Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  satire, 46, 49, 50, 51, 169, 291n

  Scipio Aemilianus, 36

  scolding. See insults in court records

  Scottish and Scots, 86, 152, 155, 201, 224, 247, 248

  Second World War. See World War II

  self-control, 100–101

  obscenities as dangerous to, 53, 242–43

  Renaissance ideal of, 53, 147–50

  Roman ideal of, 21, 30

  Seneca, the Elder, 50

  “Seven Sages” of Ostia, 31–32

  sexual schema, Roman, 21–22, 27–39

  ability to change sex in, 29

  medical understanding of, 28–29

  See also masculinity, priapic; tribades

  Shakespeare, William, 104, 116, 166–67, 191n, 224, 291n

  shame, 21, 37, 42, 49, 50, 83, 85, 221, 256

  development of, 103, 106, 109, 131, 156–62, 165, 205, 230, 253, 289n

  Shaw, George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), 211, 215

  shit, 82, 93–95, 107, 153, 198, 203, 214, 217, 229, 245, 252, 258

  sins of the tongue, 85–86, 109–10

  See also foul words

  slang, 26, 33, 51, 144, 153, 167, 175n, 178, 195, 200, 219–22, 225, 228–29, 247, 256

  as vulgar, 177, 207–8, 223–24

  slavery, 21, 30, 34–35, 44, 56, 216–17, 265n

  social class 11, 91, 126–27, 157, 206, 185

  lower, 47, 157, 207–9, 242, 254

  middle, 157, 176, 193, 202, 206–12, 222, 231, 245

  upper, 126, 162–65, 202, 208–9, 210

  See also vulgar language

  sodomy. See bugger and buggery; pedicatio

  Southwell, Robert, 129–38

  Speght, Thomas, 165–66

  Stanbridge, John, 95–96, 111, 149

  stone, paradox of the, 58

  stuprum, 34–35

  Suetonius, 34

  Supreme Court, United States, 7, 234–35, 237–38, 245–46

  swearing and swearwords

  as Anglo-Saxon, 19

  as “bad language,” 13, 15, 96, 108, 112

  brain processing of, 1, 5, 250–52

  classes of, 214–15

  and deeper connection to things represented, 6, 9

  elimination of, 254–55

  epidemics of, 15, 127, 211

  feminization of, 214

  future of, 255–58

  gender and, 142–43, 214

  grammatical flexibility of, 214–15

  linguistic studies of, 251–52

  meaning of, 12, 90, 112, 218–19

  nonliteral use of, 6, 61, 214–15

  physiological effects of, 5, 8, 252

  as plain speaking, 26

  See also oaths; obscenities; racial slurs

  swive, 97–98, 144, 151, 153

  Synge, John Millington (The Playboy of the Western World), 199

  taboos

  Freud’s definition, 41–42

  new, 255–58

  racial, 225–26, 231–32, 255

  religious, 3, 42, 90–91, 253

  sexual/excremental, 3, 18, 22, 24, 92, 106, 177, 183, 199, 206, 248–49, 253, 256, 282n

  Tacitus, 185

  tarse, 98–99

  television, 5, 15, 44, 228, 230–31, 244–46

  Toiletgate, 202–3

  toilets, 144, 199–205

  Topcliffe, Richard, 133

  Tourette’s Syndrome, 8, 248–51

  trial by ordeal, 115

  tribades, 27–29, 98

  twat, 189–90

  urination, 23–24, 81–82, 103, 201–2, 205

  See also piss

  use-mention distinction, 12–13

  Venus de Milo, 188, 190

  verpa, 17, 39–45, 46, 94

  Vietnam War, 230, 237

  Virgil, 32–34, 51, 165

  vows and vowing, 68–69, 77

  vulgar language, 11, 22, 52–53, 82, 86, 95, 149, 176–77, 184–86, 199, 202–3, 205, 207–9, 225

  vulgaria, 94–96, 111, 150

  Webster, Noah, 195, 223

  wedding ceremony, Roman, 42–43

  Welsh, 166–167, 224, 238

  William the Conqueror, 113–14

  World War I, 205, 227–29

  World War II, 227, 229–30, 235

  Wyclif, John, 89–90, 283n

  xenophobia, 223–25

  Yahweh

  and Asherah, 71–73

  as God’s “real name,” 64

  as one God among many, 64–66, 271n

  victorious over other gods, 69–77

  yard, 89, 95, 96, 98–99

  YouTube, 246

  zounds, 168–69, 178

  * The “Big Six” are always in flux as language and culture change. It is time to include nigger, our worst racial insult.

