Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing
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Shakespeare never employs a primary obscenity: In Act II, scene I of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio teases Romeo by wishing that Rosaline “were an open-” something. It is clear from the text that Mercutio means “open-arse,” a medlar, but no edition of the play prints the word, preferring the euphemism “open et caetera” (Q1) or, as in the Folio, leaving it blank, “O that she were an open, or thou a Poprin Pear.” I think the actor must have said “open-arse” on stage, given the kind of obscene language Shakespeare’s contemporaries were employing, although it is also possible that the actor could have hinted at “arse” yet not said it. For more on this, see the following chapter.
Other Renaissance dramatists: “windfucker”: Epicene, or the Silent Woman (1609), I, iv; “Turd in your teeth”: Bartholomew Fair (1614, pub. 1631), I, iv; “Marry, shit o’ your hood”: Bartholomew Fair, IV, iv; “Kiss the whore”: Bartholomew Fair, V, v.
Plays were licensed for performance: For more about the master of the revels, see Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (London: Macmillan, 1991).
In The Famous Victories: The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (London, 1598), Early English Books Online.
For more about the expurgation of oaths in Shakespeare, see Gary Taylor’s “‘Swounds Revisited,” in Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606–1623 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 51–106. I have simplified what is actually a complicated situation.
Sir Henry Herbert is so concerned: The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 22.
Herbert once burns a play: Scholars debate whether he burned the play solely because of the obscenity. Most think that he probably had another reason, e.g., anti-Catholic satire that was presented in a bawdy way. See Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 51–61.
The first acknowledged case: Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 36–38; Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India, and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51. Curll is the first person prosecuted for “obscene libel,” an entirely new category that made obscenity subject to legal regulation under common law. Printers had suffered fines for printing “obscene and lascivious books” before, starting around 1680, but this had been as a result of the pre-publication licensing system. Rochester’s Sodom (1684) and The School of Venus (1680) were banned as obscene and lascivious as a result.
a religious group from the 1650s: For more on the Ranters, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); A. L. Morton, The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970); J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth, and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
“The fellow creature which sits next”: The Ranters Ranting (London 1650), 4, Early English Books Online.
“it put the woman into such a fright”: The Ranters Ranting, 6.
Chapter 5
In 1673, John Wilmot: All Rochester poems are from John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and Lucina’s Rape, ed. Keith Walker and Nicholas Fisher (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
“boxing the Jesuit”: Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1785), 18.
Rochester abducted the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth: Walker and Fisher, introduction to John Wilmot, xviii; Arthur Malet, Notices of an English Branch of the Malet Family (London: Harrison & Sons, 1885), 48–49.
they are now ranked among the mildest: Tony McEnery, Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present (London: Routledge 2006), 36, 50, and n. 59.
In a 2006 study of speakers: Timothy Jay, “The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4, no. 2 (2009): 156.
“My Lord, why, what the Devil?” Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 2nd ed. (London: Bernard Lintott, 1714), 37.
Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary: Grose, A Classical Dictionary, 182, 43, 61.
Eighty years later: John Hotten, The Slang Dictionary: or, The Vulgar Words, Street Phrases, and “Fast” Expressions of High and Low Society, 3rd ed. (London: John Camden Hotten, 1865).
“How do you do, sir?” Basil Hall, Fragments of Voyages and Travels, second series (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1832), II:234.
religion occupied a less central role: For more on the decline of religion in the eighteenth century, see Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1990) and Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
“The terrors of supernatural vengeance”: Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 65.
But in 1847, Lionel de Rothschild, a Jew: “Bank to Westminster: Lionel de Rothschild’s Journey to Parliament, 1847–1858,” The Rothschild Archive (online), accessed July 29, 2012; Reports of State Trials, ed. John E. P. Wallis, new series (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1898), VIII:114.
In 1880, the people of Northampton chose someone: Marsh, Word Crimes, 135; Adolphe S. Headingley, The Biography of Charles Bradlaugh, 2nd ed. (London: Freethought, 1883), 177.
