Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  Scientists have discovered much about the emotional impact of swearwords through traditional psychological testing such as word recall tasks. If you are given a list of words, some of which are obscene and some of which are not, chances are the ones that will stick in your mind are obscene. When Timothy Jay gave people a list of thirty-six taboo and non-taboo words, the top five recalled were nigger, bitch, pussy, cock, and slut. Fewer subjects recalled friend and cuddle; nobody remembered kiss, pity, crime, lung, or frame. This confirms what we feel instinctively and have seen through brain imaging studies—taboo words are arousing, not in the sexual sense (though of course they can be that too) but in a more general physiological sense. These words excite the lower-brain circuitry responsible for emotion, which creates electrical impulses that can be measured in the skin. Reading Jay’s taboo words caused higher skin conductance frequencies than did the non-taboo words, correlating pretty exactly with the recall of the terms.

  Another piece of folk wisdom about swearing has recently found scientific support. If you ask people why they swear when they hurt themselves, they will likely say that it makes them feel better—it is cathartic in some way. Intrepid researchers have discovered that you can keep your hand immersed in extremely cold water for longer (an additional forty seconds) if you swear than if you say some neutral word. The psychologist Richard Stephens, who led the experiment, summed up his results: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear.”

  Many people in the twentieth century and today have been following Stephens’s advice, and not only when they’ve hurt themselves. In the past century, swearing manifested itself in the public sphere to a degree not seen since the vain oaths of the Middle Ages. Like the Victorian period, though, it was an era of the Shit. Twentieth-century speakers still used religious oaths frequently when they swore, but they were much less powerful, less shocking than the obscenities. In the mid-twentieth century, we started to see a change in this schema, however, as sexual obscenities themselves started to lose power to a new class of obscene words—the racial slurs.

  Epilogue

  In the thousands of years we’ve surveyed, we’ve seen people use many different swearwords to express the same things—aggression, insult, one-upmanship, and denigration, certainly, but also love and friendship, and the surprisingness or awesomeness of our experiences. Swearwords were and are perhaps the best words we have with which to communicate extremes of emotion, both negative and positive.

  Over the centuries, these words have drawn strength from two main areas of taboo—religion and the human body, the Holy and the Shit. In ancient Rome, the Shit was in ascendance. Latin obscenity was not the same as contemporary English obscenity, though, given that Rome had a very different sexual schema, and that for Romans some kinds of obscenity themselves had a religious function. In the Bible, the Holy replaced the Shit, and oaths gained power—sincere oaths because they called on God as a witness, and vain oaths because they could injure him in various ways. Oaths remained the most shocking, most highly charged language in the Middle Ages, as taboos on touching God’s body and impugning God’s honor were stronger than those on revealing or mentioning parts of the human body. In the Renaissance, this began to change. Because of the rise of Protestantism and other factors we’ve discussed, the balance slowly began to shift away from the Holy and back to the Shit. By the mid-nineteenth century, we were firmly mired in the Shit—obscene words had become the most shocking, the worst words in the English language. This was the height of the civilizing process, the maximum extent of the shame threshold, with obscene body parts and words taboo as never before or since. It was at the end of the nineteenth century that obscene words finally started to be thought of as and called “swearing,” though they had been fulfilling this function for many years before then. Most recently, the twentieth century witnessed the beginning of sexual obscenity’s decline and the rise of a new kind of obscenity, racial epithets, which are now some of the most taboo words in the English language.

  Just as there has always been swearing, there have always been attempts to stop or control it. Roman obscenity was supposed to be limited to particular genres of texts, or particular occasions—the religious rites of Priapus, or triumphal ceremonies, for example. Yahweh wanted his people to swear by him and by nobody else. Medieval authors of pastoral texts tried to convince, then command, people not to take God’s name in vain. The English Parliament issued laws against oaths onstage and in everyday life during the seventeenth century; prosecutions for obscenity began during the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, euphemisms grew in popularity as obscene words were stigmatized and avoided as vulgar and low-class. The twentieth century saw the regulation of fighting words and more obscenity prosecutions, which, ironically, helped pave the way for the public use of obscene words that they were intended to curtail.

  Some people have set their sights even higher—not on the control of swearing but on its elimination altogether. In 1973, Yugoslav philologist Olga Penavin predicted that swearing would simply go extinct with the spread of socialism. In a socialist utopia, there would be no conflict, and thus no need for swearwords, she reasoned. This didn’t work out, obviously—Russian obscenities constitute almost an entire language of their own, called mat, and Serbians, Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, and Macedonians can all understand jebem ti mater (“I fuck your mother”), though they theoretically speak different languages. In the 1950s and early 1960s, comedian Lenny Bruce had reversed Penavin’s causation, promoting the idea that getting rid of swearing would end sexual repression, racism, and violence. Many of his routines were intended to make audience members aware of what he saw as the Puritanism that prevented them from enjoying sexuality without guilt. In a bit called “To Is a Preposition, Come Is a Verb,” he tried to get people to think about why it is taboo in polite society to discuss topics that are ultimately pleasurable, while racism, violence, and intolerance—the “true obscenities,” according to Bruce—can be discussed and often even indulged in without repercussions.

