Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  * Despite preserving these songs for posterity, Brophy and Partridge (who a few years later published one of the best slang dictionaries and even a book devoted exclusively to bawdiness in Shakespeare) felt the need to go Victorian on the obscenity they contained. These words, they declared, “are ugly, in form and in sound. They are sexual but utterly unvoluptuous. Their use will coarsen and degrade, but it will not soften or seduce… . They are unshriven and, seemingly, past redemption. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover D. H. Lawrence experimented with two of them [fuck and cunt]… . The experiment was a failure: the two words instead of interweaving with the texture of his prose, rear their unlovely heads out of the page, gibbering abominably.” The inspiration for Alien?

  * W.O.1 stands for “warrant officer first class,” C.O. for “commanding officer.”

  * Wanker is quite taboo in Britain, though almost unused in the United States. The etymology is unknown; it was first employed around 1950, and means “masturbator,” or figuratively “loser” or “jerk.” Jerk (jerk off) is one of our few contributions to the “masturbation as insult” category, while Brits also have tosser and frig, which, as we have seen, are obscene terms for the act.

  * Ezra Pound had censored the first few sections, taking out Joyce’s phrase “the grey sunken cunt of the world” and removing Leopold Bloom’s trip to the outhouse—perhaps the first noncomical depiction of defecation in literary history. It is possible that these would have brought down the censors earlier.

  * The British ban was lifted in 1936, largely as a result of the American court cases.