Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (3 page)

I am aware that there is a real risk that other people will be offended by parts of
Holy Shit
. Some people don’t like the title; others object to the number of times that I repeat certain sexual obscenities; I myself shied away from the racial slurs. If you haven’t already been offended by this book, chances are you will be. I can only apologize in advance. It is possible to discuss the subject of oaths in general without mentioning any specific ones, as many medieval authors did. And in the 1930s Allen Walker Read wrote a long article about
fuck
without ever spelling it out. But everyone has a different bar, a different account of what is considered to be sayable and unsayable. For some people, even a phrase such as “Shut up!” is “bad language,” to be strictly avoided. If I tried to write a book about swearing in such a way that the most sensitive of readers could peruse it without blushing, it would be difficult, confusing, and probably very much less entertaining. As Samuel Johnson said to two ladies who commended him on leaving “naughty words” out of his
Dictionary
, “
What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?
”

Many people today are not only shocked by swearing but also look down on it. An anthropology professor at Harvard once told me confidently that swearing was a sign of a lazy mind, the linguistic crutch of someone who can’t think of a more original way to express him- or herself. James O’Connor, author of
Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing
(2000), sums up this common attitude in his list of
twenty-four things wrong with swearing
, including “it shows you don’t have control,” “it discloses a lack of character,” “it’s abrasive, lazy language,” and “it lacks imagination.”

It would be disingenuous to deny that swearing is in some ways “bad language.” Swearwords are offensive, they are vulgar, and they can certainly be overused. But they also do what no other English words can. They are the most powerful words we have with which to express extreme emotion, whether negative or positive. They insult and offend others (which, like it or not, is a function of language); they offer catharsis as a response to pain or to powerful feelings; they cement ties among members of groups in ways that other words
cannot. As we choose our words when speaking or writing, we consciously and unconsciously consider many factors. We think about the meaning of what we want to say. We consider the emotional attitude we’d like to convey. We assess whom we are talking to and where we are. Sometimes, taking all these factors into account, we need to employ formal diction and a measured tone. Other times, though, only a swearword or two can accomplish what we need. To put it another way, language is a tool box and swearing is a hammer. You can try to pound a nail into a piece of wood with the handle of your screwdriver, with your wrench, or with your pliers, but it’s only your hammer that’s perfectly designed for the job.

Swearing performs a crucial role in language today, as it did in the past; that alone makes it worthy of serious consideration and study. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history. People swear about what they care about, and did in the past as well. A history of swearing offers a map of some of the most central topics in people’s emotional lives over the centuries. This book is partly a record of how swearwords have changed through the years—how, for example,
fuck
came to replace
sard
and
swive
; how
by God’s bones
was once more taboo than any of those three; why the Victorians were so worried about
gamahuche, godemiche
, and the
huffle
. But it is also a study of the cultural concerns that gave rise to those words. It is, if you will, history in four letters—a look at what has mattered most to English-speakers over hundreds of years, and how this is revealed by swearing.

I need to emphasize the “English-speakers,” for while the first chapters of this book consider ancient Roman obscenity and the biblical roots of oath swearing, this is partly, if not mainly, because they serve as deep background for the history of English usage. I concentrate on swearing in England and America and do not specifically analyze swearing in other English-speaking cultures, such as Australia, India, South Africa, or Canada. The reservoir is too vast, for one thing, and for another, many of the major obscenities are in use wherever English is spoken.

Wherever English is spoken, many people believe that we are experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of swearing today. The
Times of India
recently reported on
the worrying trend of increased swearing
in books for teens; the
Daily Mail
of Britain has declared in a headline that “
This Culture of Swearing Curses Us All
”; and the
New York Times
has published on “
the growing frequency
of public figures using vulgarity.” In 1972, George Carlin famously listed the seven words you couldn’t mention on TV—
shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cock-sucker, motherfucker
, and
tits
. Now you can say all but three, depending on when you are talking and how you use the words.

But are we really experiencing an epidemic? Swearing is like the climate—it goes through cycles. The ears of ancient Romans burned with the “plain Latin” they heard and saw all around them. In the Middle Ages, blasphemous oaths were used so frequently that authorities worried they might injure God himself, and religious writers pleaded, then threatened, in order to get people to stop swearing. If we are swearing more openly than did people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we are not swearing more. If we are experiencing an epidemic of swearing, it is not the first and not the last.

Behind the anxiety about swearing lies a fear that civilization is a thin veneer, barely covering a state of chaos. We worry that this fragile membrane can be ripped apart by swearing, which violates so many dictates of polite, rational discourse and gives voice to so many unruly impulses. But the truth is that we have always lived with swearwords, whatever they may have been, and always will. They are intrinsic to language and to our use of it.
Some studies have shown that
contemporary English-speakers use eighty to ninety such words a day—we might as well try to get rid of the pronouns
we, us
, and
our
, which we use at a similar rate. Just as a healthy brain needs both its “higher” and “lower” parts, cerebral cortex and limbic system, a healthy society needs its “good” language and its “bad.” We need irreproachably formal and unassailably decent speech, but we also need the dirty, the vulgar, the wonderful obscenities and oaths that can do for us what no other words can.

Chapter 1
To Speak with Roman Plainness
Ancient Rome

You might know an old joke: A masochist says to a sadist, “Hurt me.” The sadist says, “No.”

The joke is actually older than you might think. Ancient Rome had a version, too, a little bit different:

There’s a horrible boor
who throws dinner parties that end up insulting his guests instead of entertaining them. He and his favorites drink the best wine and eat the finest foods, while everyone else has to make do with table scraps and leftovers. While people are eating, his masseuse rubs down every part of him, and he throws foie gras to his yappy little dogs. Then he falls asleep, snoring like a horse, and his servants warn us not to wake him up. We have to suffer this insolence and can’t retaliate, my friend—he performs fellatio [
hos malchionis patimur improbi fastus, / nec vindicari, Rufe, possumus: fellat
].

