Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (26 page)

My Lord, why, what the devil?

Z——ds! Damn the lock! ’fore Gad, you must be civil!

Plague on ’t! ’tis past a jest—nay prithee, pox!

Give her the hair.

Sir Plume, just the kind of fop that Rochester’s Corinna would have opened her legs for, is defending his beloved Belinda from the evil baron who has just cut off a lock of her hair—the “rape.” The swearing in this poem presents a striking contrast to the way oaths were treated in the seventeenth century, when they were banned onstage and struck from most published texts of plays, including Shakespeare’s. By the end of the eighteenth century,
zounds
was still in use but had become a completely meaningless expletive. It even had to be defined in dictionaries of slang for those who might hear it said but fail to understand it.
Francis Grose’s 1785
Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
explained it as “an exclamation, an abbreviation of God’s wounds” (Grose also defined such obscure terms as “crinkums, the foul or venereal disease” and “feague, … to put ginger up a horse’s fundament, to make him lively and carry his tail well.”)
Eighty years later, John Hotten
even got the definition slightly wrong in the 1865 edition of his
Slang Dictionary
: “an abbreviation of God’s wounds,—a very ancient Catholic oath.” Like all swearing by God’s body parts, it was not particularly Catholic, but had been nondenominational.

One final example must serve to indicate the frequency with which vain oaths were sworn in the eighteenth century, and the decline in their potency. When Captain Basil Hall visited the Comoro Islands off the coast of Africa in the 1820s, he was welcomed by an islander with the memorable words: “
How do you do, sir?
Very glad to see you. Damn your eyes! Johanna man [a man from Anjouan, one of the islands] like English very much. God damn!”
The man had learned English from sailors who had visited the islands previously, and had retained what seemed to him to be the essential phrases of polite conversation: “Damn me,” “Damn you,” and “God damn.”

The decline in the potency and eventually in the frequency with which people used vain oaths goes hand in hand with falling church attendance throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Church was still very rich and politically powerful, but
religion occupied a less central role
in the average person’s life. “
The terrors of supernatural vengeance
had steadily receded” since the seventeenth century, as historian Keith Thomas puts it, and with these terrors went much of the Church’s control over people’s inner and outer lives. (Of course this is a broad generalization; the nineteenth century also saw the rise of numerous evangelical movements that put God and religious obligations firmly at the center of life.) The number and prominence of people over whom the Church had no hold at all also began to increase—“freethought,” code for atheism, was a contentious but growing movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, and people who didn’t believe in God had little incentive to use his name, even in vain.

The same conditions that initiated the slow decline of vain oaths paradoxically inspired huge battles over sincere swearing in the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era, as today, oaths had to be sworn when giving evidence in court and upon certain important occasions, such as assuming public office or becoming a doctor or lawyer. Historically these oaths had been taken before God, on a Bible, and as a Christian, “profess[ing] faith in Jesus Christ.” By the late seventeenth century, laws had begun to chip away at the Christian-fits-all nature of these oaths—the 1689 Toleration Act gave the Quakers the right to affirm their intentions before God, not to swear (if you remember, they believed that Christ was speaking literally when he said “Swear not at all” in Matthew).
But in 1847, Lionel de Rothschild, a Jew
, was elected to Parliament. To take his seat and begin his term, he was supposed to swear the parliamentary
oath on a Bible including the New Testament and “upon the true faith of a Christian.” No Quakerly affirmation before God and by Jesus would help here. Rothschild didn’t believe in the New Testament and had no Christian faith. A bill was introduced to soften the oath into a form Rothschild might be able to swear, but it was rejected by the House of Lords. This set up a pattern repeated for ten years—Rothschild was elected repeatedly and overwhelmingly by his constituents, but he would not swear the oath as it stood. Bills to change the oath were proposed, only to be repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected by the House of Lords. Meanwhile, another Jew was elected to Parliament. David Salomons saw that Rothschild’s approach wasn’t working, and so he swore the oath when he took his seat, simply omitting the words “on the true faith of a Christian.” He was able to participate in three votes in the House of Commons before being thrown out by the sergeant-at-arms and fined five hundred pounds for voting illegally.

