Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the subject of another key obscenity trial, this one in Britain, in 1960. It tested the new British Obscenity Act of 1959, which, influenced by the American Ulysses cases, stipulated that works had to be considered as a whole, not in part, and that the literary merit of a work, evaluated by a panel of experts, should also be taken into account in determining whether it is obscene. Where four-letter words were only part of the problem with Ulysses, they were the heart of the problem with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. One of Lawrence’s projects in writing the book in the late 1920s was to free obscene words from their social stigma, paving the way for a healthier acceptance of sexuality, and healing what he saw as a cultural separation of intellect and body. Or as he put it: “If I use the taboo words, there is a reason. We shall never free the phallic reality from the ‘uplift’ taint till we give it its own phallic language, and use the obscene words.” In any case, the phallic reality remained chained until 1960, when Penguin Books decided to publish an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, complete with swearwords and all.

  The book had been published in several editions since 1928, but all had been censored except the first edition, published in Italy. These editions removed passages such as the one in which the game-keeper Mellors, representing the fully sexualized phallic reality, discusses anatomy with his lover Lady Chatterley, who carries the heavy weight of representing both the eternal feminine and the transition from the bodiless and barren world of intellectuals and the aristocracy to the profound, embodied sensuality of a person who has thrown off the conventions of society:

  “Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha’rt willin’!”

  “What is cunt?” she said.

  Mellors goes on to explain to the good lady the difference between fuck, which is what animals do, and cunt, which is “the beauty o’ thee, lass!”

  The crown was hampered in its case by a prosecutor who seemed more in sympathy with Cockburn’s original 1868 views than with the revised obscenity law. He famously asked the jurors, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?” A panel of esteemed literary scholars gave their views that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was an important novel and that the obscene words were a necessary part of Lawrence’s project, not an add-on intended to promote lust among wives and servants. The book was declared not obscene and Penguin’s unexpurgated edition sold 2 million copies in its first year and 1.3 million in its second.

  The trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is often seen as heralding an era of new openness in public discourse. People had been speaking together in private like Mellors and Lady Chatterley for a hundred years, but the publication of their Penguin edition signaled a new acceptance of this language in the public sphere. The trial offers a handy symbol for the cultural liberalization taking place, in which obscene words became more socially acceptable, because the parts of the body they represented were themselves becoming less shocking.

  By 1973, the words thought to be so shocking in Lady Chatterley’s Lover were being said openly on public radio at two o’clock in the afternoon, prompting another key legal case. In 1972, George Carlin had identified “the seven words you can never say on television” and made these the basis of a monologue he performed on a comedy tour. The monologue basically consists of him swearing, with occasional disquisitions into the strange ways we use these seven words—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. He has this and more to say about shit, for example:

  The word shit, uh, is an interesting kind of word in that the middle class has never really accepted it and approved it. They use it like crazy but it’s not really okay. It’s still a rude, dirty, old kind of gushy word. [Laughter] They don’t like that, but they say it, like, they say it, like, a lady now in a middle-class home, you’ll hear most of the time she says it as an expletive, you know, it’s out of her mouth before she knows. She says, Oh shit oh shit [laughter], oh shit. If she drops something, Oh, the shit hurt the broccoli. Shit. Thank you.

  A man heard part of this monologue, broadcast by a California radio station, while he was driving with his young son. He complained to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is responsible for regulating what is broadcast on the radio and on television in the United States. In the United States, obscene material, which (1) appeals to the prurient interest, (2) depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and (3) lacks serious value, cannot be broadcast at any time.

  What was at issue with Carlin’s monologue, however, was not obscenity but whether the FCC had the power to regulate indecency. Legally, indecency is “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.” This is pretty much code for obscene words. The FCC threatened the local radio station with disciplinary action if more complaints were received. The Pacifica station sued, complaining that the FCC was chilling Americans’ right to free speech. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the FCC won—in 1978 the Court declared that the FCC did have the power to regulate indecency on television and the radio. Material broadcast into people’s homes or cars is subject to less First Amendment protection than are books, stand-up comedy tours, or personal conversations, because it is harder to avoid offensive material in such a situation. The FCC can ensure that indecent language is broadcast only between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., when the most vulnerable listeners—children—are supposed to be asleep.

  We have only to look at TV today to see that the Supreme Court and the FCC were less like Moses commanding the Red Sea to part and more like King Canute ordering the tide not to come in and watching helplessly as his shoes got wet. The tide of swearing has come in—of Carlin’s original seven words you can’t say on TV, you can now say all but three, depending on when you are talking and how you use the words. And this is only on network TV. On cable, there has been a show, Deadwood, whose entire raison d’être appeared to have been swearing, as extreme and as frequent as possible. A group of fans has calculated the “fucks per minute” from the show at 1.73 for the final season and 1.76 for the previous one. And these figures are just for fuck, not for cocksucker, chink, and the other swearwords in common use on the show. The HBO crime drama The Wire featured a scene where two policeman converse about a crime scene using only variations on the word fuck in different tones of voice, managing to express frustration, surprise, pain, compassion, and insight with dialogue that is basically “fuck … motherfucker … the fuck? Fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck… . fuckin’ A.” Once you hit the Internet, all bets are off. On YouTube you can find any number of paeans to profanity, including “the Fucking Short Version” of dozens of movies such as The Departed, The Big Lebowski, and Die Hard II. The title is pretty descriptive—these are the movies pared down to a single word. There is the little boy who can’t say truck—it’s a “fire fuck.” There is the Teletubbies doll that says “Faggot faggot faggot bite my butt!” (Actually, unfortunately, it says “faster faster faster” in Cantonese—a language mix-up.) And there are many, many swearing parrots.

