverently, hell, s.o.b., damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression, however used.”