In 1880, the people of Northampton chose someone
even more scandalous as their MP—an avowed atheist, Charles Bradlaugh. Like Rothschild, Bradlaugh refused to swear the parliamentary oath. He wanted to give an affirmation—and not before God, like the Quakers—upon taking his seat. When it was decided that he could not affirm, he offered to swear the oath even though it was meaningless to him, “as a matter of form.” The House decided that since he was not a believing Christian, he couldn’t swear the oath, and so he was arrested and imprisoned when he attempted to take his seat without having sworn. Like Rothschild and Salomons, he was elected by his constituents over and over, and each time he was prevented from doing his job by the oath he first would not, then would but couldn’t, swear.

These oaths were a point of controversy because they so clearly enshrined England’s status as a believing Protestant nation, a status under threat in the nineteenth century. Victorian England had no shortage of people making arguments, familiar to us from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, that “
the sacredness of oaths
is essential to
the existence of society,” or “
that from the earliest times of a Christian Legislature
no man has ever been permitted to take part in it, except under the sanction of a Christian oath.” Cardinal Henry Manning warned against the dangers of allowing atheists to affirm: “
Deny the existence of God
, and nine thousand affirmations are no more than nineteen or ninety thousand words. Without God there is no law-giver above the human will, and therefore no law; for no will by human authority can bind another. All authority of parents, husbands, masters, rulers, is of God.”

Manning, and others like him, were worried about two things. First of all, they believed that an affirmation was not as secure as an oath. Without supernatural sanction, without God to strike down liars and allow honest men to flourish, an affirmation is nothing but empty words. But more important, affirmation would allow atheists to participate in public life, defend themselves at trial, make wills that could be supported in court, and so forth. It would be a public acknowledgment that Britain was not a God-fearing Christian nation but a plural society, Christian, Jewish, and nonbelieving.
*

These arguments were roundly rejected by the thousands of people who elected the Jews and the atheist to Parliament, again and again. Cardinal Manning could protest all he wanted, but British society was changing and oaths, which had publicly cemented Britain’s status as a Christian nation, had to change with it.
Rothschild finally took his seat in Parliament
in 1858 after the passage of the Jewish Relief Act, which allowed him to swear “so help me Jehovah” on the Old Testament. Bradlaugh was finally allowed to swear the oath and take his seat in 1886, despite his nonbelief, and
in 1888 he secured the passage
of the Oaths Act, which allowed anyone who either had no religious belief or believed that swearing was religiously forbidden
to “solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm” in almost all cases where an oath had previously been required.

In the nascent United States, oath swearing was a much less contentious issue. The framers of the Constitution allowed affirmation from the get-go, without hinging its use on exceptions for religious or nonreligious belief. The president’s promise is the only one actually spelled out in the Constitution, and it is a marvel of ecumenical brevity compared to the numerous oaths specified in such discriminatory detail in British law:

Before he [the President] enter on the execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” (Art. 2, Sect. 1)

The oath or affirmation to be taken by other public officials is not set out specifically in the Constitution, but Article 6 declares that they “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Rather than pass successive amendments granting exceptions for Quakers, then for Unitarians, then for Catholics, then for Jews, then for atheists, the Constitution got it all over with at once. If you wanted to affirm, whether from an abundance of religious belief or from none at all, you could.
*
George Washington undercut
the really quite astonishing secularity of the presidential oath when he took it in 1789, adding “So help me God” and kissing the Bible upon which he swore. “So help me God” has since become an official part of
other public oaths and affirmations in the United States, such as those sworn by judges and witnesses giving evidence (the exact form of courtroom oaths varies from state to state, and even from judge to judge).