  One of Bruce’s most famous routines tried to strip racial slurs of their power to wound. During “Are There Any Niggers Here Tonight?” Bruce looked out into the audience and pretended to count the people who belonged to stigmatized groups: “That’s two kikes and three niggers, and one spic. One spic, two, three spics. One mick, one mick, one spic, one hick thick funky spunky boogie.” Bruce’s repetition of these slurs almost turns them into rhyming nonsense words, and for a brief time they lose their charge, their ability to stigmatize and degrade.

  Is this a good thing? Should we all in our own small ways be working toward Bruce’s goal? Fuck, no. Eradicating the words with which we express hatred will not get rid of the emotion itself, producing some conflict-free, if not socialist, utopia. A world without swearing would not be a world without aggression, hate, or conflict, but a world bereft of a key means of defusing these emotions, of working them out. Swearing is an important safety valve, allowing people to express negative emotions without resorting to physical violence. This doesn’t always work, of course, or the legal category of “fighting words” would not exist. But swearwords are the closest thing we have to violence without actual physical contact—they are cathartic, relieving pent-up emotions in ways that other words cannot. Take away swearwords, and we are left with fists and guns.

  We may not have much say in the matter, however. It could be that the current efflorescence of swearing is in fact well on its way to accomplishing at least some of what Lenny Bruce wanted. All the swearing parrots of the Internet are pretty effectively sapping the charge from some of our worst obscenities. The more often we hear or use fuck, the less power it has to shock and offend. For ancient Romans, the highly charged taboo status of the sexual organs was encoded in their language—the genitalia were veretrum (parts of awe) or verecundum (parts of shame). In today’s American slang, the genitalia are devalued as junk. We have already seen one group of swearwords—the religious oaths—lo
se most of their charge, beginning in the Renaissance, but as their power declined, the sexual obscenities were there to take up the slack. Now, as our sexual and excremental obscenities are becoming less taboo, where will we find new ones? What will the swearwords of the future be?

  Our sexual and excremental terms may one day be considered as mild as religious oaths are today, but it seems safe to say that epithets will remain strong obscenities. It is becoming more and more taboo to essentialize anyone or anything in a single word as epithets do, whether that word sums up a person by race, mental acuity (retard), physical disability (cripple), or size (fat). Epithets are more limited than our most popular obscene verbs, however, lacking the grammatical flexibility of the f-word and, to some extent, shit. Our most highly charged epithets are so far quite closely tied to their referential meanings as well. Nigger almost always refers to a black or African American person, or is used of a person of a different race who is supposed to possess “black” characteristics. Most of our obscene words, in contrast, as we’ve seen, can be used nonliterally. It is possible that as epithets become stronger obscenities, they will likewise begin to lose their referential function. Perhaps one day nigger and paki, like fuck, will be able simply to express strong emotion, negative or positive, without calling to mind their denotative meanings. One day, perhaps, they may even be plugged into the damn you formula that gave us fuck you, producing the even less comprehensible nigger you. For hundreds of years, though, English had swearing that did not need the grammatical flexibility of verbs. Perhaps, then, epithets could be used as were oaths such as by God’s bones. In the twenty-second century maybe we’ll be swearing by the retard’s toes.

  Or perhaps we will find an entirely different zone of taboo that will give us a whole new set of verbs with which to swear. As we live longer, healthier lives, as more and more fifty-year-olds strive to look and act as if they are twenty-five, as the end of life comes to seem less a natural process and more a grave, possibly avoidable injustice, death itself may become obscene. Many societies have long had complicated sets of rules for handling dead bodies, speaking the names of the deceased, what can and cannot be done during mourning, and so on, but to generalize very broadly, these are often “traditional” cultures in which death is wept for but accepted as natural and inevitable. In contemporary American and British culture, our taboos around dying are by and large weak, limited to a preference for euphemisms when referring to death—it is more polite to say “pass away” than “die”—and a general uncomfortableness around people whom it has touched. These taboos could become stronger the more we fool ourselves that we can “conquer” death by curing cancer, stopping our telomeres from breaking off, or popping fish oil capsules and eating less than twelve hundred calories a day. Dying and corpses, then, could become a source of new obscene words—“Fuck off and die,” for example, would become simply “Die!”