  On Urban Dictionary.com, the most popular website about contemporary language usage, obscenities receive far and away the most attention. People vie to come up with the best definitions and identify or invent new slang based on them. Fuck, as of this writing, has collected more than 200 different definitions and more than 150,000 “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” votes on their quality. (Mother, in contrast, has 33 definitions and 4,500 votes.) It has also inspired approximately 6,000 entries based on it, from fucabomb to fuczoid. Cunt, impressively, has acquired 414 definitions and somewhere around 200,000 votes while inspiring 2,500 entries, from cuntabilia to cuntzor. There are also Web pages that list all the bad words in the Bible that explain, sometimes correctly, the etymologies of swearwords; and that describe the most popul
ar obscenities among rappers, the prison population, and gay men.

  In March 2011, three of the top-ten hit songs on the Billboard pop music chart had obscenities in their titles (bleeped, courtesy of the FCC, when played on the radio). Cee Lo Green told various people off with “Fuck You!,” Enrique Iglesias begged pardon for his rudeness in announcing “Tonight (I’m Fuckin’ You),” and Pink told listeners that they needn’t be “Fuckin’ Perfect.” The New York Times called this “some kind of milestone,” as top-ten pop music had in the past at least theoretically shied away from such blatant swearing. (New York Times best-selling books have been ahead of the curve in this respect. The list included Randall Kennedy’s Nigger way back in 2003, followed by Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit [2005], Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says [2009], and Adam Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to Sleep [2011].)

  Rap music, in contrast to pop, is marked by an exuberant and near-constant use of swearwords. Much of rap music deals with boasting and bragging (or, as rappers and critics call it, “braggadocio,” derived from a character in Edmund Spenser’s 1590 epic poem, The Faerie Queene); battling or “beefing,” like the flyting of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland; and “hustling,” making money, usually through illicit means. “Lighters,” by Eminem and Royce da 5′9″, is a 2011 example of braggadocio—“Had a dream I was king, I woke up, still king,” Eminem boasts. The song is so full of obscenities that bits of it are almost unintelligible when heard on the radio, particularly when Eminem points out, among other things, that “You stayed the same, ’cause cock backwards is still cock, you pricks.” Rap battling evolved most directly from “the dozens,” a game originally played by young African American men. In the dozens, contestants show off their verbal dexterity and wit by trading insults, particularly of the “yo momma” variety—“Yo momma so ugly, they filmed Gorillas in the Mist in her shower.” As Scottish flyting shows, though, this kind of organized obscenity has evolved over and over in society—it must represent a fairly universal human urge. Hustling, as rapper Jay-Z puts it, is “the ultimate metaphor for the basic human struggles: the struggle to survive and resist, the struggle to win and to make sense of it all.” Rap music depicts these basic human struggles in the coarse language of the street. Obscenities are particularly useful in these contexts because they are the words with the most emotive force. They are the go-to words for expressing aggression, for putting someone else down, for resisting “the system” and the dominant culture that expects certain kinds of “good” language and behavior.

  The Science of Swearing

  As swearwords have become more prevalent and less taboo in society, this more relaxed cultural climate has opened up swearing as a (mostly) socially acceptable field of study. Brain scientists, psychologists, linguists, and sociologists now all do research into different aspects of swearing. The discovery of Tourette’s syndrome in the late nineteenth century really sparked scientific inquiry into our topic, although at that point in time doctors had to conduct their research through euphemisms and elisions and had to fight against the idea that understanding swearing was unworthy of real intellectual effort.

  On July 10, 1890, a mother brought her thirteen-year-old daughter to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore because the girl could not stop her body from jerking and she was making loud barking sounds. Doctors tried hypnosis to calm her down, but it was unsuccessful. A few months later, her case took a turn for the worse. Her mother wrote the doctors: “Mary makes use of words lately that make me ashamed to bring her to you or to take her out of the house; it is dreadful, such words as———,———,———, etc. She was always a modest child, and it almost kills me for to hear her use such words.” It is fairly obvious that the worrisome words are obscene—the mother implies that they are the opposite of modest—though the doctor can’t mention what they are in a late-nineteenth-century medical journal. (The thirteenth-century English translator of Lanfranc’s Science of Chirurgie, say, would not have had such scruples.) Mary was suffering from Tourette’s syndrome, described by two French doctors in 1885.

