Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  Going up a step on the ladder, Latin elegies often were sexually suggestive—Ovid was supposedly banished for his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)—but their vocabulary was clean. Ovid’s Elegy 1.5 gives a typical example of this mix of lascivious subject matter and chaste language (this is Christopher Marlowe’s translation, done while he was a student at Cambridge and published posthumously in 1603):

  Then came Corinna in a long loose gown

  Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down …

  I snatched her gown: being thin, the harm was small,

  Yet strived she to be covered therewithall,

  And striving thus as one that would be cast,

  Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.

  Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,

  Not one wen in her body could I spy,

  What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,

  How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me,

  How smooth a belly, under her waist saw I,

  How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?

  To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,

  I clinged her naked body, down she fell,

  Judge you the rest, being tired she bade me kiss.

  Jove send me more such afternoons as this.

  Marlowe’s language offers a good approximation of Ovid’s—it is racy and suggestive without being obscene.

  Roman culture mandated that the language of oratory too should be above reproach, and that its themes should contain nothing titillating, even when recounted in the most restrained of terms. The rhetorician Seneca instructs that when publicly pleading a case for someone, “one must stay far away from every obscenity in both words and thoughts. It is better to be quiet, even if it damages your case, than to speak if it damages your sense of shame.” Any words in these genres would not be obscene, even if they were used in a vicious attack on an opponent in a debate, or in a plea for one’s mistress to get back into bed. Crepo, for instance, must be a polite way to say “to fart”—along the lines of “to break wind”—since the orator Cato uses it in a speech, while pedo (also “to fart”) is a less polite version, found only in satire and epigram. And we can tell that Romans did not consider meio an obscenity, despite its best translation as “to piss,” because it too is found in oratory. If not for the hierarchy of genres, our prejudices as English-speakers would lead us to class it as obscene.

  Epics are at the top of the list because they deal with such lofty subjects as the Olympian gods, battles, and the founding of nations. The language must be equally elevated. Here, for example, is how Virgil describes Dido and Aeneas getting it on for the first time: “Dido and the Trojan leader make their way / To the same cave. Earth herself and bridal Juno / Give the signal. Fires flash in the Sky / Witness to their nuptials, and the Nymphs / Wail high on the mountaintop.” Here is no place for a cunnus, or even a little criso; if Martial were telling this story, it would have sounded a bit different.

  This hierarchy of genres is the most useful tool we have for gauging the relative obscenity of Latin words. If a term is found in graffiti or epigrams and nowhere else, we can be pretty sure that it’s a very bad word. If it appears in satire, graffiti, and epigrams, it’s pretty bad, but not one of the worst, and so on, up the ladder. Occasionally, however, Roman authors themselves comment on appropriate language, providing direct evidence for a scale of obscenity. Cicero’s letter about the word mentula is the most famous example. In this response to his loose-tongued friend Paetus, who mentioned mentula in a letter, Cicero discusses the Stoic idea that nothing is obscene, in word or in deed—that “breaking wind should be as free as a hiccough” (crepitus aiunt aeque liberos ac ructus esse oportere). Note his use of crepitus, the more polite word for “fart.” Cicero himself is on the side of modesty—he doesn’t agree with the Stoic proverb that “the wise man tells it like it is.” But his letter is a lengthy investigation into which words should be avoided, and why. Penis is obscenus, but it is not as offensive as mentula, for which it was originally a euphemism meaning “tail.” Cicero will actually write out penis, but he only alludes to mentula. He appears to consider landica and cunnus extremely obscene, and pedo, colei (balls), and testes (testicles) less so. Battuo (to beat) is merely vulgar slang for futuo; the synonymous slang depso (to knead) is outright obscene. Authors such as Cicero, who were self-conscious about their language and recorded their thoughts, provide another way for modern linguists to get a feel for swearing in a language long dead.

  From Profanity to Politesse

  If penis was obscene to the Romans, why has it become the most proper English term for the male organ of generation? It is not the only Latin word to make this transition. Vulva, a polite English word for the external genital organs of the female, was in Latin a vulgar word for the womb. And vagina (literally “a sheath,” “a scabbard,” as we have seen) was originally a crude metaphor for the anus. Fellatio and cunnilingus aren’t as common in English, since they refer to acts that are even more taboo than the body parts they involve. If we ever need to talk about these things, however, they are again our most proper words. How did all these obscene Latin words become our most polite sexual terms in English?

  During its long tenure as the language of the Roman Empire, Latin gradually split into two different languages, according to levels of discourse—a literary language that was used by the educated elite and which remained fairly stable over the centuries, and a “vulgar” language that over the years evolved into the Romance vernaculars: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, et cetera. In England, there was no vernacular Latin, only the elite language used by the Catholic Church, and later (beginning in the fourteenth century) by humanists, a new class of civil servants cum philosophers who wanted to revitalize ancient Roman and Greek texts and virtues. Latin was the lingua franca through which educated people of various countries could communicate with each other, and it was used this way into the eighteenth century. (John Milton, for example, was appointed Latin secretary to Cromwell’s republic in 1649. His job was to compose the government’s foreign correspondence in Latin. The poet Andrew Marvell was his assistant.)

