Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

HOLY SHIT

HOLY SHIT

A Brief History of Swearing

Melissa Mohr

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Melissa Mohr 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction rights outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form, and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mohr, Melissa.
Holy shit : a brief history of swearing / Melissa Mohr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-974267-7
1. Swearing—History. 2. English language—Obscene words—History. 3. English language—Slang—History. 4. English language—Social aspects—History 5. English language—History. I. Title.
PE3724.S85.M65 2013
417′.2—dc23 2012034513

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To John Harington and Samuel Johnson
And to my husband

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. To Speak with Roman Plainness: Ancient Rome

2. On Earth as It Is in Heaven: The Bible

3. Swearing God to Pieces: The Middle Ages

4. The Rise of Obscenity: The Renaissance

5. The Age of Euphemism: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

6. “Fuck ’Em All”: Swearing in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Epilogue

NOTES

CREDITS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Katie Boyle for her tremendous enthusiasm and all her work on my behalf. I would like to thank Tim Bent for his enthusiasm too, as well as his careful editing and his thoroughly useful suggestions of ways to improve this book. It seems to me that being an agent or an editor requires a certain amount of faith—I thank them both for putting theirs in me.

Many people read drafts of this book or answered questions I had, and I thank them: J. N. Adams, Emily Allen-Hornblower, Marcia Blakenham, Dorothy Bray, Chloe Breyer, George Brown, Cressida Cowell, Edwin Craun, Mary Custic, Ben Faccini, Emily Faccini, Andrea Heberlein, Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, Ron Hirsch, Ruth Mazo Karras, Simon Kirby, Diane Asadorian Masters, Tom Mohr, Monique Morgan, Stephen Orgel, Lawrence Poos, David Riggs, Carolyn Sale, Greg Scholl, and Linda Rabieh, who thought of the title.

Finally, I would like to thank my children for getting their heads around the idea that Mommy was writing a book about “potty talk,” and my husband, who cheerfully read draft after draft.

Writing this book—which spans more than four thousand years of history, give or take, and addresses everything from the Bible to poetry to legal cases to neuroscience—I very much felt the misgivings Samuel Johnson described when he set out the plan of his dictionary in 1747: “I cannot hope, in the warmest moments, to preserve
so much caution through so long a work, as not often to sink into negligence, or to obtain so much knowledge of all its parts as not frequently to fail by ignorance. I expect that sometimes the desire of accuracy will urge me to superfluities, and sometimes the fear of prolixity betray me to omissions: that in the extent of such variety, I shall be often bewildered; and in the mazes of such intricacy, be frequently entangled: that in one part refinement will be subtilized beyond exactness, and evidence dilated in another beyond perspicuity. Yet I do not despair of approbation from those who, knowing the uncertainty of conjecture, the scantiness of knowledge, the fallibility of memory, and the unsteadiness of attention, can compare the causes of error with the means of avoiding it, and the extent of art with the capacity of man; and whatever be the event of my endeavours, I shall not easily regret an attempt which has procured me the honour” of your attention, my dear reader.

HOLY SHIT

Introduction

It was the last word my grandmother ever said to me. She was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease and didn’t speak at all as I helped her eat her lunch or even when I showed her family photos. I’m not sure she recognized me. When I took her for a walk outside in her wheelchair, though, she found her voice. I wheeled her over a crack in the sidewalk and her chair bumped. Out it came—“Shit!” This from a woman who, even when she was feeling particularly frustrated, had rarely gone further than “Nuts!” or “Darn it!” She relapsed into silence for the rest of my visit.

In 1866, the French poet Charles Baudelaire was laid low by a stroke. He lost his ability to speak,
except for one phrase
he repeated so often that the nuns taking care of him threw him out of their hospital: “Cré nom!”—short for
sacré nom de Dieu
. Today, the English equivalent to this would be the mild
goddamn
or
damn
, but in 1866 “Cré nom!” so unforgivably offended the nuns that they could explain Baudelaire’s outbursts only as the result of satanic possession.

Embedded deep within the brains of Baudelaire and my grandmother, remaining even when other language had been stripped away, were swearwords. Baudelaire’s swearing was a violation of religious taboo, taking God’s name in vain. My grandmother’s violated taboos against mentioning certain body parts or bodily excretions and actions. Over the centuries these two spheres of the unsayable—the religious and the sexual/excremental, the Holy and the Shit, if you will—have given rise to all the other “four-letter words” with which we swear. A history of swearing is a history of their interaction and interplay. Sometimes the Holy has been the main source of swearwords, sometimes the Shit, and sometimes the two fields have
joined in what we today would consider unusual combinations—obscene words shouted during religious rituals, for example. In the twenty-first century, we have an embarrassment of riches, and can choose words from both areas, as demonstrated by one precocious four-year-old at my son’s nursery school, who responded to something his mother had said with “Well, fuck me, Jesus!”

