Authors: Bill Bryson
Most of our swear words have considerable antiquity. Modern English contains few words that would be unhesitatingly under-stood by an Anglo-Saxon peasant of, say, the tenth century A.
D.
but
tits
is one of them. So is
fart,
believe it or not. The Anglo-Saxons used the word
scitan,
which became
shite
by the 1300s and
shit
by
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the 1500s.
Shite
is used
as a
variant of
shit
in England to this day.
Fuck,
it
has
been suggested, may have sprung from the Latin
futuo,
the French
foutre,
or the German
ficken,
all of which have the same meaning. According to Montagu the word first appears in print in 1503 in a poem by the Scottish poet William Dunbar.
Although
fuck
has been around for centuries, possibly millennia, for a long period it fell out of general use. Before 1503, the vulgar word for sex was to
swine.
Pussy,
for the vagina, goes back at least to the 1600s.
Arse
is Old English. Common names for the penis, such as
dick, peter,
and
Percy
(used variously throughout the English-speaking world), go back at least 150 years, though they may be very much older.
Jock
was once also common in this respect, but it died out, though it survives in
jockstrap.
It is often hard to trace such terms reliably because they weren't generally recorded and because they have, for obvious reasons, seldom attracted scholarly investigation.
Buttocks,
for instance, goes back to at least the thirteenth century, but
butt,
its slangy diminutive form, is not recorded until 1859 in America. As Stuart Berg Flexner observes, it seems highly unlikely that it took 600
years for anyone to think of converting the former into the latter.
Similarly, although
shit
has been around in various forms since before the Norman Conquest,
horseshit
does not appear before the 193os. Again, this seems improbable. The lack of authoritative guidance has sometimes encouraged people to come up with fan-ciful explanations for profanities.
Fuck,
it was suggested, was orig-inally a police blotter acronym standing for "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." It is nothing of the sort.
After
O. K. , fuck
must be about the most versatile of all English words. It can be used to describe a multitude of conditions and phenomena, from making a mess of something
(fuck up)
to being casual or provocative
(fuck around),
to inviting or announcing a departure
(fuck off),
to being estimable (fucking-A), to being baf-fled
(I'm fucked
if
I know),
to being disgusted
(fuck this),
and so on and on and on.
Fuck
probably reached its zenith during the Second World War. Most people are familiar with the army term
snafu
(short for "situation normal—all fucked up"), but there were many
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others in common currency then, among them
fubar
("fucked up beyond all recognition") and
fubb
("fucked up beyond belief").
Piss
goes back at least to the thirteenth century, but may be even older. It has been traced to the Vulgar Latin
pissiare
and thus could conceivably date from the Roman occupation of Britain. As piss became considered indecent, the euphemism
pee
evolved, based simply on the pronunciation of the first letter of the word. In America,
piss
has been documented since 176o and
pee
since 1788.
The emotional charge attached to words can change dramatically over time. Cunt was once relatively harmless. Chaucer dropped it casually and severally into
The Canterbury Tales,
spelling it vari-ously
queynte, queinte,
and even
Kent.
The City of London once had an alley favored by prostitutes called Gropecuntlane. It was not until the early eighteenth century that the word became inde-cent.
Shit
was considered acceptable until as recently as the early nineteenth century.
Prick
was standard until the eighteenth cen-tury.
Piss
was an unexceptionable word from about 12.5o to 1750, a fact still reflected in the common French name for urinals:
pissoirs.
On the other hand, words that seem entirely harmless now were once capable of exciting considerable passion. In sixteenth-century England,
zooterkins
was a pretty lively word. In nineteenth-century England puppy and
cad
were highly risque.
Today the worst swear words in English are probably
fuck, shit,
and
cunt.
But until about the 18 7os it was much more offensive to be profane.
God damn, Jesus,
and even
Hell
were worse than
fuck
and
shit
(insofar as these things are quantifiable). In early swearing religion played a much more prominent role—so much so that in the fifteenth century a common tag for Englishmen in France was
goddams.
