Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  The fellow Creature which sits next

  Is more delight to me

  Than any that I else can find;

  For that she’s always free.

  Equally shockingly, however, the Ranters also performed the Eucharist themselves, interrupted church services to preach their gospel, and swore. They were famous for their profane oath swearing, which they supposedly saw as the fullest realization of God in man. They swore so virulently that people who heard them were supposed to become prostrate with shock, as did one innkeeper who tried to throw a Ranter out of her house: “it put the woman into such a fright, to hear his curses and blasphemies, that she trembled and quaked some hours after.”

  The Ranters Ranting, 1650. This pamphlet details some of the Ranters’ horrible practices and helpfully illustrates them with a woodcut.

  As the example of the Ranters indicates, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries presented a mix of the Holy and Shit. The Holy was declining in power, the Shit gaining it. Oaths had lost their ability to access God directly, and had begun to lose their power to shock and offend, but had not yet been eclipsed as the most powerful kind of language. Obscenity was beginning its rise to the position it has today, but it was still in the process of being defined, with obscene words sometimes avoided and sometimes ignored or even celebrated in the same contexts. It would take the extreme repression of the Victorians finally to secure obscene words their place as the “worst” in the English language.

  Chapter 5

  The Age of Euphemism

  The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

  In 1673, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, composed a poem attacking his mistress for the criteria she used in choosing other lovers. While his subject matter perhaps fails to strike a chord, Rochester’s vituperative language is instantly recognizable. “Much wine had past with grave discourse / Of who Fucks who and who does worse,” he begins this poem, his most famous, “A Ramble in St James’s Park.” Drunk, and looking for some lechery himself, he wanders into the park, which is “Consecrate to Prick and Cunt” because it is so full of people meeting up for assignations. Even the trees are sexualized—their “lewd tops Fuckt the very Skies.” In this promiscuous landscape the poet sees his lover, Corinna, go off in a carriage with three fops, and complains:

  Gods! that a thing admir’d by me

  Shou’d fall to so much Infamy.

  Had she pickt out to rub her Arse on

  Some stiff prickt Clown or well hung Parson,

  Each job of whose spermatique sluice

  Had filled her Cunt with wholesome Juice,

  I the proceeding should have praisd …

  But to turn damn’d abandon’d Jade

  When neither Head nor Tail persuade

  To be a Whore in understanding

  A passive pot for Fools to spend in… .

  He is angry that Corinna has taken up with fools, though neither “head nor tail” inspired her choice—she was motivated by social snobbery, not intellectual interest or sexual desire. A good old country boy the poet could accept, or a parson with a large “spermatic sluice,” because the decision would be driven by pure desire. But when Corinna seduces the ridiculous men-about-town based partly on a calculation of social advantage, she becomes a whore, in the poet’s system of values.

  Rochester concludes with one of the best curses ever:

  May stinking vapours Choke your womb

  Such as the Men you doat upon;

  May your depraved Appetite

  That cou’d in Whiffling Fools delight

  Beget such Frenzies in your Mind

  You may goe mad for the North wind,

  And fixing all your hopes upon’t

  To have him bluster in your Cunt,

  Turn up your longing Arse to the Air

  And perish in a wild despair.

  May you go crazy, fall in love with the wind, stick your ass in the air, and die. It’s practically Yiddish, and a literal description of the Renaissance insult windfucker. This is followed by one of the best threats ever written down:

  But Cowards shall forget to rant,

  School-Boys to Frig, old whores to paint,

  The Jesuits Fraternity

  Shall leave the use of Buggery,

  Crab-louse inspir’d with Grace divine

  From Earthly Cod to Heaven shall climb,

  Physicians shall believe in Jesus

  And Disobedience cease to please us

  E’re I desist with all my Power

  To plague this woman and undo her.

  Cowards will stop boasting, schoolboys will stop boxing the Jesuit, whores will stop putting on makeup, Jesuits will stop boxing the schoolboys, and genital lice will crawl from the scrotum up to heaven before the poet will stop tormenting Corinna for her lapses in amorous taste.*

  This is modern obscenity. Though some of the sentiments and language are foreign to readers today, cunt, fuck, frig, prick, arse, and other words are employed in order to provoke, to offend, to add insult to injury.† Rochester does not write “when your lewd Cunt came spewing home” because cunt is the most direct word for what he’s talking about and he values clarity of thought and expression. He uses it because it has become a derogatory, offensive, obscene word, and he wants to shock and offend.

  Rochester’s poems heralded a brave new era of obscenity. Words such as cunt had been employed for hundreds of years, as we have seen, and in the Renaissance had begun to accrue the power being lost by oaths. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Holy and the Shit were mixed, neither one nor the other predominating. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the balance swings entirely toward the Shit. Obscenities experienced a tremendous growth in strength, even as they disappeared almost entirely from public discourse. Obscene words for body parts and actions (sex and excrement) took oaths’ place as the words that shocked and offended; that insulted; that expressed extremes of emotion, positive or negative. To a degree, obscene words even adopted oaths’ ability to signify the truth of a statement, a capability that harks back to the “plain Latin” of ancient Rome. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, obscene words began to be used nonliterally, for their emotional charge alone; at this point they completed their transformation into swearwords.

