Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  As an independent nation our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard. For the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language is on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be our model and to instruct us in the principles of our language.

  It was Webster who was in large part responsible for getting rid of the u in honor, giving Americans something of a spelling system of our own.

  This nationalistic desire to “fix” the English language worked hand in hand with rising civility to banish slang, vulgar words, and taboo topics from polite public discourse. Paradoxically, it also led to the creation of a whole new category of swearing—racial and ethnic slurs. Before the era of empire, people had of course been in contact with other cultures, felt pride in their own culture, and experienced xenophobia. For centuries, the English had shared their small island with the Welsh and the Scots (and they had colonized Ireland since the mid-1500s). Renaissance drama had made some use of ethnic stereotypes—Shakespeare’s rather obscure “leek” references mock the supposed Welsh penchant for this vegetable, for example, and the Welsh love of cheese is also ridiculed during this period. The Scots and the Irish came in for their share of such insults as well, and we’ve already seen Shakespeare mock the French with “I shall make-a de turd.” There were, however, “comparatively few terms of abuse” among these groups, as Geoffrey Hughes notes.

  It was only with the development of nationalism, and the great mixing of people brought about by trade and colonialism, that racial and ethnic insults really took off. By 1682 the Irish were no longer gently ridiculed for mispronouncing is as “ish” but were being denigrated as bogtrotters and boglanders. Abusive terms for other ethnicities arose around the same time, in quick succession: frog (a Dutch or a French person, 1652), hottentot (originally a term for the African “Bushmen,” then for any “uncivilized” person, 1677), dago (Spanish or Italian person, originally a U.S. term, 1723), macaroni (a foppish and effete foreigner, especially Italian, 1764), yankee (a derogatory term from the southern United States for New Englanders, or, used by the British, for Americans generally, 1765), nigger (a black person, 1775), and kaffir (originally a Muslim term for “heretic,” which came to refer to black Africans; predominantly a South African term, 1792).

  A bit later we get sheeny (a Jewish person, 1816), coon (a black person, 1837), wi-wi (the French, in Australia and New Zealand, 1841), mick (an Irishman, 1850), yid (Jewish again, 1874), jap (Japanese, 1880), and limey (an Englishman, used by people from the British colonies, 1888). By 1940, our lexicon of slurs is pretty much complete, with ofay (a derogatory term for whites, used by U.S. blacks, 1898), wop (a U.S. term for an Italian or other southern European, 1912), spic (a Spanish-speaker from South America or the Caribbean, 1913), wetback (an illegal immigrant from Mexico, 1929), wog (a foreigner, especially of Arab descent, 1929), and gook (a foreigner, especially East or Southeast Asian, 1935). Honky (a white person) first appears a bit later, in 1946, and the last important entrant is paki (1964), British slang for a person of South Asian descent. Paki is not commonly heard in America, but in Britain it is one of the top-ten swearwords, ranked in 2000 as number ten in order of offensiveness—below cunt and motherfucker but well above arse and bugger.

  Some of these words were originally neutral terms, including, surprisingly, nigger, which had been used since 1574 to designate dark-skinned people from Africa. In early examples such as “the Nigers of Aethiop [Ethiopia] bearing witness” (1574), the word is used without intent to wound; its derogatory sense dates from around 1775. Most, however, were originally intended to be insulting—they were slurs. They were immediately offensive to their targets. It took much longer, however, for them to become offensive to others, for society to decide that they too were “bad words” or swearwords. Farmer and Henley, the pioneering authors of the late nineteenth-century Slang and Its Analogues, include entries such as nigger in the fence, “an underhand design”; nigger-driving, “exhausting with work”; and nigger-luck, “very good fortune,” as well as sheeny and yid. Farmer and Henley define these racial and ethnic slurs without comment, even though they editorialized about the coarseness, lowness, and vulgarity of bloody and bugger.

  Even the first edition of the OED failed to note the potential offensiveness of racial epithets, though it had refused to include fuck and cunt at all, and editorialized about many it did include. Arse, for example, was “obs. [obsolete] in polite use” in 1888; bugger was “in decent use only as a legal term.” Even boghouse, which, as we have seen, was a euphemism for a privy, was qualified as “dial. [dialect] and vulgar.” Bogtrotter, frog, kaffir, and other racial epithets, in contrast, were defined without comment, though it did note in 1908 that nigger was a colloquial use and “usually contemptuous.”

  By the end of the nineteenth century, English-speakers were firmly stuck in the Shit. Obscenities had become the most offensive words in the English language, the ones with which people preferred to swear. A new category of swearing arose during this era as well, though it would take a further fifty years or so until society as a whole began to condemn the use of racial epithets, making them too into obscene words.