  * A wicket is a small door or gate built into a larger one—a structural analog to the labia and vagina.

  * The symbol * before a word indicates that the word has been reconstructed by linguists, applying theories of language change backward to re-create an ancestral language.

  * An andiron is one of a pair of metal supports used to hold up logs in a fireplace. This is not a bizarre mistranslation, but an attempt to avoid obscenity through metaphor. In Latin, the female genitalia were often depicted through baking metaphors: the vagina as the oven, the labia as the hearth.

  † Lucretia was a Roman paragon of chastity. When she was raped by Tarquinus, she committed suicide rather than bear the shame.

  * Cinaedus was used for a fish that wriggles its tail—suggestively, the Romans thought. Ganymede is Zeus’s/Jupiter’s cupbearer, the archetype for a boy lover.

  * It is bad to be called a cocksucker (our equivalent to fellator) in English too, but this is mostly because of our culture’s negative views of homosexuality. A Roman woman could be attacked as a fellatrix, but it doesn’t make sense in English to insult a woman as a cocksucker. As Lenny Bruce reportedly said, “You call a guy a cocksucker, that’s an insult. You call a lady a cocksucker—hey, that’s a nice lady.” On the flip side, women can take heart that though clit is not a swearword, neither is cunt licker.

  * An aedile was an official responsible for public festivals and for the care of the city—making sure temples, sewers, and so forth were in good repair.

  * The great exception is the first volume of Horace’s Sermones, where the language is as salty as that of any epigram. (Salty came to mean “racy, piquant, earthy” from two different directions. It describes the language of sailors, “old salts,” whose vocabulary is sprinkled with obscene and vulgar words. In the seventeenth century, however, salt was used, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “of bitches: In heat.” It came to be applied to people as well, meaning “lecherous, salacious.”)

  * From 1600 to 1200 BC, the Hittites ruled a wide-ranging empire in what is now Turkey, Syria, and possibly Israel. They left fairly extensive written records, including a collection of laws quite similar to those laid down in the early books of the Bible. These differ in some of the details, however. Exodus forbids bestiality on pain of death (Ex. 22:19), for example, while the Hittites had a more complicated view: “If anyone have intercourse with a pig or a dog, he shall die. If a man have intercourse with a horse or a mule, there is no punishment. But he shall not approach the king, and shall not become a priest. If an ox spring upon a man for intercourse, the ox shall die but the man shall not die. One sheep shall be fetched as a substitute for the man, and they shall kill it. If a pig spring upon a man for intercourse, there is no punishment. If any man have intercourse with a foreign woman and pick up this one, now that one, there is no punishment.” The more things change …

  * Different religious groups have different ways of numbering the Decalogue. To Jews and Protestants, this is the third commandment; to Catholics, it is the second.

  * Or with “orgies on the mountains,” depending on your translation. This is a good example of the difficulties involved in translating the Bible from Hebrew. The Hebrew word hamo
n means anything from “a sound, murmur, roar, tumult” to “abundance, wealth” to “many, multitude, hordes, population.” In choosing “the multitude of mountains,” the translators of the King James, Webster, and Darby versions are linking the phrase to the worship of idols that often takes place in “high places”—as when God warns any Israelites thinking about backsliding that he will “destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars; I will heap your carcasses on the carcasses of your idols” (Lev. 27:30). In choosing “orgies on the mountains,” translators of the NRSV fit the verse into the biblical narrative that describes idolatry in terms of sexual deviance—“this people [those Israelites, again] will begin to prostitute themselves to the foreign gods in their midst” (Deut. 31:16). Both translations have something to recommend them, though perhaps getting orgies from crowd and tumult is a bit more of a stretch. Which one is “correct”? God knows.