  This line of thinking ignores the fact that in America, and to some extent in Britain, a large number of people have found their way back to the Holy. Evangelical Christians, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews all try to keep “chaste” tongues by avoiding obscene language, but perhaps try even harder not to take the Lord’s name in vain. As a member of an evangelical group at Oxford University put it: “It’s offensive to God, basically, to take His name in vain… . I find that kind of swearing more offensive, probably, than the ‘F-word’ or whatever.” (Members of this group, conscience-barred from using either oaths or obscene language, expressed insult and frustration with the word pants.) Perhaps as our sexual taboos weaken, the balance will return to the Holy for more of us, and our most highly charged words will again become those that injure God or tarnish his honor. In many Catholic countries, where the Protestant Reformation never caught hold, oaths still are among the strongest swearwords. The most famous example is Québec, where religious oaths, called sacres, are more shocking than obscenities. These are derived from aspects of the Catholic Mass—ostie (the Host), tabarnak (the tabernacle, where the Host is stored on the altar), câlice (chalice), and ciboire (the ciborium, the container in which the Host is stored, in the tabernacle). They can be combined, too, to increase their charge, as in ostie de tabarnak. Hostia (the Host, again) is one of the most highly charged words in the Spanish language, as is, perhaps more obviously, a phrase such as me cago en el copón bendito (“I shit on the blessed chalice”), while porco Dio (God [is a] pig), and porca Madonna (the Madonna [is a] pig) are considered quite offensive in Italian. It could be that future English-language swearers will return to using such religious oaths, due to the increasing influence of evangelical and other religious groups in America.

  So the next time someone calls you a———for taking too long at the ATM machine, stop, reflect, and be grateful. When someone swears to God that he or she will———your——————, run away, maybe, but be a little bit happy too. Appreciate that our language has so many such useful words that can be employed in such a wide variety of ways. And if by chance you are moved to return an answer, decide which terms in obscenity’s or oaths’ rich store will best suit your purpose, then swear away, in the full knowledge of the beautiful history and importance of these words.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  except for one phrase: S. Dieguez and J. Bogousslavsky, “Baudelaire’s Aphasia: From Poetry to Cursing,” Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, ed. J. Bogousslavsky and M. G. Hennerici (New York: Karger, 2007), 2:135.

  one that “kidnaps our attention”: Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2007), 339.

  “You are all a bunch”: Timothy Jay, Cursing in America: A Psycholinguistic Study of Dirty Language in the Courts, in the Movies, in the Schoolyards and on the Streets (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1992), 11.

  The Court agreed: Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, 556 U.S. 502; 129 S. Ct. 1800; 173 L. Ed. 2d 738 (2009). In 2012, the Court looked at another aspect of this case, telling the FCC that it is probably fine to regulate fleeting expletives but that it should go back and review its indecency policy. The Court has not reexamined whether it is constitutional to regulate broadcast indecency.

  Some language experts have criticized: Jess Bravin and Amy Schatz, “Don’t Read His Lips—You Might Be Offended,” WSJ.com, November 4, 2008, criticizing the FCC’s argument about expletives; Timothy Jay, “Do Offensive Words Harm People?” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 15, no. 2 (2009): 81–101; 92; Adam Freedman, “Gentleman Cows in Prime Time,” New York Times, May 3, 2009.

  The patient with the first reported case: William Osler, “On the Form of Convulsive Tic Associated with Coprolalia, Etc.,” Medical News LVII, no. 25 (December 20, 1890): 646; Hélio A. G. Teive et al., “Historical Aphasia Cases: ‘Tan-tan,’ ‘Vot-vot,’ and ‘Cré Nom!’” Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria 69, no. 3 (June 2011): 555–58.

  “thy drasty rhyming is not”: Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Tale of Sir Thopas,” The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 2119–20. All later Chaucer quotes are from this edition.

  referring to “terms of racial or ethnic opprobrium”: quoted in 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), 222.

  “To hear nigger is to try on”: Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 369.

  it helps create a sense: Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Vintage, 2003), 27–30.

  “you ‘take exception to the profanities’”: quoted in “Profanity,” OED online.

  “Expletives he very early ejected”: Samuel Johnson, “The Lives of the English Poets: Pope,” Works (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1810), XI:195.

  “swearing really takes off”: Allie Townsend, “Study: Kids Swearing Earlier than Ever,” Time NewsFeed, September 22, 2010, http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/22/study-kids-swearing-earlier-tha
n-ever, accessed August 1, 2012.

  “What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?”: Henry Digby Beste, Personal and Literary Memorials (London: Henry Colburn, 1829).

  twenty-four things wrong with swearing: James O’Connor, “What’s Wrong with Swearing,” CussControl.com, accessed August 1, 2012.

  the worrying trend of increased swearing: “Swearing Teen Fiction Characters Have It All,” Times of India (online), June 27, 2012.

  “This Culture of Swearing”: Sue MacGregor, “This Culture of Swearing Curses Us All,” Mail Online, June 14, 2006, dailymail.co.uk.