This is actually an epigram by the poet Martial (c.
AD
87), but the same joke appears in similar forms in other places. Martial complains that he and his friend can’t punish their host for his rudeness. Appropriate revenge would be
irrumatio
—oral rape, basically—making him give them blow jobs.
Irrumatio
is a standard Roman threat made by poets, orators, and ordinary people for causes great (adultery) and small (a bad review). No one knows how often it was carried out, given its not insignificant potential for injury to the aggressor. In this case, however,
irrumatio
won’t work. The host
fellat
—he likes to perform fellatio. If you tried to put him in his place with some
irrumatio
, he would actually enjoy it. The sadist says, “I want to hurt you,” and the masochist says, “Go ahead, I’d love it.”

Swearing in Latin and swearing in modern English have a relationship a lot like that of these two jokes. In some ways Roman obscenity seems very familiar, but in others it is fascinatingly different. (
Fascinating
, by the way, comes from the Latin
fascinum
, a representation of the erect penis. Tiny
fascini
were worn by young boys as charms to protect them against the evil eye. In ancient Rome, these penises were thought to be infused with magical power; today if something fascinates you, it captures your attention almost against your will.) Linguists generally agree that the worst words in English are
the “Big Six”
:
cunt, fuck, cock
(or
dick
),
ass, shit
, and
piss
.
*
Ancient Latin had a “Big Ten”:
cunnus
(cunt),
futuo
(to fuck),
mentula
(cock),
verpa
(erect or circumcised cock),
landica
(clit),
culus
(ass),
pedico
(to bugger),
caco
(to shit),
irrumo
, and
fello
.

Some of these words are very similar in English and Latin—
cunnus
and
caco
are equally bad in both languages and used in similar ways. Some, such as
futuo
and
landica
, start to reveal some differences.
Landica
was a horrible obscenity in Latin, while
clit
is barely on the radar in English. And then there are words such as
irrumatio
that English just doesn’t have, which point to ways in which the Romans were
really
different from us. The ancient Romans didn’t think about sexuality in terms of heterosexual or homosexual—they divided people up by whether they were active or passive during sex. This (to us) unusual schema gives rise to a very different obscene vocabulary.

The Latin word for “obscenity” is
obscenitas
.
Its etymology is unknown
, but speculation has derived it from
caenum
(dirt, filth) or
alternatively from
scaena
, the stage. In the latter case, obscenity would be what cannot be said except onstage, where, in ancient Greece and Rome, comic ribaldry was licensed.
Obscenitas
is the source of our English word and has a similar range of meanings.
Cassell’s Latin Dictionary
defines
obscenus
as “foul, repulsive, filthy; morally impure, indecent, obscene.” In Latin and in English, obscene words are dirty, whether sexually or excrementally. They refer to parts of the body, and things those body parts do, that are under strong taboos. But in Rome the obscene also had religious functions. Another meaning of
obscenus
was “of ill omen,” indicating things that would contaminate a religious rite and make it fail. Obscenity made some religious rituals succeed, though, too. Obscene words could please gods such as Priapus, with his enormous, perpetually erect phallus, and were thought to promote fertility and to protect against the evil eye. In ancient Rome, in other words, the Shit itself could be Holy.

We can see all this by looking at the Big Ten, beginning with the ones most similar to their English equivalents, and ending up with some strange and rather wonderful words.

cunnus = a womans wyket
*

—Thomas Elyot,
Dictionary
, 1538

The Greeks and Romans gave us models for our literature—the epic, the satire, the epigram, the ode—that we have used for hundreds of years. They gave us democracy. They gave us blueprints for buildings in which to house our democracy. They gave us the example of an empire that brought civilization to millions of people for hundreds of years. Historically, people have often felt that the Greeks were a bit strange—either too effeminate, too interested in boys, like the Athenians, or, like the Spartans, too militaristic, glorifying
nothing but death in war and abandoning babies who looked weak to die of exposure.
The Romans, on the other hand
, strove for almost Protestant virtues—work hard, live modestly, and don’t indulge yourself to excess.
Cunnus
is a word that reminds us of this long-standing affinity, or, at any rate, it should.

Cunnus
and
cunt
mean the same thing, are equally shocking and offensive, and are used in similar ways in Latin and English. While it appears as if they are related etymologically, current thinking among linguists holds that they are not.
The Old English
cwithe
(womb) or
cynd
(nature, essence), both of which probably relate to the proto-Germanic
*
kunton
, seem more likely candidates for the English word’s origin.
*
This may be scholarly prejudice, stemming from a wish to see obscene words as Anglo-Saxon—as blunt, earthy words that hark back to the beginnings of our language. Latin usually gives us our proper medical terms for immodest parts of the body—
vagina
and
penis
, for example—not our primary obscenities.

Latin would have had ample time, at least, to bequeath
cunnus
to us. The Romans invaded Britain in 55
BC
, conquered it in
AD
43, and ruled it for four hundred years. Usually when Rome took over a province, its native inhabitants quickly realized the benefits of speaking Latin and adopted it within a few generations. If the British were speaking Latin, there would seem to be no reason why that language couldn’t have given us
cunt
,
just as it gave
con
to French
,
coño
to Spanish, and
cunnu
to Sardinian.
Cunt
would then be even older than the Anglo-Saxon
shit
and
arse
, since the Germanic tribes invaded the island only as the Romans were beginning to leave it.