Holy Shit
is a history of swearing in English. It begins in a place where public buildings are covered with graffiti (“If you’re reading this, you’re a faggot”); where the most popular entertainers have the foulest mouths; where swearwords graphic enough to offend not very delicate sensibilities are heard on every street corner. This is not New York City. It is Rome, two thousand years ago. We start with ancient Latin, because the Roman idea of
obscenitas
guided the development of our own concept of obscenity—along with republicanism, the Julian calendar, and numerous literary classics, the Romans gave us a model for our use of obscene words. The Romans had a very different sexual schema than we do, however, which led to some fascinating differences between their obscene words and ours, as we’ll see in
Chapter 1
. The Bible, in turn, gave us the Holy, and a model for our oath swearing. Such swearing is very important to God, who demands again and again that believers swear by him and him alone. In the Old Testament, God is fighting a war for supremacy with other Near Eastern gods, and he wields oath swearing as one of his most powerful weapons.

The Middle Ages (a huge span of time, roughly 470–1500) was firmly under the sway of the Holy. Despite using plenty of words that we today would consider to be shocking and offensive, medieval English people were unconcerned about the Shit. Oath swearing instead was the most highly charged language—the truly obscene—thought to be able to injure God’s reputation and even assault Christ physically. In the Renaissance (c. 1500–1660), the Holy and the Shit were more in balance. The rise of Protestantism and its changing definition of people’s relationship to God, as well as the growing importance of “civility,” created conditions for the development of
obscenity, one of the things that proper, polite behavior is defined against. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the ascendancy of the Shit, what we today would recognize as fully developed obscenity. Obscenities possessed perhaps their greatest power to shock and offend during this age of euphemism, when even words such as
leg
and
trousers
were deemed too scandalous and vulgar for the public sphere. Today, all bets are off, and both obscenities and oaths are flourishing in public discourse, as any look at television, the Internet, or political debate will demonstrate.

For more than two thousand years, swearing has alternated between the twin poles of oaths and obscenities, between the Holy and the Shit. What makes a word a swearword, though? What distinguishes
fuck
from
bonk
or
sleep with
, “Jesus Christ!” from “Heavens above!”? These questions can be approached from several different angles: physiological, linguistic, and historical.

Physiologically, swearwords have different effects on people than do other, superficially similar words. They induce greater skin conductance responses than do other words, even emotionally evocative words such as
death
or
cancer
. (The skin conductance response indicates the extent of a person’s emotional arousal by measuring the degree to which his or her skin conducts electricity.) Swearwords help us deal with physical pain. In a recent experiment, subjects were able to keep their hands immersed in very cold water longer when they repeated a swearword such as
shit
than when they repeated a neutral word such as
shoot
. Speaking swearwords increases your heart rate. It is also easier to remember taboo words than non-taboo ones in a word recall test. If you are given a list that includes a mix of obscenities and neutral words, you can bet that the ones that stick in your mind will be
fuck
and
nigger
, not
kiss
and
angry
.

Scientists today believe that swearwords even occupy a different part of our brain. Most speech is a “higher-brain” function, the province of the cerebral cortex, which also controls voluntary actions and rational thought. Swearwords are stored in the “lower brain,” the limbic system, which, broadly, is responsible for emotion, the
fight-or-flight response, and the autonomic nervous system, which regulates heart rate and blood pressure. This is why my grandmother and Charles Baudelaire could still come up with “Shit!” and “Cré nom!” even though their ability to speak had otherwise been eroded by disease.

Linguistically, a swearword is
one that “kidnaps our attention
and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations,” as Steven Pinker puts it.
Connotation
is a word’s baggage, the emotional associations that go along with it, as opposed to its
denotation
, its dictionary definition. Cognitive psychologist Timothy Jay saw this distinction summed up in an exchange of graffiti on a bathroom wall. “
You are all a bunch
of fucking nymphomaniacs,” one line read. Someone had circled “fucking” and added below, “There ain’t no other kind.” The second writer chose to interpret “fucking” as a denotative use, not a connotative one. The literal definition is, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, “that engages in or is engaged in sexual intercourse.” It can have many connotations, however, from “really bad” to “extraordinarily good.” “Fucking nymphomaniacs” could be either, really—it is difficult to tell whether the tone is one of admiration or exasperation. Swearwords are almost
all
connotation—they carry an emotional charge that exceeds the taboo status of their referents.