  Chapter 6

  “Fuck ’Em All”

  Swearing in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

  A young soldier comes home to his family after World War II. His grandmother asks him how his time in the army was. The truth is that he has seen many men, friends and enemies, die horrible deaths, and he returns with a heavy heart. He doesn’t want to burden his family, though, so he says, “The boys sure were funny, Grandma—they had so many great jokes.” “Tell us one, tell us one,” his family begs. He says, “Oh, I can’t do that. You see, the boys also used an awful lot of bad language.” His family really wants to hear a joke, though, so someone suggests that he just say “blank” whenever he comes to a bad word. He agrees, and tells a joke: “Blank blank blank blankity blank. Blank blank blank blank, blankity blanking blank blank. Blanking blankity blanking blank, blank blank blank blank fuck.”

  I will confess that this is my favorite joke. I love the idea that there are so many words more unsayable than fuck. What could these be? But the joke also suggests that language changed as a result of the war, that some words started to be considered less obscene than they had been in the Victorian era, and that—like bloody and bugger—they started to reenter the world of public discourse. Some scholars have argued that during and after World War I and World War II, people began to swear more than they had in the past. The particular horrors of these wars—the constant threat of death by poison gas and machine guns, trench warfare, incendiary bombing—led to feelings of rage and helplessness that needed an outlet in frequent swearing. Soldiers brought what they heard in the barracks and in the field home with them and into print (and later radio and TV) to a degree that hadn’t been seen before.

  Swearing in the armed forces was so ubiquitous that fuck really wasn’t such a bad word. John Brophy and Eric Partridge, who in 1930 published a collection of British songs and slang from World War I, claimed that soldiers used fucking so often that it began to mean nothing more than “a warning that a noun is coming.” “It became so common,” they explain, “that an effective way for the soldier to express emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant said, ‘Get your —— ing rifles!’ it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said, ‘Get your rifles!’ there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.”*

  The soldiers brought this language home to Grandma. Simultaneously, a new, more realistic style of reporting was taking hold that recorded the speech men actually used on the battlefield, obscenities and all. In 1929, the Australian Frederic Manning published a fictionalized account of his experiences as an infantryman in World War I, neither expurgating nor euphemizing the constant swearing. Just one example: “’Oo’s the blo
ody shit ’oo invented this way o’ doin’ up a fuckin’ overcoat?” Manning’s book was published anonymously, in a small edition—evidently either he or his publisher was worried that the public was not ready to hear the unvarnished truth about how its soldiers spoke.

  Others who wrote about their experiences during the wars were more circumspect and their books best sellers. Robert Graves’s 1929 memoir Goodbye to All That, for example, records soldierly swearing mostly with euphemisms and elisions: “Sir, he called me a double effing c——.” In his 1948 war novel The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer famously substituted fug and fugging, leading Tallulah Bankhead to quip upon meeting him, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.” Fug was back to fuck a few years later when James Jones published From Here to Eternity in 1951, though he had to cut his fucks down from 258 in the manuscript to only 50 in the final book. But whether they spelled obscenities out nakedly, hid them with dashes and dots, or cloaked them as fug or effing, these best-selling writers and reporters brought obscenities out into the public sphere where they hadn’t appeared for centuries.

  Songs and Slang of the British Soldier contains in its various songs “I shall tell the Sergeant-Major / To stick his passes [up his arse],” eunuchs who want “balls” for Christmas, and a soldier who would prefer to stay in England and “[roger/fuck] my bloody life away” (the words in brackets are not printed out in the text, but represented by a dash). In 1928 Allen Walker Read—like Eric Partridge an early researcher of words that most academics wouldn’t deal with for another sixty years—traveled around the western half of the United States, collecting graffiti he found in public bathrooms. The writings he recorded look quite contemporary, yet at the same time seem to come straight off the walls of Pompeii. A man was moved to write on the wall of a bathroom in the Municipal Auto Camp in Red Bluff, California, that “me and my wife had a fuck,” reminiscent of “Hic ego cum veni futui / deinde redei domi”—“I came here and fucked, then went home.” Other graffiti writers give advice about evacuation, like the Seven Sages of Ostia: “When you want to shit in ease / Place your elbows on your knees / Put your hands against your chin / Let a fart and then begin.” Still others comment on the graffiti they read: “I’m proud to say this crapper has less vulgar poet[ry] in it than the past dozen I’ve been in. It shows only people with brains use this crapper.”

  Fuck, to take just one obscene word, was by World War II used with much of its modern variety: dumbfuck, (I don’t give a) flying fuck, motherfucker, and motherfucking. A popular song from World War II was “Fuck ’Em All,” the chorus of which goes:

  Fuck ’em all!

  Fuck ’em all!

  The long and the short and the tall;

  Fuck all the Sergeants and W.O.1’s,

  Fuck all the corporals and their bastard sons;

  For we’re saying goodbye to them all,

  As up the C.O.’s arse they crawl;

  You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean,

  So cheer up my lads, fuck ’em all!*

  As we saw in the previous chapter, we have tantalizing hints that by the mid- to late nineteenth century, people were swearing in much the same ways as we do today. By 1945, the evidence for this is ample and incontrovertible—people were absofuckinglutely (1921) using the same obscenities, in similar ways, with similar frequency.

