Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  Other scholars insist that “him that pisseth” is derogatory, that God is in a sense using obscene language about these men who have displeased him. By defining them through a low bodily function, God’s language makes members of the house of Jeroboam seem like dogs, marking their territory the only way they know how.

  In any case, two things are clear. The phrase does not pertain to women, to whom stricter standards of modesty were applied (and who probably would have trouble pissing against a wall). And the translators of the King James Version had a different sense of the register of piss, or perhaps simply a greater toleration for vulgarity, than we do today. Modern translations of the Bible uniformly reject the richness of “him that pisseth,” replacing it with “every last male” (New International), “every male person” (New American Standard), or “every male” (English Standard).

  As these various translations show, many people today would prefer to ignore the bad language in the Bible. But how shocking was this language to the ancient Hebrews? Would words such as gelel and shathan have been obscene, and thus best translated as shit and piss, respectively, or would they have been polite words for indelicate subjects, more like our defecate and urinate? It is almost impossible to tell. Hebrew is like Latin, in that it was a vernacular language that became frozen in time as a religious, scholarly one. For hundreds of years it was read and studied, not spoken, until it was resurrected as the lingua franca of Jews in Palestine in the nineteenth century. Huge numbers of Latin texts have come down to us, from the basest graffiti to the most high-flown oratory, allowing us, as we saw in the last chapter, to reconstruct the hierarchy of genres and assess the registers of words. But unlike Latin, there is no such record for ancient Hebrew—it comes to us from the Bible and from the Mishnah (c. AD 200), the first part of the Talmud, itself a commentary on the Bible. These texts are too similar in purpose and vocabulary to reveal anything about the register of words when they were written.

  Most of the Bible’s obscenity is in deed, not in word, though. The language is often quite chaste, even when the acts being described feature the most flagrant “whoredoms,” as the King James Version likes to call them. As translated in the New Revised Standard Version, Ezekiel 23:20 depicts things that would fit right into a pornographic movie, but in language that is G-rated (okay, maybe PG): “Yet she increased her whorings, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions” (Ezek. 23:19–20). Biblical Hebrew is extremely euphemistic—it often substitutes an indirect and inoffensive term for one thought to be blunt or offensive. It never refers to the genitals when hand, or foot, or side, or heel, or shame, or leg, or thigh will do. It never says have sex with when a man can know a woman, or go into her, or approach her, or touch her, or lie with her, or just go up to the bed, or when, sexiest of all, the two can eat bread together. For defecation, the euphemism of choice is covering the feet. Here feet means feet, not genitals—when you defecate, you’ve got your trousers, skirt, or robe around your ankles, covering up your feet.

  Some of these euphemisms are obvious, as in the Song of Songs.

  My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,

  and my inmost being yearned for him.

  I arose to open to my beloved,

  and my fingers dripped with myrrh,

  my fingers with liquid myrrh,

  upon the handles of the bolt. (Song 5:4–5)

  If hand = “genitals,” and fingers = “genitals,” and dripped = … well, you get the idea. It is almost painful to watch scholars insist that this passage has nothing at all to do with sex. No, it is truly and only about God’s love for Israel, Christ’s love for the Church, or the soul’s spiritual union with God. The esteemed eighteenth-century commentator Matthew Henry explains, for example, “In this chapter we have … Christ’s gracious acceptance of the invitation which his church had given him, and the kind visit which he made to her.”