“the sacredness of oaths”: “Popery in the Nineteenth Century,” Black-wood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1851, 252.
“that from the earliest times of a Christian Legislature”: The Annual Register, or a View of the History and Politics of the Year 1850 (London: F. & J. Rivington, 1851), 183.
“Deny the existence of God”: The Westminster Review, vol. CXIII, January-April 1880, American ed. (New York: Leonard Scott), 183.
As literary critic and historian: Marsh, Word Crimes, 50.
Rothschild finally took his seat in Parliament: The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record, ed. Isidore Singer (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906), 5:172.
in 1888 he secured the passage: Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 266.
George Washington undercut: Forrest Church, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 448. Some scholars deny that Washington actually added the words. For this view, see Peter R. Henriques, “‘So Help Me God’: A George Washington Myth that Should Be Discarded,” George Mason University’s History News Network (online), accessed July 29, 2012.
“the naked and plaine truth”: John Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 1999), cxiii, 107, 271.
“he calls a fig a fig”: Desiderius Erasmus, Adages, trans. R. A. B Mynors, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 33:132, 133.
“will strike the hearer as rather”: Desiderius Erasmus, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, trans. Betty I. Knott, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 24:309.
“Telling of a Roman army”: D.J. Enright, Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 38.
The Greek actually means: Erasmus, Adages, 384.
In a 2005 study: Eric Rassin and Simone van der Heijden, “Appearing Credible? Swearing Helps!” Psychology, Crime & Law 11, no. 2 (June 2005): 177–82.
“hardly anyone called a spade”: Marsh, Word Crimes, 218.
“Generally, people now call”: William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891), 154.
“Call a spade a spade”: Henry Alford, A Plea for the Queen’s English, 2nd ed. (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1864), 278.
John Ruskin, the eminent Vict
orian art critic: For Ruskin, I consulted Timothy Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Wolfgang Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin, trans. Jan van Heurck (London: Harper Collins, 1990); Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York: Knopf, 1983).
Other scholars have argued: Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber, 2001), 216.
He described Turner’s erotic works: Maev Kennedy, “Infamous Bonfire of Turner’s Erotic Art Revealed to Be a Myth,” Guardian, December 31, 2004; Sarah Lyall, “A Censorship Story Goes up in Smoke,” New York Times, January 13, 2005.
“Then owls and bats”: Robert Browning, “Pippa Passes,” in The Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), IV.ii.96. Browning’s “twat” has been covered in Jesse Sheidlower, The F Word, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), xv; Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language (New York: Random House, 2009), 90–91; and Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When, and What of Everyday Swearing (London: Portobello, 2009), among others.
“Give not male names then to such things”: Martial, Ex Otio Negotium, or Martiall His Epigrams Translated, trans. Robert Fletcher (London, 1656).
It appears in Thomas Wright’s: Thomas Wright, Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English (London: H. G. Bohn, 1857).
And in 1888, a concerned reader: H. W. Fay, “A Distressing Blunder,” The Academy, no. 841 (June 16, 1888): 415.
trousers, “an article of dress”: quoted in Jeffrey Kacirk, The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 98.
“When at Niagara Falls”: Capt. Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America: With Remarks on Its Institutions (New York: Wm. H. Colyer, 1839), 154.
There is scholarly debate about the number: Sweet, Inventing the Victorians, xiv–xv; Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 56–57.
“euphemisms, words and phrases”: Noah Webster, ed., The Holy Bible (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1833), iv.
Even John Farmer and William Henley: “Bender,” in John Farmer and William Henley, eds., Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present, 7 vols. (London, 1890–1904).
In the 1874 edition of his Slang Dictionary: John Hotten, ed., Slang Dictionary, rev. ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874).
“In the papers”: Henry Alford, A Plea for the Queen’s English, rev. ed. (New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1878), 251, 248.
“not once unsheathed”: John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Wagner (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 112–13.
“The tree of Life”: quoted in Alison Syme, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 26; Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 90.
Of perspiration: quoted in OED.
Linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge: Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 33. See especially Chapter 2, “Sweet Talking and Offensive Language.”