  Latin was, at this time, what historian and linguist Nicholas Ostler calls “a language for male initiates.” These languages are not learned naturally but transmitted through an artificial procedure—school. Latin was handed down from teacher to student unchanged, since no one was using it in daily life, and almost the only people who could speak and write it were well-off and well-educated men. Ordinary people didn’t know Latin; women didn’t know Latin (with few exceptions, including Queen Elizabeth I); children didn’t know Latin. This made the language particularly suitable for talking about things you didn’t want the majority of people to understand—dangerous things such as sex. In the Renaissance, when many obscene Latin terms were being rehabilitated, there was great value placed on sexual continence, on staying in control of one’s base bodily urges (an ideal in ancient Rome as well, as we’ve seen). People of weak will and poor judgment—pretty much anyone not part of the Latin-language community, that is, women, children, and uneducated men—would lose control of themselves if they read or listened to descriptions of sexual activity or even overheard obscene words. Women’s passions would be inflamed, and they would become sexually insatiable. Children would be corrupted, their early promise blasted. Latin became the appropriate language in which to talk about sexual parts and actions since it was understood only by the few who wouldn’t get carried away reading about, say, penises. And so it remains today. If you are teaching a junior-high sex ed class, you had better say penis and vagina instead of cock and cunt—the former are almost abstractions, going as far as words can to desexualize the things they represent.

  Though Latin lived on after the fall of the Roman Empire, it never again achieved the same grandeur of obscenity it boasted under the Republic and the Caesars. As it retired into its Renaissance role as the source for polite and technical English v
ocabulary, however, it left behind the model of obscenity that we still employ today, based on sexually and excrementally taboo body parts and actions. Today we have lost the religious aspects that obscenitas possessed—the Shit stands alone, if you will. But, as we will see, the Holy-Shit connection returned in English too, in a slightly different form, in the Middle Ages.

  Chapter 2

  On Earth as It Is in Heaven

  The Bible

  Latin showed us how consistent some broad categories of obscenity have been across time and culture, while revealing some interesting differences in the details. But there is another kind of swearing, which was once more powerful than even landica could ever hope to be—the oath. Swearing an oath means calling on God to witness that a person is telling the truth or intending to fulfill a promise. I’ve mentioned that such swearing is still important today in courts of law, oaths of office, and personal relations. In the past, oaths were even more important. Sincere oath swearing was seen as the glue that held society together, and when done falsely or badly—when oaths were blasphemous or vain—it threatened to tear the fabric of civil life apart.

  For the origins of oaths as we know and use them, we look of course to religion. Or perhaps we should say that for the origins of religion, we look to the oath. In the Bible, swearing is the foundational act of the Jewish and Christian faiths. The covenants that God makes with Abraham are oaths, pledged by both Abraham and God. For Jews, these oaths establish God’s special relationship with the Jewish people; for Christians, they create the conditions for Christ’s eventual arrival. Either way, in the beginning was the Word, and the word was an Oath.

  Divine Swearing

  Almost the first thing we learn about Abram (as Abraham, founder of the three “Abrahamic” monotheistic religions, is originally called) is that God will bless him. God says to him, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:1–2). It takes a while for God to make good on his pledge, though, and Abram doesn’t have much time to waste—he is already seventy-five years old when he gets the call. He leaves his homeland as ordered with his wife, Sarai (later renamed Sarah), spends some time in Egypt, and gets Pharaoh into trouble by claiming that Sarai is his sister, not his wife. The unsuspecting Egyptian marries the still sexy sexagenarian Sarai, and “for her sake” gives Abram “sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels” (Gen. 12:16). In return for Pharaoh’s generosity, God afflicts him with plagues until he finally realizes his mistake—“Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife?”—and kicks Abram and his entourage out. Abram then wanders into Canaan, and God repeats his promise of numerous offspring, specifying that Canaan is the land he will give him: “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you” (Gen. 13:16–17). Thus begins a long period of wandering, during which Abram begins to doubt that God will—or is able to—fulfill his promises. How can his descendants be like the dust on the ground if he doesn’t have any children? Who exactly is going to inherit this land he’s living in?

  God decides he needs to assuage Abram’s doubts and to bind himself to his words even more strongly than he has done so far. He instructs Abram to collect a three-year-old heifer, she-goat, and ram, as well as a turtledove and a pigeon, and then to cut the bigger animals in half. Abram falls into a deep sleep and sees God, in the form of a smoking firepot and a flaming torch, pass between the pieces of the animal carcasses (Gen. 15:7–21). This is God’s first covenant with Abraham, in which he formalizes the promises he has been making to give the land of Canaan to Abraham’s descendants.

