Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  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 its and shits. 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.

  I am aware that there is a real risk that other people will be offended by parts of Holy Shit. Some people don’t like the title; others object to the number of times that I repeat certain sexual obscenities; I myself shied away from the racial slurs. If you haven’t already been offended by this book, chances are you will be. I can only apologize in advance. It is possible to discuss the subject of oaths in general without mentioning any specific ones, as many medieval authors did. And in the 1930s Allen Walker Read wrote a long article about fuck without ever spelling it out. But everyone has a different bar, a different account of what is considered to be sayable and unsayable. For some people, even a phrase such as “Shut up!” is “bad language,” to be strictly avoided. If I tr
ied to write a book about swearing in such a way that the most sensitive of readers could peruse it without blushing, it would be difficult, confusing, and probably very much less entertaining. As Samuel Johnson said to two ladies who commended him on leaving “naughty words” out of his Dictionary, “What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?”

  Many people today are not only shocked by swearing but also look down on it. An anthropology professor at Harvard once told me confidently that swearing was a sign of a lazy mind, the linguistic crutch of someone who can’t think of a more original way to express him- or herself. James O’Connor, author of Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing (2000), sums up this common attitude in his list of twenty-four things wrong with swearing, including “it shows you don’t have control,” “it discloses a lack of character,” “it’s abrasive, lazy language,” and “it lacks imagination.”

  It would be disingenuous to deny that swearing is in some ways “bad language.” Swearwords are offensive, they are vulgar, and they can certainly be overused. But they also do what no other English words can. They are the most powerful words we have with which to express extreme emotion, whether negative or positive. They insult and offend others (which, like it or not, is a function of language); they offer catharsis as a response to pain or to powerful feelings; they cement ties among members of groups in ways that other words cannot. As we choose our words when speaking or writing, we consciously and unconsciously consider many factors. We think about the meaning of what we want to say. We consider the emotional attitude we’d like to convey. We assess whom we are talking to and where we are. Sometimes, taking all these factors into account, we need to employ formal diction and a measured tone. Other times, though, only a swearword or two can accomplish what we need. To put it another way, language is a tool box and swearing is a hammer. You can try to pound a nail into a piece of wood with the handle of your screwdriver, with your wrench, or with your pliers, but it’s only your hammer that’s perfectly designed for the job.

  Swearing performs a crucial role in language today, as it did in the past; that alone makes it worthy of serious consideration and study. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history. People swear about what they care about, and did in the past as well. A history of swearing offers a map of some of the most central topics in people’s emotional lives over the centuries. This book is partly a record of how swearwords have changed through the years—how, for example, fuck came to replace sard and swive; how by God’s bones was once more taboo than any of those three; why the Victorians were so worried about gamahuche, godemiche, and the huffle. But it is also a study of the cultural concerns that gave rise to those words. It is, if you will, history in four letters—a look at what has mattered most to English-speakers over hundreds of years, and how this is revealed by swearing.

  I need to emphasize the “English-speakers,” for while the first chapters of this book consider ancient Roman obscenity and the biblical roots of oath swearing, this is partly, if not mainly, because they serve as deep background for the history of English usage. I concentrate on swearing in England and America and do not specifically analyze swearing in other English-speaking cultures, such as Australia, India, South Africa, or Canada. The reservoir is too vast, for one thing, and for another, many of the major obscenities are in use wherever English is spoken.

  Wherever English is spoken, many people believe that we are experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of swearing today. The Times of India recently reported on the worrying trend of increased swearing in books for teens; the Daily Mail of Britain has declared in a headline that “This Culture of Swearing Curses Us All”; and the New York Times has published on “the growing frequency of public figures using vulgarity.” In 1972, George Carlin famously listed the seven words you couldn’t mention on TV—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cock-sucker, motherfucker, and tits. Now you can say all but three, depending on when you are talking and how you use the words.

  But are we really experiencing an epidemic? Swearing is like the climate—it goes through cycles. The ears of ancient Romans burned with the “plain Latin” they heard and saw all around them. In the Middle Ages, blasphemous oaths were used so frequently that authorities worried they might injure God himself, and religious writers pleaded, then threatened, in order to get people to stop swearing. If we are swearing more openly than did people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we are not swearing more. If we are experiencing an epidemic of swearing, it is not the first and not the last.