  Tourette’s syndrome is characterized by physical and vocal tics such as eye blinking, coughing, shrugging the shoulders, twitching of the limbs, and clearing the throat. The most famous symptom, though, is what got Mary’s mother so upset—coprolalia, the uncontrollable utterance of obscene words. (Touretters also occasionally suffer from copropraxia, which involves obscene gestures such as giving the finger or crotch grabbing, and coprographia, the urge to make obscene drawings.) Only 10 to 30 percent of people with Tourette’s experience coprolalia, but it causes great embarrassment to them and can lead to even greater misunderstandings with the general public. Sometimes the tic is relatively harmless—someone mentions ducks, and the Touretter feels compelled to repeat “fuck a duck.” Other times the outbursts are more meaningful, directed at a person’s race, weight, or sex, in what might seem to be the most hurtful way possible.

  In the 1890s, no one had any idea what caused Tourette’s syndrome, or why anyone might be compelled to vocalize the words locked down by society’s strongest taboos. The problem was thought to lie, probably, with the mothers—they were too rigid and didn’t let their children indulge in enough free play, so the children never learned to control their bodies and language. Or they were too indulgent of temper tantrums, with the same result. If it wasn’t the mother’s fault, you could always blame penis envy, as in the case of Alice, a child with uncontrollable movements and strange vocalizations who had the bad luck to draw a picture of a tower in her psychiatrist’s office in the 1940s.

  Now, however, we have an idea of how Tourette’s syndrome really works, thanks to advances in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. This in turn gives us insight into what goes on in “normal” brains when people swear. Scientists have found that swearing most likely originates in the right hemisphere of the brain, and within that half, in the “primitive” part of the brain, the limbic system. The right half of the brain is responsible for nonpropositional or automatic speech, which includes greetings, conventional expressions such as “not at all,” counting, song lyrics, and swearwords. Propositional speech—words strung together in syntactically correct forms to create an original meaning—occurs in the left hemisphere. The limbic system, particularly the amygdala, records the emotional content of words—their connotations, as opposed to denotations. The amygdala “lights up” during brain scans when subjects read taboo words, and this increased activity can also be measured through the skin with electrodes. Like my grandmother, aphasiacs who have lost their ability to create propositional speech because of Alzheimer’s or problems in their left brain often retain their ability to swear. Medical literature abounds with cases such as that of a man whose entire left hemisphere was surgically removed due to cancer, leaving him with the ability to say “um,” “one … three,” and “goddammit.” (In contrast, one patient whose right brain had atrophied could carry on a conversation more or less normally but had lost the ability to sing “Happy Birthday” or say the Pledge of Allegiance.)

  Swearing, though, is a combination of left and right brain, executive and lower functions. When you swear, you do not say just any old bad word—you choose the one calculated to do the most insult, to relieve the most stress, or perhaps to relieve the most stress without offending your Mormon neighbor who is outside gardening. Though the coprolalia of Tourette’s sounds involuntary, more often than not the words are relevant to the situation at hand. Speaking to an obese woman, a Touretter might interject, “Fat pig!”; to an African American in a purple sweatsuit, “Purple nigger!”; to just about anyone, “Fuck you!” Many people might have thoughts like these, but their prefrontal cortex—the executive area of their brains—is able to override them and shut them down. The current theory is that people with Tourette’s have a problem in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which plays a role in making choices among several actions and inhibiting certain motor functions. The executive areas of their brains
can fight against their limbic urges for a time—people can often delay but not suppress tics—but eventually the lower brain wins, and out comes “Fuck me up the asshole!”

  Other disciplines have pursued the study of swearing as well. Not so long ago, in the 1930s and 1940s, linguists had to disguise any interest in obscenity, as did Allen Walker Read, who, we’ve seen, wrote an entire article about fuck without once ever mentioning the word, and who had to publish his collection of lavatory graffiti privately. For decades, however, most linguists simply pretended that swearwords didn’t exist. The standard word frequency list created in 1944 ranked the frequencies of various words within a sample of 18 million. Almost the only swearword among those 18 million was shit, as the list had been compiled from Black Beauty, Little Women, and issues of Reader’s Digest. Another study of English usage, this one based on spoken telephone conversations in New York City, excluded 25 percent of the recorded words from its sample because they were indecent. Linguists and psychologists now feel free to include the bad words in their samples of English. Psychologist Timothy Jay found that on average 0.7 percent of the words people use in a day are taboo ones. This sounds like a small percentage until it is compared with first-person plural pronouns (we, us, our, ourselves), which occur at a 1 percent rate. And Jay found that the rate of swearing varied, from 0 percent (a person who doesn’t swear at all) to 3 percent (someone who says motherfucker quite a bit more than we and us). In 1969, psychologist Paul Cameron compiled word frequency lists in three different social settings. He found that when he compared them, the only words on all three lists that were not pronouns (he, I), articles (the, a), or prepositions (to, from) were damn, hell, fuck, and shit.