  * A similar connection between genitals and swearing is present in the English word testify, which comes from the Latin word for “witness,” testis. In Latin, testis was also a “risqué and jocose” (as J. N. Adams put it) word for “testicle,” perhaps because the testicles “bear witness” to a man’s virility. The English testify thus isn’t derived from a Latin term for “balls,” but the words share a common ancestor in testis.

  * Like later Protestants, Lollards denied the physical presence of God’s body in the Eucharist, translated the Bible and encouraged individual reading of it, and protested against what they saw as the material excesses of the Catholic Church. (We’ll talk more about the Lollards in the following chapter.)

  * Blame Alexander Pope, at least for “finny prey.” In his translation of Homer’s Odyssey, we get both “finny prey” and “scaly tribe,” and moving lines about how said tribe “its loss of Ocean’s flood bewails” while “the sun’s torrid radiance each fish / Condemns to die” (618–25). We will talk in Chapter 5 about how this kind of sensibility and idea of literary diction affects swearing.

  * Led, by a creative but false definition in the 1976 Robertson Davies novel The Manticore, to believe that anitergium meant “trifle,” choreographer Phoebe Neville inadvertently entitled a 1988 performance “Anitergium II Hohodowndownho,” otherwise known as “Ass-wiper 2, the Hoedown.”

  * Stanbridge does avoid oaths. Phrases such as “by God’s bones” are what schoolboys should avoid, not “turd in your teeth.”

  * By orthodox I mean the strand of Catholicism that upheld traditional, Church-sanctioned views, as opposed to heretical groups that questioned parts of those doctrines—not the Eastern Orthodox churches.

  * Was Bill Clinton equivocating in the sixteenth-century sense of the word when he denied his involvement with Monica Lewinsky? While it is perennially popular to make statements that are hard to pin down, equivocation in the technical sense of the term had been out of fashion for almost four hundred years at the time of the scandal. Clinton, however, was educated at Georgetown, a Jesuit university, and was strongly influenced by the Jesuit father Tim Healy. This background raises the possibility that he added the crucial “so that it’s any of your business,” to make a mental reservation. More likely he employed amphibology, playing with two different meanings of sexual relations, e.g., oral sex isn’t “sex.”

  * Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with her. He prayed to Aphrodite to make the statue real, and she did.

  * Titillation is only indirectly related to tit—it comes from the Latin titillatio, meaning “a tickling.” Bescumbered means “covered in dung”; to scumber is “to evacuate the faeces,” as the Oxford English Dictionary says, especially of a dog or fox. Bescumber, along with bewray and beshit, is one of those words that comes up a lot in the Renaissance but hardly ever anymore—all mean “to cover or spray with shit.” Just as medieval people seem to have felt a need to spit that no longer impels us, people of the Renaissance appear to have been interested in the act of covering something with shit, which doesn’t grab us today at all.

  * La Cazzaria is the title of a circa 1530 dialogue between two humanists who address questions ranging from “Why the asshole is behind the cunt” to “Why the common people don’t understand the beauty of the Tuscan language.”

  † In Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionary of the French and English Tongues there are no cunts or fucks, but there is a greyhound. A levretée is “an Hare-lipt, or blabber-lipt wench; also, a wench that hath beene buggered by a Greyhound.”

  * Historians don’t like to use the terms middle class and working class to describe people of this period, as those words are too freighted with a Marxist sense of class opposition to delineate early modern social groups. “Middling sort” indicates people who were not wealthy and not poor, and who were for the most part merchants and low-level gentry. They were not “bourgeois,” with all that term implies today. And the “lower sort” were not ill-educated factory workers who drank lots of beer on the weekends, the unfortunate connotations of working class today. (Also, there were no weekends—only Sunday, and you had better have spent that day in church.)

  * If you want to see Shakespeare’s genius in action, compare The Famous Victories with the Henriad.