  Rochester and his libertine companions were reacting to the Puritanism of the Commonwealth (1649–1660), when chastity, modest dress, and sober behavior reigned, except, of course, among the Ranters. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the merry monarch and his friends threw themselves into an opposite world—they wore beautiful clothes, took countless mistresses (one hopes it was on the basis of desire and/or intellectual interest), and practiced jolly pranks such as kidnapping heiresses and trying to marry them by force. (When he was eighteen, Rochester abducted the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Malet from her grandfather’s coach. He was caught and sent to the Tower of London, and the girl was returned to her family. Elizabeth was apparently impressed—she married him of her own volition two years later.) After the riotous Restoration, however, a form of Puritanism came back, though its motivations were not religious this time, but social. The bourgeoisie developed in the eighteenth century—a middle class of merchants who seized on the “civilizing process” that had started in the Renaissance and made it their own. Good manners and refinement of language became an indication of social and moral worth, a sign of distinction that differentiated the middle classes from the great unwashed outside and below. Delicacy of speech and propriety of dress became increasingly important, to such a degree that chickens lost their legs and developed limbs (and later white and dark meat), lest the bird be so rude as to remind someone that people have legs too. These two trends account for obscenity’s great power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Obscene words violated class norms—they were seen as the language of the lower classes, the uneducated—and accessed the deepest taboo of Augustan and Victorian society, the human body and its embarrassing desires, whi
ch had to be absolutely hidden away in swaths of fabric and disguised in euphemisms.

  Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English also needed to be purified to reflect the greatness of the growing British Empire. Latin had served Rome well; English had likewise to be made to conform to rules and shorn of slang (often code for obscenities) so that it could help to promote British imperialism and monumentalize the empire’s achievements forever. The growing empire paradoxically created the last category of obscenity—racial slurs. Many of these arose as cultures intermixed on a scale never seen before, as the empire stretched its arms across the ocean to America and then around the world, and the United States expanded westward.

  From Oath to Affirmation

  Vain and blasphemous oaths didn’t disappear all at once in the eighteenth century—theirs was a slow but steady decline, which is still going on today. In surveys of the American and British publics, oaths are now ranked among the mildest but most common swearwords. In a 2006 study of speakers of American English, hell, damn, goddamn, Jesus Christ, and oh my God were five of the ten most frequently used swearwords, with the top ten making up 80 percent of the swearing recorded. Oh my God alone accounted for 24 percent of women’s swearing.* In the early eighteenth century, vain and blasphemous oaths were even more numerous than they are today, as the obscenities were just starting to take their place in the lexicon of swearing. A character in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712) provides an extreme but not unrealistic example of the way oaths were employed at this time:

  My Lord, why, what the devil?

  Z——ds! Damn the lock! ’fore Gad, you must be civil!

  Plague on ’t! ’tis past a jest—nay prithee, pox!

  Give her the hair.

  Sir Plume, just the kind of fop that Rochester’s Corinna would have opened her legs for, is defending his beloved Belinda from the evil baron who has just cut off a lock of her hair—the “rape.” The swearing in this poem presents a striking contrast to the way oaths were treated in the seventeenth century, when they were banned onstage and struck from most published texts of plays, including Shakespeare’s. By the end of the eighteenth century, zounds was still in use but had become a completely meaningless expletive. It even had to be defined in dictionaries of slang for those who might hear it said but fail to understand it. Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue explained it as “an exclamation, an abbreviation of God’s wounds” (Grose also defined such obscure terms as “crinkums, the foul or venereal disease” and “feague, … to put ginger up a horse’s fundament, to make him lively and carry his tail well.”) Eighty years later, John Hotten even got the definition slightly wrong in the 1865 edition of his Slang Dictionary: “an abbreviation of God’s wounds,—a very ancient Catholic oath.” Like all swearing by God’s body parts, it was not particularly Catholic, but had been nondenominational.

  One final example must serve to indicate the frequency with which vain oaths were sworn in the eighteenth century, and the decline in their potency. When Captain Basil Hall visited the Comoro Islands off the coast of Africa in the 1820s, he was welcomed by an islander with the memorable words: “How do you do, sir? Very glad to see you. Damn your eyes! Johanna man [a man from Anjouan, one of the islands] like English very much. God damn!” The man had learned English from sailors who had visited the islands previously, and had retained what seemed to him to be the essential phrases of polite conversation: “Damn me,” “Damn you,” and “God damn.”