  The Hebrew Bible’s penchant for euphemism can lead to surprising reinterpretations of familiar passages. Everyone knows that Eve was created from Adam’s rib, right? But ribs aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew—that is a translation made by the Septuagint, the early Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. The word actually used is side (tsela), and, as we’ve seen, side can be used as a euphemism for the genitals (Gen. 2:20–23). Scholar Ziony Zevit takes this euphemism and runs with it, arguing that in the Genesis narrative Eve is actually made from Adam’s penis, in particular from his penis bone. Most mammals have a baculum, a bone in their penis, which helps with erections. Only humans, spider monkeys, whales, horses, and a few other species lack it, achieving erections through blood pressure alone. Zevit thinks that the ancient Israelites would have been quite knowledgeable about comparative anatomy, given that they probably encountered lots of skeletons—of animals in fields, and of humans in caves where bodies were entombed. They would have known that men and women have the same number of ribs, another mark against the rib theory, and would have seen that the bone men were in fact missing was the baculum. It makes a certain kind of sense, then, to have God create Eve from Adam’s baculum. This explains the bone’s disappearance in humans and gives new richness to Adam’s famous welcome of Eve: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”—flesh, of course, being one more euphemism for the penis.

  There is sometimes a certain difficulty in deciding when the Bible is using a word in its ordinary sense and when euphemistically. One biblical law is a case in point: “If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, you shall cut off her hand; show no pity” (Deut. 25:11–12). You can imagine a rash of these fights breaking out, men struggling with each other, dust flying, women darting in and making mad grabs for the, ahem, feet. Or perhaps something like this once happened to the author of the passage and he wants to make sure that no man should ever again have to suffer such an indignity. In any case, there is one obvious euphemism here. The Hebrew doesn’t actually say “genitals” in this passage; it uses “that which excites shame.”

  But what about hand? Sometimes this is also a euphemism for the genitals, but does it function that way here? Most scholars take it at face value—the law stipulates that the woman’s hand should be cut off, an eye for an eye, and a hand for a handful. Biblical scholar Jerome T. Walsh takes a different view, arguing that hand is indeed a euphemism for the genitals here. The law is not mandating clitoridectomies for the women who transgress, however. Walsh thinks that the Hebrew that is usually translated as cut off is actually closer in meaning to the English shave, and he translates the punishment as “You shall shave the hair of her groin.” The woman has shamed the man by touching his genitals; she will be shamed in turn by having her pubic hair removed. We have no historical evidence about how the ancient Israelites actually handled situations like these (if, indeed, they ever came up), so we can’t know for sure what the law stipulates. But the debate raises interesting questions about how to read a book translated from a language in which it sometimes seems that every other word can be a euphemism for something else.

  Let Not Fornication Be Named Among You

  The New Testament is even stricter than the Hebrew Bible when it comes to obscene language. It issues guidelines for speech that would seem to restrict even euphemistic uses. The Letter to the Ephesians, which was possibly written by Paul, instructs: “But fornication and impurity of any kind, or greed, must not even be mentioned among you, as is proper among saints. Entirely out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk; but instead, let there be thanksgiving” (Eph. 5:3). The letter doesn’t simply command Christians not to do various bad things; it tells them not to speak of them. It is not enough to avoid fornication—you also have to avoid talking about it. This is not so much because the words involved are themselves foul�
��greed, for instance, is not a bad word—but because saying the word leads to thinking about what the word represents, which can all too easily lead to action. Just as when God forbids people even to mention the names of other gods, lest they be inspired to worship them, the author of Ephesians seems to fear a chain reaction in which you mention fornication, then you begin thinking about fornicating, and pretty soon you’re “fucking like any furious fornicator,” in the immortal words of sixteenth-century Scottish poet Sir David Lyndsay. The theory of language that motivates this fear is the same one that linguists and other scholars often use to understand swearing. Swearwords are thought to have a deeper connection to the things they represent than do other words; implicit in the Letter to the Ephesians is a similar claim about all words. In Ephesians, the link between word and referent is almost magical, so strong that merely saying a word seems almost inevitably to lead to the doing of the thing to which it refers.