“not even this word, it seems”: Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), 376.
When an actress spoke it: Adrian Frazier, Playboys of the Western World: Production Histories (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2004), 13–16.
“Presumptuous Piss-pot”: “On Melting Down the Plate: Or, the Piss-pot’s Farewell,” Poems on Affairs of State, pt. III (London, 1698), 215.
Consider the toilet: These euphemisms come from the OED; Richard W. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and Andreas Fischer, “‘Non Olet’: Euphemisms We Live by,” New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics II (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), 91–108.
“The newly wedded country gent”: quoted in Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English, 168.
Gardez l’eau… bourdalou: Naomi Stead, “Avoidance: On Some Euphemisms for the ‘Smallest Room,’” in Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, ed. Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 128.
toilet came to indicate: Stead, “Avoidance,” 129–30; OED.
Toiletgate: John Harris, “Common People,” Guardian, April 16, 2007.
“I find it almost impossible”: Sarah Lyall, “Why Can’t the English Just Give Up That Class Folderol?” New York Times, April 26, 2007.
“No freshman shall mingo”: William Bentnick-Smith, The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 162.
“During World War I”: Catherine O’Reilly, Did Thomas Crapper Really Invent the Toilet? The Inventions That Changed Our Homes and Our Lives (New York: Skyhorse, 2008), xii; personal communication, Simon Kirby.
A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon: “Nominative Determinism,” Wikipedia, June 30, 2012, accessed July 29, 2012.
“Excretion was an accepted and semipublic event”: quoted in Fischer, “‘Non Olet,’” 105.
“the transition from a society of estates or orders”: Suzanne Romaine, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. IV: 1776–1997 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13.
For more about this great social transition, see T. C. W. Blanning, The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
“The middle class… sought an identity”: McEnery, Swearing in English, 84.
“How shamefully rich”: Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words, 2nd ed. (New York: Blakeman & Mason, 1859), 40.
“purity of speech, like personal cleanliness”: George Perkins Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (New York: Scribner, 1860), 645.
“Few things are in worse taste”: Alfred Ayers, The Verbalist, rev. ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 103–4.
“evidence of hypercorrection”: McEnery, Swearing in English, 49.
“in good sooth”: William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, Act III, scene i.
“the great Australian adjective”: Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 171.
“is often classed as profane or obscene”: Thomas H. B. Graham, “Some English Expletives,” Gentleman’s Magazine, July-December 1891, 199.
“a few seconds of stunned disbelieving silence”: Geoffrey Hughes, An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 372.
“not pygmalion likely”: Ibid., 392.
“an epithet difficult to define”: “Bloody,” in Farmer and Henley, eds., Slang and Its Analogues.
“We cannot disguise to ourselves”: Julian Sharman, A Cursory History of Swearing (London: Nimmo and Bain, 1884), 178.
“God damn him”: A Collection of State-Trials and Proceedings (London: Benj. Motte and C. Bathurst, 1735), 7:349.
“get thee gone”: Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Thomas Urquhart, ed. Charles Whibley (London: David Nutt, 1900), 135.
“B—st [blast] and b-gg-r”: “Bugger,” OED.
“Damn ’em bugger you”: Jacob A. Hazen, Five Years Before the Mast, or, Life in the Forecastle (Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1854), 254.
“Take the bugger off”: William G. Shaw, “State v. McDonnell,” Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Vermont, vol. 32, new series, vol. 3 (Rutland: Geo. A Tuttle, 1861), 495.
“Previous to this the soil had”: Henry Lamson Boies, History of De Kalb County, Illinois (Chicago: O. P. Bassett, 1868), 391.
a low-class prostitute with whom: My Secret Life (Amsterdam, 1888), 2:256.
“a term of contempt”: Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The West Somerset Word-Book (London: Trübner, 1886), 663.
the “feminization of ambisexual terms”: Hughes, Swearing, 220–23.
“G—d—your books”: Sheidlower, The F Word, 73; Hughes, Encyclopedia, xxii.