  What the brave members of the Greatest Generation started, the counterculture of the 1960s finished off. We saw in the previous chapter how in the Victorian era, anything potentially provocative or offensive—parts of the body in particular—had to be covered up and banished from speech. “In the 1960s,” as Geoffrey Hughes puts it, “the floodgates opened”—those Victorian walls of shame were breached. The Vietnam War also helped to increase public swearing, since protesters made it a point to use obscene language—the phrase “Fuck the draft” was the subject of an important court case in 1971, as we’ll see later—to express their rage at the government.

  When talking about postwar America and Britain, it becomes more and more difficult to pick out the really important causes of societal change. We could discuss film production codes, radio and TV broadcast licensing, the baby boom and increasing numbers of people becoming middle class and thus more permissive (or “a change of emphasis from a production-based economy to a consumption-based one,” which “has been assumed to have affected a change in attitudes, with continence being rejected in favour of indulgence,” as one scholar puts it), dozens of court cases that eroded laws against obscenity, Mary Whitehouse and the Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (which campaigned in Britain for strict TV broadcasting standards), declining church attendance, and the growing importance of black culture, with its game of “the dozens,” rap music, and hip-hop.

  Whatever the particular causes, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, people had gotten used to seeing and talking about naked bodies and sex acts again, in movies, on TV, and in pornographic (and “ordinary”) magazines sold openly on newsstands. We are not back where we were in the Middle Ages—no doctor is going to write about the “cunt” in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, no new translation of the Bible is going to include “bollocks” or “the parts of the body by which turds are shat out” (not even the Jesus Loves Porn Stars Bible). But we have reached a point where we are comfortable enough with sexual swearing that we no longer consider the old obscenities to be the worst words in the English language. When graffiti collector Allen Walker Read published his groundbreaking article on fuck (“An Obscenity Symbol”) in 1934, he declared that it was “the word that has the deepest stigma of any in the language.” By the 1990s, however, many people in America were making the same argument for nigger or, in Britain, paki. Christopher Darden, a prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson trial, called nigger the “filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” And Dictionary.com declares that “nigger is now probably the most offensive word in English.” Given the depth of feeling about the n-word, it is perhaps surprising to see how recently it achieved its taboo status. It is only within the last sixty years or so that it has become a word that offends (or is supposed to offend) everyone, not just the people who are its targets, and that should not be used in polite speech.

  A story about the 1939 film Gone with the Wind illustrates the recentness of this change in attitudes. There is a familiar anecdote about swearing in the film—that producer David Selznick was fined $5,000 because Rhett Butler walks out on Scarlett O’Hara at the end of the movie with the words “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Actually, the film production code had changed shortly before the movie’s release, so Selznick was never fined. As with Eliza Doolittle’s “Not bloody likely!,” “I don’t give a damn” was more of a scandal manqué than a real cause of concern.

  The real, less well-known scandal involved the word nigger. The producers of the film wanted to preserve the “true southern flavor” of the book and so decided to include dialogue in which various characters use the word—Mammy speaking disapprovingly of “shiftless niggers,” for example. The 1930 Motion Picture Production Code forbade the use of profanity in films, including “God, Lord, Jesus, Christ—unless used reverently—Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd” (except when a quotation from a literary work, hence the exception for Rhett’s “damn”). It outlawed “obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke, or by suggestion (even when likely to be understood only by part of the audience).” It stipulated that “the use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful.” It even mandated that “the treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.” But it did not forbid or discourage the use of racial epithets such as nigger. Only when the film’s African American actors refused to say the word and hundreds of letters poured in objecting to its use did producer Selznick agree to take it out of the script.

  The fact that hundreds of people objected to the filmmakers’ decision to use the n-word shows that by the 1940s there was a growing sense that it was
out of bounds, an offensive word that no one should say. But while the n-word was becoming more and more taboo across a broader swath of society, there were still pockets of resistance. As late as 1992 (and presumably today as well), a genteel elderly white woman could tell her neighbor in North Carolina that she was looking for a “yard nigger.” (This particular lady happened to be speaking to a philosopher interested in derogatory speech, and so her words were recorded for posterity.) While such a person would most likely shrink from using sexual obscenities and profane oaths, she had no problem casually dropping America’s worst racial slur. For her, having grown up white in the American South, that was simply what one called black people; the term “carried no explicit contempt” (though plenty of condescension) and was not meant to shock or be impolite. She simply wanted someone to do her yard work; the term for such a person in her racially stratified world was “yard nigger.”

  Despite such holdouts, nigger is an obscene word for most Americans and Brits today. One might say it is our most dangerous word. People have lost their jobs for saying other words that are completely unrelated but sound like it. David Howard, for example, told his staff that they would have to be “niggardly” with the budget of their municipal agency, as money was tight. Niggardly means “parsimonious” or “miserly,” and niggard first appears two hundred years before nigger, deriving from an old Scandinavian word, nig, for a miserly person. Nevertheless, several employees took great offense and Howard was forced to resign. A British acquaintance of mine was castigated for using the word niggling, meaning small or petty, in a work email. (Niggling is also unrelated to nigger, though to niggle was slang for sexual intercourse in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries.)