  The passage goes on to forbid “obscene, silly, and vulgar talk.” These are the kinds of talk that are most likely to contain words that might lead their speakers or listeners to sin. Obscene and vulgar language is made up almost entirely of words for various kinds of impurities, whether sexual or scatological—it is fairly obvious why the author of Ephesians would want to discourage their use. “Silly talk” is less obvious, but exegetes explain it as coarse jesting and jokes that bring up dangerous topics. But this passage is also entirely in line with the New Testament’s strict demands for the language of “saints,” which refers to all Christians, not just to particularly holy people, as it does today. Christ tells his followers that “on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matt. 12:36–37). Careless is often translated as idle—Christ wants every word a person speaks to be useful. It is not enough to abstain from obscene language, hurtful speech, or lies. If what you are saying doesn’t improve or edify you or your hearers, you shouldn’t say it. This is how St. Jerome interprets the passage: “An idle word is one that is spoken without benefit to both the speaker and the hearer, for example, when we speak about frivolous things to the neglect of serious matters, or when we tell old wives’ tales.” This is the standard against which all language is judged in the New Testament. Christ and his apostles are not so concerned with obscene language per se as with any speech that is not serious and improving, whether it’s a silly knock-knock joke or the most lewd description of some sexual act. Nevertheless, some words are worse than others. Language that is not just distracting but actually spurs people to do bad things is especially to be avoided, whether those words are obscene words such as fuck or polite terms for the same things, such as fornication.

  The New Testament’s stance on language had a profound influence in the Middle Ages, in preference to the Roman—and contemporary—one that privileges words for taboo topics as worse and thus more powerful than other words. It goes some way toward explaining why medieval medical texts used words that the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine would never employ, and why the Canterbury pilgrims very likely would have wended their way wearing little pins in the shape of erect penises and vaginas with wings, as we’ll see in the next chapter. The Old Testament’s stance on language determined what kind of words actually were shocking, offensive, and thought to be dangerous in the Middle Ages: oaths.

  Chapter 3

  Swearing God to Pieces

  The Middle Ages

  In the year 715 a monk named Eadfrith began a wonderful and ambitious labor of love. In a cold, damp, windswept priory on the coast of northeast England, he poured all his energy and artistic skill into a gift to honor God, producing the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the world. This exquisite manuscript contains Vulgate (Latin) versions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, illustrated in the insular fashion, a combination of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon styles. Some 250 years later a priest of the same community named Aldred added an English gloss to the Latin text, producing the oldest surviving English version of the Gospels. “Liber generationis Iesu Christi filii David Φilii Abraham,” Matthew begins, and Aldred translates: “Bóc cneurise haelendes cristes dauides sunu abrahames sunu.”

  This is Old English, almost incomprehensible to modern speakers of the language. (The line means, as the King James Version puts it: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”) And so Aldred goes on, glossing the Latin quite literally, until he comes to Matthew 5:27: “Audistis quia dictum est antiquis non moechaberis”—in the KJV, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Aldred, however, translates this rather differently, as “Geherde ge forðon acueden is to ðæm aldum ne gesynnge ðu [vel] ne serð ðu oðres mones wif”—“You have heard that it was said to them of old, don’t sin, and don’t sard another man’s wife.”

  Much later, during the English Renaissance, sard was seen as only slightly more acceptable than fuck is today. In a 1530 English-French dictionary, for example, it is defined with foutre, French for fuck: “I sarde a queene [a prostitute]. Je fous, nos foutons, je foutis, jay foutu, je fouteray, que je foute, foutre …” (I fuck, we fuck, etc.). The question is, what is a word like sard doing in the Bible? In this sacred book, so beautifully crafted for the honor of God, why did the priest translate the Latin as, in essence, “Thou shalt not fuck thy neighbor’s wife”?

  Aldred was not the only one to include obscene words in a translation of the Bible. In fact, his use of sard is more the rule than the exception. In the 1370s, four centuries later, John Wyclif and his associates started work on an English version of the Bible, so that ordinary people who didn’t know Latin could understand God’s word directly, without the intercession—what they saw as the interference—of a priest. And what these ordinary people learned couldn’t be said out loud in church today: “A geldynge, þe ballogys brusyd or kut off, & þe ʒarde kut awey, shal not goon yn to þe chirche” (Deut. 23:1) (a gelding [eunuch], the bollocks bruised or cut off, and the yard [penis] cut away, shall not go into the church). The same constraint went for sacrificial animals: “Ye shall not offer to the Lord any beast whose bollocks/balls [ballokes] are broken” (Lev. 22:24). In American English, balls is not a polite word, but it is not a particularly bad one. In Britain, however, bollocks was and is quite obscene. In a 2000 ranking of the top-ten swearwords by members of the British public, bollocks came in eighth.