  * “Boxing the Jesuit” was eighteenth-century slang for masturbation. As Francis Grose explains in his 1785 dictionary of slang: “to box the Jesuit, and get cock roaches” is a “sea term [used by sailors] for masturbation. A crime it is said much practiced by the reverend fathers of that society.”

  † Frig as an obscene word is perhaps more familiar in Britain, where it refers to masturbation. If you come across it in America, it may occasionally be a misspelling of fridge, meaning “refrigerator.” I walked into my daughter’s school one morning and saw a sign posted: “Note: small frig needed Tuesday.”

  * The results for British swearing are similar—God and hell are two of the most frequently used swearwords, among all social classes.

  * As literary critic and historian Joss Marsh writes, “Not to be competent to give evidence in a legal system that had come to rely upon evidence … was tantamount to nonexistence.” An atheist whose nine-year-old son was killed before his eyes by a reckless cabby was unable to give evidence at the inquest, as he couldn’t take the oath; atheists charged with blasphemy couldn’t speak at their own trials, as they could not be sworn.

  * British laws that granted rights to religious minorities, including the right to swear or affirm according to their beliefs, include the Toleration Act (1689) for Quakers and other dissenters who believed in the Trinity, the Doctrine of the Trinity Act (1813) for Unitarians, the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829), and the Jewish Relief Act (1858).

  * This was a popular motif. It also appears in a 1613 epigram by Henry Parrot:

  Cacus constraind on suddaine to untrusse,

  Turn’d up his podex in the open street

  But hid his face and to them answerd thus

  That passed by, and told him t’was unmeet,

  Ther’s none (quoth Cacus) by mine arse that knows me,

  How beastly els soever they suppose me.

  —Laquei ridiculosi

  * Another speculation was that she was menstruating and that nothing had prepared Ruskin for this either. Other scholars have argued that it would be impossible even for Ruskin to be this ignorant, citing a letter he wrote to his parents that some aristocratic young men possessed pictures of “naked bawds.” It seems unlikely that Ruskin, who very much wanted to burn the erotic paintings of his idol J. M. W. Turner, would have wanted to examine the naked bawds, even if offered. He described Turner’s erotic works as “painting after painting of Turner’s of the most shameful sort—the pudenda of women—utterly inexcusable and to me inexplicable.” He could only explain their production as “having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity.”

  * Open-arse, we have seen, was a synonym for medlar, which was itself sometimes substituted for vagina. A poperin pear is a kind of pear
that came originally from Poperinghe, in Flanders. In Shakespeare, though, of course, a pear is never just a pear.

  * An anonymous author waxed poetic on this theme in 1697 in “On Melting Down the Plate: Or, the Piss-pot’s Farewell”:

  Presumptuous Piss-pot! How didst thou offend?

  Compelling Females on the hams to bend?

  To Kings and Queens, we humbly bow the Knee;

  But Queens themselves are forc’d to stoop to thee.

  * The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1891 contains an article titled “Some English Expletives,” in which it discusses “that most characteristic of English epithets.” Bloody, it argues, “is often classed as profane or obscene … but does not properly fall within either of such categories.”

  * These schemas work better with verbs than with nouns. Few would argue that cunt is one of the most highly charged words in the English language, yet it can fill at most two of Hughes’s slots, personal and personal by reference.

  * It is worth noting that Betsy, Miss H—lsb—ry and Mrs. B-ooks are extraordinarily well paid. Betsy gets two pounds for the backdoor, Miss H receives two guineas (slightly more than two pounds) a pop, and Mrs. B-ooks gets a banknote, the lowest denomination of which was £5. In the mid-eighteenth century, a housemaid could expect to earn £6 a year; Mrs. B-ooks can earn that practically every night she chooses to work. Even well-off, thoroughly middle-class (male) lawyers only earned around £165 a year—two to three months’ work for our ladies. Of course, not all the women did so well from their commodities. Many on Harris’s list sold themselves for a few shillings. Even these “cheaper” women outearned housemaids by a wide margin, however.