To Call a Washtub a Washtub

As vain oaths were on the decline and sincere oaths were consumed by controversy, obscene words began to take on some of their functions. Most obviously, obscenities took the place of vain oaths to become our swearwords—words that shock, that offend, and that express strong emotion, positive or negative. But, in a limited way, obscene words also assumed oaths’ privileged relation to facts—they became the words that a man (especially a man) used when he wanted to tell the truth. As God’s body receded from contact, the human body supplied its lack as a generator of taboos and as a guarantor of the truth.

This is signaled in two popular metaphors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England—“the naked truth” and “to call a spade a spade.” When the truth is naked, it is obvious, without disguise, fully revealed to the eyes and understandings of hearers, viewers, or readers. Many authors of this period thought such openness was a fundamental characteristic of obscene language. More directly than do euphemisms or other polite expressions, obscene words were thought to
reveal
the body parts and actions that morality or modesty dictates must be concealed, and are thus able to convey the reality, the truth, of those things more immediately. Using obscene words characterized a speaker as direct, honest, the kind of person who would not mince words to spare someone’s feelings or sense of decency.

The association between obscenity and honesty goes back to ancient Rome. We saw in the first chapter how Martial praised the emperor Augustus’s liberal use of
futuo
in an epigram—the emperor
knew “Romana simplicitate loqui,” how to speak with Roman plainness. In the late seventeenth century, the biographer John Aubrey declared that he wrote “
the naked and plaine truth
, which is here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many passages that would raise a Blush in a young Virgin’s cheek.” He made good on his word by describing a lawyer as having “got more by his Prick than he had done by his practise” and recounting a tale of Sir William Fleetwood, who was surprised by violent diarrhea (“loosenesse”) while out walking: “He turned up his breech against the Standard [a pub] and bade his man hide his face; For they shall never see my Arse again, sayd he.”
*
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, obscenities continued to be seen as the best words to use when displaying “the naked truth.” Such thrusters-forth of the scantily clad truth were, normally, imagined to be masculine—for around two hundred years (1600–1800) a common word for “expurgate” was
castrate
. “Remov[ing] obscene or objectionable passages,” as the
Oxford English Dictionary
terms it, was seen as cutting off the manly bits.

The other metaphor that associated truth-telling with the use of bad words was “to call a spade a spade.” This proverb seems to have been invented by Erasmus, whom we also have to thank for the idea of
copia
and for his tract on civility in young boys. In his
Adages
, a huge collection of Greek and Roman proverbs, he lists “ficus ficus, ligonem ligonem vocat”: “
he calls a fig a fig
, and a spade a spade.” He glosses that this “is an iambic line from the comedies of Aristophanes adapted for use as an adage. It suits a man who speaks the truth in a
simple and countrified style, who tells of things as they are, and does not wrap them up in ornamental verbiage… . Men of more homely mother-wit speak more crudely and more plainly, and call things by their true names.” In this form, the proverb addresses both obscene words and vulgar ones.
Ficus
literally means “fig” but is metaphorically used for “anal sore” and in late Latin came to refer to the vagina. A person of scrupulous politeness might thus avoid using even the proper term for the fruit to prevent any possible innuendo; a more straightforward, more manly person would not hesitate to use the word
fig
despite its sexual undertones.
Ligonem
is a vulgar word, one that, as Erasmus explains, “
will strike the hearer as rather
too common for the dignity of the context” and which is adopted from the vocabularies of “low trades and occupations, like bath-attendant, cook, tanner, and eating-house keeper.” Someone who calls a spade a spade is not afraid to use the proper but lower-class word for a lower-class thing. The Roman historian Tacitus exemplifies the opposite of this plainspoken style, with his literal refusal to call a spade a spade: “
Telling of a Roman army
hard pressed in Germany and forced to dig emergency fortifications by night, he says that in their hasty retreat they had ‘to a great extent lost the implements by means of which earth is dug and turf is cut.’” Tacitus’s refusal to mar the otherwise elevated style of his history with such a vulgar word perhaps prompted Erasmus to (mis)translate the proverb from the Greek as he did.
The Greek actually means
“he calls a fig a fig and a wash-tub or kneading-trough a wash-tub or kneading-trough.”