  Behind the anxiety about swearing lies a fear that civilization is a thin veneer, barely covering a state of chaos. We worry that this fragile membrane can be ripped apart by swearing, which violates so many dictates of polite, rational discourse and gives voice to so many unruly impulses. But the truth is that we have always lived with swearwords, whatever they may have been, and always will. They are intrinsic to language and to our use of it. Some studies have shown that contemporary English-speakers use eighty to ninety such words a day—we might as well try to get rid of the pronouns we, us, and our, which we use at a similar rate. Just as a healthy brain needs both its “higher” and “lower” parts, cerebral cortex and limbic system, a healthy society needs its “good” language and its “bad.” We need irreproachably formal and unassailably decent speech, but we also need the dirty, the vulgar, the wonderful obscenities and oaths that can do for us what no other words can.

  Chapter 1

  To Speak with Roman Plainness

  Ancient Rome

  You might know an old joke: A masochist says to a sadist, “Hurt me.” The sadist says, “No.”

  The joke is actually older than you might think. Ancient Rome had a version, too, a little bit different:

  There’s a horrible boor who throws dinner parties that end up insulting his guests instead of entertaining them. He and his favorites drink the best wine and eat the finest foods, while everyone else has to make do with table scraps and leftovers. While people are eating, his masseuse rubs down every part of him, and he throws foie gras to his yappy little dogs. Then he falls asleep, snoring like a horse, and his servants warn us not to wake him up. We have to suffer this insolence and can’t retaliate, my friend—he performs fellatio [hos malchionis patimur improbi fastus, / nec vindicari, Rufe, possumus: fellat].

  This is actually an epigram by the poet Martial (c. AD 87), but the same joke appears in similar forms in other places. Martial complains that he and his friend can’t punish their host for his rudeness. Appropriate revenge would be irrumatio—oral rape, basically—making him give them blow jobs. Irrumatio is a standard Roman threat made by poets, orators, and ordinary people for causes great (adultery) and small (a bad review). No one knows how often it was carried out, given its not insignificant potential for injury to the aggressor. In this case, however, irrumatio won’t work. The host fellat—he likes to perform fellatio. If you tried to put him in his place with some irrumatio, he would actually enjoy it. The sadist says, “I want to hurt you,” and the masochist says, “Go ahead, I’d love it.”

  Swearing in Latin and swearing in modern English have a relationship a lot like that of these two jokes. In some ways Roman obscenity seems very familiar, but in others it is fascinatingly different. (Fascinating, by the way, comes from the Latin fascinum, a representation of the erect penis. Tiny fascini were worn by young boys as charms to protect them against the evil eye. In ancient Rome, these penises were thought to be infused with magical power; today if something fascinates you, it captures your attention almost against your will.) Linguists generally agree that the worst words in English are the “Big Six”: cunt, fuck, cock (or dick), ass, shit, and piss.* Ancient Latin had a “Big Ten”: cunnus (cunt), futuo (to fuck), mentula (cock), verpa (erect or circumcised cock), landica (clit), culus (ass), pedico (to bugger), caco (to shit), irrumo, and fello.

  Some of these words are very similar in English and Latin—cunnus and caco are equally
bad in both languages and used in similar ways. Some, such as futuo and landica, start to reveal some differences. Landica was a horrible obscenity in Latin, while clit is barely on the radar in English. And then there are words such as irrumatio that English just doesn’t have, which point to ways in which the Romans were really different from us. The ancient Romans didn’t think about sexuality in terms of heterosexual or homosexual—they divided people up by whether they were active or passive during sex. This (to us) unusual schema gives rise to a very different obscene vocabulary.

  The Latin word for “obscenity” is obscenitas. Its etymology is unknown, but speculation has derived it from caenum (dirt, filth) or alternatively from scaena, the stage. In the latter case, obscenity would be what cannot be said except onstage, where, in ancient Greece and Rome, comic ribaldry was licensed. Obscenitas is the source of our English word and has a similar range of meanings. Cassell’s Latin Dictionary defines obscenus as “foul, repulsive, filthy; morally impure, indecent, obscene.” In Latin and in English, obscene words are dirty, whether sexually or excrementally. They refer to parts of the body, and things those body parts do, that are under strong taboos. But in Rome the obscene also had religious functions. Another meaning of obscenus was “of ill omen,” indicating things that would contaminate a religious rite and make it fail. Obscenity made some religious rituals succeed, though, too. Obscene words could please gods such as Priapus, with his enormous, perpetually erect phallus, and were thought to promote fertility and to protect against the evil eye. In ancient Rome, in other words, the Shit itself could be Holy.