  The decline in the potency and eventually in the frequency with which people used vain oaths goes hand in hand with falling church attendance throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Church was still very rich and politically powerful, but religion occupied a less central role in the average person’s life. “The terrors of supernatural vengeance had steadily receded” since the seventeenth century, as historian Keith Thomas puts it, and with these terrors went much of the Church’s control over people’s inner and outer lives. (Of course this is a broad generalization; the nineteenth century also saw the rise of numerous evangelical movements that put God and religious obligations firmly at the center of life.) The number and prominence of people over whom the Church had no hold at all also began to increase—“freethought,” code for atheism, was a contentious but growing movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, and people who didn’t believe in God had little incentive to use his name, even in vain.

  The same conditions that initiated the slow decline of vain oaths paradoxically inspired huge battles over sincere swearing in the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era, as today, oaths had to be sworn when giving evidence in court and upon certain important occasions, such as assuming public office or becoming a doctor or lawyer. Historically these oaths had been taken before God, on a Bible, and as a Christian, “profess[ing] faith in Jesus Christ.” By the late seventeenth century, laws had begun to chip away at the Christian-fits-all nature of these oaths—the 1689 Toleration Act gave the Quakers the right to affirm their intentions before God, not to swear (if you remember, they believed that Christ was speaking literally when he said “Swear not at all” in Matthew). But in 1847, Lionel de Rothschild, a Jew, was elected to Parliament. To take his seat and begin his term, he was supposed to swear the parliamentary oath on a Bible including the New Testament and “upon the true faith of a Christian.” No Quakerly affirmation before God and by Jesus would help here. Rothschild didn’t believe in the New Testament and had no Christian faith. A bill was introduced to soften the oath into a form Rothschild might be able to swear, but it was rejected by the House of Lords. This set up a pattern repeated for ten years—Rothschild was elected repeatedly and overwhelmingly by his constituents, but he would not swear the oath as it stood. Bills to change the oath were proposed, only to be repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected by the House of Lords. Meanwhile, another Jew was elected to Parliament. David Salomons saw that Rothschild’s approach wasn’t working, and so he swore the oath when he took his seat, simply omitting the words “on the true faith of a Christian.” He was able to participate in three votes in the House of Commons before being thrown out by the sergeant-at-arms and fined five hundred pounds for voting illegally.

  In 1880, the people of Northampton chose someone even more scandalous as their MP—an avowed atheist, Charles Bradlaugh. Like Rothschild, Bradlaugh refused to swear the parliamentary oath. He wanted to give an affirmation—and not before God, like the Quakers—upon taking his seat. When it was decided that he could not affirm, he offered to swear the oath even though it was meaningless to him, “as a matter of form.” The House decided that since he was not a believing Christian, he couldn’t swear the oath, and so he was arrested and imprisoned when he attempted to take his seat without having sworn. Like Rothschild and Salomons, he was elected by his constituents over and over, and each time he was prevented from doing his job by the oath he first would not, then would but couldn’t, swear.

  These oaths were a point of controversy because they so clearly enshrined England’s status as a believing Protestant nation, a status under threat in the nineteenth century. Victorian England had no shortage of people making arguments, familiar to us from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, that “the sacredness of oaths is essential to the existence of society,” or “that from the earliest times of a Christian Legislature no man has ever been permitted to take part in it, except under the sanction of a Christian oath.” Cardinal Henry Manning warned against the dangers of allowing atheists to affirm: “Deny the existence of God, and nine thousand affirmations are no more than nineteen or ninety thousand words. Without God there is no law-giver above the human will, and therefore no law; for no will by human authority can bind another. All authority of parents, husbands, masters, rulers, is of God.”

  Manning, and others like him, were worried about two things. First of all, they believed that an affirmation was not as secure as an oath. Without supernatural sanction, without God to strike down liars and allo
w honest men to flourish, an affirmation is nothing but empty words. But more important, affirmation would allow atheists to participate in public life, defend themselves at trial, make wills that could be supported in court, and so forth. It would be a public acknowledgment that Britain was not a God-fearing Christian nation but a plural society, Christian, Jewish, and nonbelieving.*

  These arguments were roundly rejected by the thousands of people who elected the Jews and the atheist to Parliament, again and again. Cardinal Manning could protest all he wanted, but British society was changing and oaths, which had publicly cemented Britain’s status as a Christian nation, had to change with it. Rothschild finally took his seat in Parliament in 1858 after the passage of the Jewish Relief Act, which allowed him to swear “so help me Jehovah” on the Old Testament. Bradlaugh was finally allowed to swear the oath and take his seat in 1886, despite his nonbelief, and in 1888 he secured the passage of the Oaths Act, which allowed anyone who either had no religious belief or believed that swearing was religiously forbidden to “solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm” in almost all cases where an oath had previously been required.

  In the nascent United States, oath swearing was a much less contentious issue. The framers of the Constitution allowed affirmation from the get-go, without hinging its use on exceptions for religious or nonreligious belief. The president’s promise is the only one actually spelled out in the Constitution, and it is a marvel of ecumenical brevity compared to the numerous oaths specified in such discriminatory detail in British law: