Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  Crapper model #4, “The Cedric.”

  Alternatively, one could take the Roman view and see it as nominative determinism (“Nomen est omen”)—Thomas Crapper was destined to work with toilets, just as much as A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon (“wee’d on”) were fated to publish an article on urinary incontinence (“The Urethral Syndrome: Experience with the Richardson Urethroplasty”), or Usain Bolt to become the fastest man alive.

  Class and Swearing

  Euphemisms enjoyed such prominence because the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries were the age of decorum. The civilizing process that began slowly in the Middle Ages reached its height during these years; the shame threshold was at its widest extent. Bodily functions that formerly were performed unashamedly in public were now done only behind closed doors; the same functions had been discussed openly but were now subject to a parallel cloaking in language. As one historian writes, “Excretion was an accepted and semipublic event that Chaucer rarely used for comedy. In the last [i.e., nineteenth] century, these body functions have become rites performed in the shamefast privacy of a closed room, the excreta being immediately laved away by sparkling rivulets, to be seen and smelled no more.” Likewise, the words used to discuss these topics were washed out of public discourse—shit became defecate, and Victorian readers were embarrassed by the use of piss in the King James Bible. All things sexual were hidden away to an even greater degree, including things such as trousers that were not themselves taboo but lay adjacent to taboo areas.

  The newly emerged middle class was responsible for a great deal of this increased delicacy. The biggest social change of the eighteenth century was the development of the bourgeoisie—historical linguist Suzanne Romaine observes that “the transition from a society of estates or orders to a class-based society is one of the (if not THE) great themes of modern British social history.” In the Middle Ages, society had been rigidly hierarchical and divided by social function—those who fought (the landed gentry and knights), those who studied and prayed (the clergy), and those who worked (the peasants). You could go from the gentry to the clergy—many second and third sons did exactly this in England, because primogeniture left them little to inherit—but otherwise social mobility was almost impossible. In the Renaissance, merchants and craftspeople began to be seen as “the middling sort”—they were not noble, but neither were they poor peasants. By the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution, colonization, and global trade had made many of the middling sort extremely rich, forcing a reevaluation of their place in society. Economic criteria replaced social function as the determiner of social status, giving us what was coming to be called “class,” the upper, lower, and middle. Since class membership was determined to a great extent by money, class boundaries were much more fluid than those between the old estates. As one’s power, wealth, and influence increased, one moved up; if one went bankrupt, one moved down. The upper classes were more or less secure, with their ancestral lands and titles, but the middle classes felt themselves to be in a constantly precarious position. They needed to shore it up by broadcasting their differences from the lower classes—they moved to the suburbs, behaved with what they saw as greater moral probity, and, most relevant to us, spoke differently. “The middle class … sought an identity for themselves predicated in asserting their social and moral superiority over the working classes,” as linguist Tony McEnery puts it. They strove to “establish a personal ascendancy above the herd as right minded, responsible and successful citizens, and at the same time to impress their worth upon their social betters, including God.”

  The civilizing process was thus co-opted by the middle class as a way of differentiating themselves from the lower classes. They asserted their “civility” through language—the euphemisms they chose drew attention to an extreme delicacy that shrank from anything even pointing vaguely in the direction of taboo, marking them off from the lower classes, who, it was thought, still called a spade a spade, a water closet a shithouse.

  The opposite of euphemism—swearing and other sorts of “bad language”—was identified as morally wrong, partly because it spoke freely of taboo subjects, and partly because it was thought to be lower class. Obscene words such as fuck and cunt and also merely vulgar words such as thing and half pay came to be seen as the language of the uneducated, who were also ipso facto the morally sketchy—people who would violate linguistic decency, it was thought, would not hesitate to commit any sort of outrage against moral decency.

  But let us allow a few Victorian grammarians to speak for themselves. Richard Chenevix Trench lamented in 1859: “How shamefully rich is the language of the vulgar everywhere in words which are not allowed to find their way into books, yet which live as a sinful oral tradition on the lips of men, to set forth that which is unholy and impure.” George Perkins Marsh declared confidently around 1859 that “purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied with purity of thought and rectitude of action.” And Alfred Ayres had nothing good to say in his 1896 The Verbalist about people who use the word gentlemen where a simple men would do:

  Few things are in worse taste… . The men who use these terms most … belong to that class of men who cock their hats on one side of their heads, and often wear them when and where gentlemen would remove them; who pride themselves on their familiarity with the latest slang; who proclaim their independence by showing the least possible consideration for others; who laugh long and loud at their own wit; who wear a profusion of cheap finery, such as outlandish watch-chains hooked in the lowest button-hole of their vests, Brazilian diamonds in their shirt-bosoms, and big seal-rings on their little fingers; who use bad grammar and interlard their conversation with big oaths.

  It is difficult to pick apart the tangle of class and linguistic prejudices in Ayres’s stylistic advice. To say “gentlemen” when you mean “men” is low-class but aspirational, not the choice of someone who is content with his station. Such a man is trying to look middle- or upper-class, without a firm grasp on the lingo. He is very likely nouveau riche, with lots of money to buy Brazilian diamonds and large rings, but no taste. He is also morally suspect (here is the link between class and virtue), the kind of person who shows “the least possible consideration for others.” Finally, such a person is uneducated, with little knowledge of grammar and a propensity to swear.

  Perhaps no one in the twenty-first century would put it quite like Mr. Ayres, but the attitudes he reveals still exist, particularly about swearing. Swearing is frequently connected with ignorance—swearers are depicted as uneducated people who lack the verbal resources or imagination to think of any other words to use. And, with some empirical justification, swearing is thought to be a low-class habit. Tony McEnery analyzed 8,284 recorded examples of swearing, then broke them down by class. He found that members of the working class swore the most and used the strongest words. Members of the upper middle and middle middle classes swore the least but used stronger words (e.g., more fucks than Gods) than members of the lower middle class. McEnery speculates that this might be “evidence of hypercorrection … in attempting to copy the linguistic habits of the AB [upper middle and middle] social class, the lower-middle-class speakers exaggerate what they view to be a feature of AB speech.” This modern empiricism gives some support to the proverbs about swearing and social station mentioned in the introduction: “he swears like a lord” and “he swears like a tinker.” Excessive swearing was proverbially associated both with the aristocracy, who were more or less secure in their social position and could say and do what they wanted, and with what we’d now call the lower classes, who supposedly didn’t know any better. When in Henry IV, Part One, Lady Percy swears what her husband, Hotspur, considers a mealy-mouthed oath—“in good sooth”—he tells her to swear “as a lady … a good mouth-filling oath,” not as a merchant “comfit-maker’s wife.” Even in Shakespeare’s day, the middling sort were marking themselves off with their more delicate language.

  The links between s
ocial class and swearing are complicated. It is true that on average, the lower classes swear more than the upper and middle classes. It is probably true in some cases that people who swear frequently are uneducated, with impoverished vocabularies and imaginations. And it may very well be true that some sorts of swearing are morally wrong. But it is also important to remember that these attitudes were brought to us by the same people who declared that it was a sin to boldly split an English infinitive (Latin infinitives, like futuere, can’t be split) and informed students that they can’t use no double negatives (according to the principles of logic, they cancel each other out, despite centuries of usage during which they were perfectly well understood). Like many of our most prescriptive points of grammar, modern attitudes toward swearing and social class are the legacy of Victorian social climbers who were afraid to look working-class.

  Shit, That Bloody Bugger Turned Out to Be a Fucking Nackle-Ass Cocksucker!

  The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ embrace of linguistic delicacy and extreme avoidance of taboo bestowed great power on those words that broached taboo topics directly, freely revealing what middle-class society was trying so desperately to conceal. Under these conditions of repression, obscene words finally came fully into their own. They began to be used in nonliteral ways, and so became not just words that shocked and offended but words with which people could swear.

  The definitive expletive of the eighteenth century was bloody, which is still in frequent use in Britain today, and is so common Down Under that it is known as “the great Australian adjective.” Bloody was not quite an obscenity and not quite an oath, but it was definitely a bad word that shocked and offended the ears of polite society.* It is often supposed to be a corruption of the old oaths by our lady or God’s blood (minced form: ’sblood), but this is another urban legend that turns out to be false. Either it derives instead from the adjective bloody as in “covered in blood” or, as the OED proposes, it referred to the habits of aristocratic rabble-rousers at the end of the seventeenth century, who styled themselves “bloods.” “Bloody drunk,” then, would mean “as drunk as a blood.”

  The career of bloody is interesting, because one can clearly see either its perjoration (becoming a worse and worse word) or the rise of civility in action—or perhaps both. In the late seventeenth century, dramatists had no problem including the word in plays seen by genteel audiences, and printers had no problem spelling it out in their editions of those plays: “She took it bloody ill of him,” is just one example, occurring in the 1693 Maids Last Prayer. Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, uses it in one of his plays in 1743: “This is a bloody positive old fellow.” And Maria Edgeworth has her hero exclaim of another man, “Sir Philip writes a bloody bad hand,” in 1801’s Belinda. If Miss Edgeworth—who wrote novels about young women finding love and good marriages for a largely female readership, as well as morally improving children’s literature (six volumes of Moral Tales for Young People)—had her young hero say “bloody,” it can’t have been that bad a word. Miss Edgeworth gets her “bloody” in at almost the last moment it is possible, however. At around this time, the word starts to get more offensive: it begins to be printed as b——y or b—— and falls out of polite use, where it continues through the Victorian era. When George Bernard Shaw wanted to create a scandal, but not too big a scandal, in his 1914 Pygmalion, he had Eliza Doolittle exclaim in her newly perfect posh accent, “Walk! Not bloody likely! I am going in a taxi.” The first night’s audience greeted the word with “a few seconds of stunned disbelieving silence and then hysterical laughter for at least a minute and a quarter,” and there were some protests from various decency leagues, but on the whole a scandal never materialized. Bloody became “the catchword of the season” and pygmalion became a popular oath itself, as in “not pygmalion likely.” Had he scripted Eliza to say “Not fucking likely!” (which he very well could have in 1914) there in all likelihood would have been a real scandal, akin to that generated by shift in Playboy of the Western World.

  This was bloody at the turn of the century—a bad word, but not so bad that it was not in common use, according to Shaw, “by four-fifths of the British nation.” Perhaps because of this somewhat equivocal status, bloody comes in for more than its fair share of opprobrium from Victorian language mavens. In their definitions for fuck and related terms, for example, Farmer and Henley do not editorialize, merely defining the terms (“to copulate,” etc.) and providing examples of use. But they go off on poor bloody. It is

  an epithet difficult to define, and used in a multitude of vague and varying senses. Most frequently, however, as it falls with wearisome reiteration every two or three seconds from the mouths of London roughs of the lowest type, no special meaning, much less a sanguinary one, can be attached to its use. In such a case it forms a convenient intensitive, sufficiently important as regards sound to satisfy those whose lack of language causes them to fall back upon a frequent use of words of this type.

  Note the typical association of bad language with low social status and lack of education—the London roughs say “bloody” a lot because their vocabulary isn’t rich enough to furnish them other options. The original OED (1888) takes a similar line—bloody is “now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered ‘a horrid word,’ on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) as ‘b——y.’” Perhaps the OED would have had similar things to say about fuck, but the Victorian editors decided not to include it, along with cunt. And Julian Sharman, whose 1884 Cursory History of Swearing does not include any obscene words, attacks bloody for several pages. A sampling:

  We cannot disguise to ourselves that there is much in its unfortunate associations to render its occurrence still exceedingly painful. Originating in a senseless freak of language, it has by dint of circumstances become so noisome and offensive … Dirty drunkards hiccup it as they wallow on ale-house floors. Morose porters bandy it about on quays and landing-stages. From the low-lying quarters of the towns the word buzzes in your ear with the confusion of a Babel. In the cramped narrow streets you are deafened by its whirr and din, as it rises from the throats of the chaffering multitude, from besotted men defiant and vain-glorious in their drink, from shrewish women hissing out rancour and menace in their harsh querulous talk.

  (To chaffer is “to bargain, haggle, bandy words.”) Again, bloody is portrayed as a word beloved by the ignorant, morally degenerate lower classes. Bloody, unlike a word such as fuck, was perfectly placed to attract the anger from society’s growing intolerance of obscenity—it was “a swear-word,” as the Pygmalion press described it, yet it was not quite profane and not quite obscene. This made it offensive, but not so bad that one couldn’t with any decency draw attention to it.

  Bugger was the other early obscenity used nonliterally, with the true flexibility of a fully developed swearword. It was, in the past as now, a blunt, direct word for anal intercourse (or for the person who does the penetrating during said anal intercourse, the pedicator, if you will remember your Latin). Randall Cotgrave used it this way when defining levretée, the girl “buggered” by a greyhound. Even more frequently, however, the use of bugger was divorced from its literal meaning, in examples such as these: “God damn him, blood and wounds, he would bugger his Soul to Hell, and these words he used frequently to Man, Woman, and Child, bugger, bugger, bugger” (1647, reported); “Go, get thee gone … thou frantic ass, to the devil, and be buggered” (1693); “B——st [blast] and b-gg-r your eyes, I have got none of your money” (1794); “Damn ’em bugger you an’ your ballast” (1854); “Take the bugger off, he is knifing me” (1860); “Previous to this the soil had, in the expressive phrase of the country, been ‘buggered over’ with the old cast-iron plows” (1868). One final example shows that the biblical epidemic of crotch grabbing had not entirely died out in the Victorian era. A witness for an 1840 divorce petition described how Susan Shumard “came out and met
him [Francis Shields, her brother], and as she came up to him, she grabbed him by his private parts; there was considerable of a scuffle; she held tight, and he hollowed to her, you bugger you, let go.” (This was evidence that Susan had slept with her brother; her husband wanted a divorce because she had supposedly married him without informing him that she was four months pregnant with her brother’s child. The General Assembly of Ohio refused to grant the divorce—they felt that the testimony on both sides was so fantastical and unreliable that they could make no determination about the truth of the matter.) It is interesting that in the nineteenth century, bugger was apparently a term that could be applied equally to men and women, while today it is used almost exclusively toward men. Along with Francis Shields and the gentleman who called “bugger bugger bugger” to “Man Woman and Child,” we have evidence from the masterpiece of Victorian pornography, My Secret Life (1888), in which the protagonist reports that a low-class prostitute with whom he is consorting calls her landlady “bugger.”