  God here enters what amounts to a traditional Hittite covenant, which would have been sworn between enemies at the end of hostilities, between rulers and vassals to set up the terms of their relationship, or by a person committing himself to some weighty action.* A covenant is “a solemn promise made binding by an oath, which may be either a verbal formula or a symbolic action. Such an action or formula is recognized by both parties as the formal act which binds the actor to fulfill his promise.” In Hebrew, covenants were said to be “cut,” not “made,” because the ritual killing and slicing of animals was an important part of the ceremony. The sacrifice sealed the deal—anyone who broke the covenant was supposed to end up as dead as the doves, heifers, or sheep that were killed. The covenant God cuts here is unilateral—it binds God to do what he has promised, but it doesn’t require Abram to do anything in return. In walking through the animal sacrifices, God is implicitly swearing an oath that if he breaks his word, he will end up like those slaughtered ruminants.

  This is the only place in the Bible where God utters what scholars call a self-curse. Usually he is on the administering end, and it’s humans swearing, “So may God do to me”—what will be done is often unexpressed and always assumed to be awful—“if I break my word.” (King David swears this way, as do Ruth, Solomon, Saul, and many other figures.) In these oaths, God is expected to carry out whatever horrible punishment the speaker has invited upon him- or herself. But in his first covenant with Abraham, God is putting himself under a curse. Who will punish him if he breaks his word? Who will ensure that he ends up like the sacrificial animals? (And in what sense would that be possible?) These questions are analogous to the “paradox of the stone,” a staple of college philosophy classes: can God, who is omnipotent and thus can do anything, create a stone too heavy for him to lift? The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, perhaps best known for his On Bullshit, offers a succinct reply, which boils down to “He can, and then he lifts it.” God “can handle situations which he cannot handle.” Likewise, God could destroy himself if he breaks his oath. God would never need to, however, because he is Truth itself and would never go back on his word. This early in the Bible, though, there are some other possible solutions, which we will get to later. In any case, God has not just made promises to Abram; in cutting the covenant with him, he has pledged himself even more strongly. He has sworn.

  When Abram is ninety-nine years old—getting on in years even by biblical standards—God confirms the covenant with him. This time, though, God requires Abram to do something—this new version is a mutual covenant, with responsibilities on both sides. God will make Abram the father of a multitude of nations and give his descendants the land of Canaan, per above; he will also “be God to you and your offspring after you” (Gen. 17:7) and start calling him Abraham (“ancestor of a multitude”). For his part, Abraham promises to “be blameless” (Gen. 17:1) and agrees to circumcise the males of his household, as a sign of the covenant: “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (Gen. 17:13–14). This appears to be divine humor, by the way. Anyone who breaks the covenant of circumcision will be “cut off.” (This joke actually occurs twice in the Bible, making it the most popular joke in a book not known for its humor. When in the New Testament Paul argues that Christ has abrogated the need for circumcision, he declares of those still in favor of it: “I would they were even cut off” (i.e., castrated; KJV Gal. 5:12).

  God reaffirms the covenant one more time, after Abraham obeys God’s command to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, born to him at the age of one hundred. When the boy is weaned, God orders Abraham to “take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Gen. 22:2). Abraham sets off the next day, without hesitation or complaint. He builds an altar, binds Isaac and lays him on top, and is about to plunge a knife into him when an angel tells him to stop; he has proved that he fears God. Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in a thicket
, and sacrifices it instead.

  Because Abraham has “been blameless” and obeyed God even in something so heart-wrenching and terrible, God once again reaffirms the covenant. An angel calls down from heaven and tells Abraham, “By myself I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore” (Gen. 22:16–17). God has now committed himself to Abraham in several, increasingly serious ways. He has promised him, made and renewed a covenant with him, and sworn an oath by himself that he will bless Abraham and look after his descendants.

  Why does God swear? It seems an odd thing for him to do—perhaps not as odd as when he puts himself under a self-curse by passing through the slaughtered bodies of three-year-old animals, but still. Every word that God says is true, so why does he need the extra security an oath provides? That he swears is both a mark of favor to Abraham and his descendants and a recognition of their frailty. In binding himself here with an oath, and earlier with his self-curse, God is reassuring Abraham that he will fulfill his promises, in language that people can readily understand. This doesn’t increase the probability that he will do what he says, as it is supposed to when people swear; God knows that there is never a difference between his word and his deed. It acknowledges instead that even faithful believers have moments of doubt, that human hearts and minds are fallible. As the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo wrote around AD 30, God “is said to swear, because of our weakness… . And since He is blessed and gracious and propitious, He does not judge created beings in accordance with His greatness but in accordance with theirs.” God loves his creation so much that he is willing to assume the restrictions and obligations of an oath to assuage our insecurities.

  Why God Wants Us to Swear