Swearing by saints was also common. A relic of this
is
our epithet
by George,
which is a contraction of "by St. George"and has been around for centuries.
Cock
was for a long time not only a slang term for penis but also a euphemism for God. Thus in
Hamlet
Ophelia could pun: "Young men will do't, if they come to't; By cock, they are to blame." Some of these were surprisingly explicit—"by God's bones," "by God's body"—but as time went on they were increasingly blurred into more harmless forms, such as
zounds
(for "God's wounds"),
gadzooks
(for "God's hooks," the
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significance of which is obscure), and
God's bodkins
or other vari-ants like
odsbodikins
and
gadsbudlikins, all
formed from "God's body."
This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing. Most languages employ
euphemism
(from the Greek, meaning "to speak well of') in some measure. Germans say the meaningless
Potz blitz
rather than
Gottes Blitz
and the French say par
bleu
for par
Dieu
and
Ventre Saint
Gris instead of
Ventre Saint Christ.
But no other language approaches English for the number of delicate expletives of the sort that you could safely say in front of a maiden aunt: darn, durn,
drat, gosh, golly, goodness gracious, gee whiz, jeepers,
shucks,
and so on. We have scores, if not hundreds, of these terms.
However, sometimes even these words are regarded as exception-able, particularly when they are new.
Blooming
and
blasted,
orig-inally devised as mild epithets, were in nineteenth-century England considered nearly as offensive
as
the more venerable ex-pletives they were meant to replace.
But then of course the gravity of swear words in any language has little to do with the words themselves and much more to do with the fact that they are forbidden. It is a circular effect. Forbidden words are emotive because they are forbidden and they are for-bidden because they are emotive.
A remarkable example of this is
bloody in
England, which to most Britons is at least as objectionable a word as
shit
and yet it is meaningless. A number of explanations have been suggested, gen-erally involving either a contraction of an oath such as "by Christ's blood" or "by our Lady" or else something to do with menstrua-tion. But there is no historical evidence to favor one view over the other. The fact is that sometime around the sixteenth century peo-ple began to say
bloody
and to mean a curse by it. It's now often hard to tell when they meant it
as a
curse and when they meant it to be taken literally, as when in
Richard II
Richmond says, "The bloody dog is dead."
Although Shakespeare had a weakness for double entendre puns, on the whole he was a fairly restrained and not terribly inventive swearer.
Damned
appears 105 times in his thirty-seven plays, but
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for the rest he was content to insert the odd "for God's sake," "a pox on't," "God's bread," and one "whoreson jackanapes."
Julius
Caesar,
unusually for the period, has not a single instance of swear-ing. By contrast, in the same year that
Julius Caesar
was first performed, Ben Jonson's
Every Man in His Humour
offered such colorful phrases as "Whoreson base fellow," "whoreson coney-catching rascal"
(coney
being a synonym for pudendum), "by my fackins faith," and "I am the rankest cow that ever pissed." Other of his plays contain even richer expressions: "I fart at thee," "Shit o' your head," "Turd i' your teeth." Another play of the period,
Gammer Gurton's Needle,
first performed about 1550, contained literally dozens of instances of swearing: "By Jesus," "dirty bas-tard," "bawdy bitch," "for God's sake," and many more in the same vein. It even had a parson describing someone as "that shitten lout." Other oaths of the period included such memorable expres-sions as "kiss my blindcheeks" and "stap my vitals."
Soon after Shakespeare's death, Britain went through a period of prudery of the sort with which all countries are periodically seized.
In 1623 an Act of Parliament was passed making it illegal to swear.
People were fined for such mild oaths as "upon my life" and "by my troth"—mild utterances indeed compared with the "God's poxes"and "fackins faiths" of a generation before. In 1649 the laws were tightened even further—to the extent that swearing at a par-ent became punishable by death.