  Readers of Wyclif’s Bible also learned what God promised to do to anyone who didn’t obey and honor him: “The Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt [on] the part of the body by which turds are shat out” (Deut. 28:27). This is a close translation of the Latin, which accounts for the odd circumlocution that avoids one vulgar word by using two more. It’s not that the Wycliffites couldn’t bring themselves to use arse. They could. We later find out that “the Lord … smote [the people of] Azothe [Ashdod] and its coasts in the more private/secret part of the arses” (1 Sam. 5:6).

  This is only a sampling of the obscene words that Wyclif and his associates put into their vernacular Bible. Their version is much more obscene, by our standards, than the usually euphemistic Hebrew Bible or the Latin Vulgate (the latter served as their source text). Deuteronomy 28:27’s “Parte corporis per quam stercora digeruntur” means, in modern English, “the part of the body by which dung is spread.” Stercora, we saw in Chapter 1, is a fairly polite Latin word, and spreading is vastly more polite than shitting. Here Wyclif et alia took what in Latin is a highly euphemistic and quite vague description and turned it into something specific and dysphemistic. They did this over and over, sticking arses and bollocks where there had never been any before.

  The naked truth is that words such as bollocks, sard, and even cunt were not obscene in the Middle Ages. Generally, people of medieval England did not share our modern concept of obscenity, in which words for certain taboo functions p
ossess a power in excess of their literal meaning and must be fenced off from polite conversation. A word such as cunt, which today “kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations,” as we’ve seen Stephen Pinker define a swearword, was an ordinary word in the Middle Ages—direct, to be sure, but not wielding any special power to raise hackles or offend. Medieval people were, to us, strikingly unconcerned with the Shit.

  This is not to say that medieval people had no concept of bad language. They adopted the New Testament’s stance on the immorality of idle speech. They were especially concerned with what were called “foule wordes” or “wordes of vyleny” (villainy), but these were not coextensive with our obscene words. “Foule wordes” were any words that could lead people into sin—they had bad moral effects, such as we saw in the previous chapter. Any word could be a foul word if its use enticed its speaker or hearer into doing some sort of evil, whether that would be lechery, theft, murder, gaming, or what have you.

  The worst, most dangerous kind of language in the Middle Ages, however, was swearing. Swearing at the time had a very particular meaning, the biblical meaning—it referred only to oaths by God. Sincerely done, swearing was one of the bases of stable government and social order. Badly or frivolously—that is, vainly—done, it threatened to wreak havoc with the smooth running of society and even to injure God himself. The Holy provided the strongest taboos and most highly charged language.

  Before we go on, we need to clarify what we mean by the Middle Ages, and what the linguistic situation in England was during this period. For hundreds of years, English was only one of three languages spoken in England, and not the most important one. England was triglossic—its three languages were used by different social classes and imbued with varying amounts of prestige. Latin was the language of learning, the international lingua franca, used by monks, clerks, doctors, philosophers, and many literary authors in England and across the rest of Europe. Anglo-Saxon—the Old English of Aldred’s Bible translation—was the primary language of everybody else from the sixth century to 1066, when the Normans conquered England. After the Conquest, Norman French became the language of power, parlée par the nobility, employed in the courts of law, and prized as an expressive literary language. English became in turn the language of the downtrodden, the dispossessed. King Richard the Lionheart, portrayed in tales and movies as the savior of the brave and oppressed Saxons in Sherwood Forest, actually wouldn’t have been able to talk to them—he never bothered to learn English.