But the greatest outburst of prudery came in the nineteenth century when it swept through the world like a fever. It was an age when sensibilities grew so delicate that one lady was reported to have dressed her goldfish in miniature suits for the sake of propri-ety and a certain Madame de la Bresse left her fortune to provide clothing for the snowmen of Paris. Prudery, so often associated with the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), actually consider-ably predated it. One of the great names in the field was that of Thomas Bowdler, an Edinburgh physician who purified the works of writers such as Shakespeare and Gibbon, boasting that it was his practice to add nothing new to the work, but simply to remove those words that "cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family."
His ten-volume
Family Shakespeare
appeared in 1818, a year be-
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fore Victoria was born, so it is clear the queen didn't establish the trend, but simply helped to prolong it. In fact, almost a century before she reigned Samuel Johnson was congratulated by a woman for leaving indecent words out of his dictionary. To which he dev-astatingly replied: "So you've been looking for them, have you, Madam?"
It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion.
Thomas Pyles in his outstanding
Words and Ways of American
English
tracked the story to a book called Diary in
America,
writ-ten in 1837 by an English traveler, Captain Frederick Marryat, and concluded that the story was told for comic effect and almost cer-tainly was untrue. Rather more plausible was the anecdote re-corded in the same book in which Marryat made the serious gaffe of asking a young lady if she had hurt her leg in a fall. The woman blushingly averted her gaze and told him that people did not use
that
word in America. "I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to having been accustomed only to
English
society," Marryat drolly remarked, and asked the lady what was the acceptable term for "such articles."
Limbs,
he was told.
It was an age in which the most innocuous words became unac-ceptable at a rate that must have been dizzying.
Stomach became
a euphemism for
belly
and in its turn was considered too graphic and was replaced by tummy,
midriff,
and even
breadbasket.
The conventional terms for the parts of a chicken, such as
breast, leg,
and
thigh,
caused particular anxiety and had to be replaced with terms like
drumstick, first joint,
and
white meat.
The names for male animals, such as
buck
and
stallion,
were never used in mixed company. Bulls were called
sires, male animals,
and, in a truly inspired burst of ridiculousness,
gentleman cows.
But it didn't stop there. Euphemisms had to be devised for any word that had
cock
in
it—haycock
became
haystack, cockerel
became
rooster—and
for the better part of a century people with
cock in
their names, such as Hitchcock or Peacock, suffered unspeakable embarrassment when they were required to make introductions. Americans were
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rather more squeamish in these matters than the British, going so far
as
to change the old English
titbit
to
tidbit.
Against such a background one can easily imagine the shock that must have gripped readers of
The Times
of London, who turned to their paper one morning in January 1882 and found a lengthy report on a parliamentary speech by the attorney general conclud-ing with the unexpectedly forthright statement: "The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking." Not surprisingly, it caused a sensation. The executives of
The Times
were so dumbstruck by this outrage against common decency that four full days passed before they could bring themselves to acknowledge the offense.
After what was doubtless the most exhaustive internal investigation ever undertaken at the newspaper, it issued this apology: "No pains have been spared by the management of this journal to dis-cover the author of a gross outrage committed by the interpolation of a line in the speech by Sir William Harcourt reported in our issue of Monday last. This malicious fabrication was surreptitiously introduced before the paper went to press. The matter is now under legal investigation, and it is to be hoped that the perpetrator will be brought to punishment." But if they hadn't caught him after four days I doubt if they ever did. In any case, he or someone of like sensibilities struck again six months later when an advertise-ment appeared promoting a book about "Every-day Life in our Public Schools. Sketched by Head Scholars. With a Glossary of Some Words used by Henry Irving in his disquisition upon fuck-ing." Whatever soul or souls were responsible for this sequel, they kept their peace thereafter—though I have been told that when Queen Victoria opened the Clifton Suspension Bridge the sen-tence "Her Majesty then passed over the bridge" came out in
The
Times as
"Her Majesty then pissed over the bridge." Whether this embellishment of the facts was intentional or fortuitous (or even possibly apocryphal) I could not say.