Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (31 page)

This movement contradicts two trends in swearword evolution. With the development of feminism, many swearwords have become more equal-opportunity, not less.
Bitch
can now be applied to men and women, as can
cunt
. In the nineteenth century
shit
as a noun was reserved exclusively for men—the
West Somerset Word-book
defines it as “
a term of contempt
, applied to men only,” as in “He’s a regular shit.” Now, women too can work, vote, own their own property, and be called a shit.

When swearwords don’t become more equal-opportunity, they often begin to be used solely for women—Geoffrey Hughes calls this
the “feminization of ambisexual terms
.” Words such as
scold, shrew, termagent, witch, harlot, bawd
, and
tramp
were all at one point in their histories terms for men; furthermore, the terms were usually neutral and sometimes even adulatory.
Scold
, for example, comes from the Old Norse word for “poet.” When these terms were feminized, they perjorated, going from neutral or positive to insulting.
Bugger
bucks this trend, too, going from a word used of men and women equally to an insulting term reserved almost exclusively for men.

In these examples,
bugger
shows great grammatical flexibility. Geoffrey Hughes categorizes swearing into eight classes, while Tony McEnery finds sixteen; either way, the above
bugger
s can occupy many of the slots. The word can be personal: “you bugger you!”; personal by reference: “take the bugger off”; a curse: “bugger you!”; destinational: “bugger his Soul to Hell”; and a figurative extension of literal meaning: “the soil was ‘buggered over.’” Hughes notes that “as terms become more highly charged, so they acquire greater grammatical flexibility.”
*
As words become charged—obscene—they are
able to be used in more and more ways. Once the worst word in the language,
fuck
can be used in all eight of Hughes’s categories and in fourteen of McEnery’s sixteen.

As we can see with
bugger
, most categories of swearing require the word
not
to be used in its literal sense. When Francis yells “you bugger you” at his sister, he is not suggesting that she goes around having anal intercourse—he means “I have a strong negative emotion toward you, let go of my balls!” When soil is described as “buggered over,” no one is suggesting that teams of sodomites traversed the field, doing their thing—it means, figuratively, “really messed up.” Along with grammatical flexibility, this figurativeness is the hallmark of a fully obscene word, a word used not as a literal descriptor but to shock, offend, or otherwise carry emotion—a swearword.

Bloody
and
bugger
were the two most prevalent swearwords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is ample evidence of their use, from multiple sources, because they were employed frequently (remember Shaw’s contention that
bloody
is “in common use as an expletive by four-fifths of the British nation”) and because they were considered less offensive than many other obscene words. It was possible to print the two, even if they had to be disguised as
b——y
and
b-gg-r
, where
f——k
would have been impermissible. But there is tantalizing, if sparse, evidence that our other modern swearwords were making the same transition at the same time, becoming not just obscene words but swearwords, used where one once would have used an oath. By the 1860s, swearing probably sounded much as it does today, with obscene words doing much of the work of swearing, and with religious words—
damn it, Jesus, oh God
—employed frequently but to less effect.

The evidence for the most part comes from records of court proceedings, where people’s spoken language was recorded verbatim; from pornographic books, where obscene language went hand in hand with obscene doings; or from dictionaries whose editors were brave enough to include bad words. Let’s take
fuck
, for example. Around 1790, a Virginia judge named George Tucker wrote a poem
in which a father argues with his son the scholar, “‘
G—d—your books
!’ the testy father said, / ‘I’d not give———for all you’ve read.’” According to Jesse Sheidlower and Geoffrey Hughes, the third———is replacing “a fuck,” producing the first recorded example of the modern teenage mantra, “I don’t give a fuck.” This poem didn’t see the light of day until a scholarly edition of Tucker’s work in 1977. Tucker’s great-granddaughter published some of his poems in 1895, but she somehow didn’t see her way to including this one. By 1879, the evidence is less equivocal. A character in the mock Christmas pantomime
Harlequin Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fairfuck
(1879) declares, “
For all your threats
I don’t care a fuck. / I’ll never leave my princely darling duck.” (The panto relates the story of Prince Cherrytop, who has become enslaved by the Demon of Masturbation. The Good Fairy Fairfuck helps him conquer his addiction to self-abuse, so he can embrace the joys of holy matrimony with his betrothed, the Princess Shovituppa. It was written by an eminent journalist for the
Daily Telegraph
, whose work had also been published by Dickens and Thackeray.)

In 1866, a man swore in an affidavit that
one Mr. Baker had told him
he “would be fucked out of his money by Mr. Brown.” The notary who recorded the testimony editorializes, “Before putting down the word as used by the witness, I requested him to reflect upon the language he attributed to Mr. Baker, and not to impute to him an outrage upon all that was decent.” Luckily for us, the witness insisted he copy it down, outrage or no, and so we have the first recorded use of
fuck
meaning “cheat, victimize, betray.”
In 1836 Mary Hamilton
was charged with using “obscene language” in the street—she followed a group of other women, called them “bloody whores,” and “[told] them to go and f … k themselves.”
An 1857 abolitionist work
relates the story of a slaveholding doctor who whipped one of his slaves on Sunday. The woman “writhed under each stroke, and cried, ‘O Lord O Lord!’” The doctor “gazed on the Woman with astonishment” and said “Hush you
^*******
b h, will you take the name of the Lord in vain on the Sabbath day?” (“
^*******
b h” = “fucking bitch”). Again we have
circumstance to thank for the preservation of this insult. The authors of the antislavery tract were invested in making slaveholders appear as foul and morally bankrupt as they could, and one easy way to signal that was with obscene language. And though they provide no examples in their slang dictionary, Farmer and Henley describe both the adjective and adverb forms of
fucking
as “common.” The adjective, they note, is “a qualification of extreme contumely” (“fucking bitch” is a pretty good example of that), while the adverb (“I am fucking furious!”) is “intensitive and expletive; a more violent form of
BLOODY
.” If
fucking
was “common” in 1893, when the volume containing
F
was published, it was probably in pretty wide use for some years before that, as the 1857 example implies.

So by the mid- to late nineteenth century, we have many forms of
fuck
being used just as they are today—“he fucked me over,” “go fuck yourself,” “you fucking bitch,” “I don’t give a fuck,” et cetera. What about our other swearwords?
Shit
was apparently used in modern ways back then too. In an investigation of voting fraud from 1882, one man was recorded as telling another, “
Shit, that’t nothen
[that ain’t nothing]; get your father to swear that you are twenty-one.” This is
shit
as an interjection, just as we use it today: “Shit, I got a parking ticket.” And we’ve already seen the
West Somerset Word-Book
of 1886 record
shit
as a “term of contempt,” which, it notes, is “very com. [common].”

The same dictionary includes a definition for
nackle-ass
, an adjective meaning “poor, mean, inferior, paltry: applied as a term of contempt to both persons and things indifferently,” as in “Why do you not buy yourself a knife worth something; (and) not keep about such a [nackle-ass] thing as that?” or “A
plat-vooted
[flat-footed], nackle-ass old son of a bitch!” While
nackle-ass
in particular doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression beyond West Somerset, it is strikingly reminiscent of our own modern and widespread
-ass
constructions—
big-ass, bad-ass, dumb-ass
, and so on. It is different, too, from the Renaissance construction
burnt-arsed
, as in “burnt-arsed whore.” This was a literal use—it meant “infected with venereal disease.”

One final example will have to suffice:
in 1894, a New York man murdered
an acquaintance partly because the acquaintance wouldn’t stop calling him “cock-sucker.” It’s not clear who started the bad blood originally, but the deceased escalated things by ordering drinks for a group of men but excluding his murderer with the words “Treat them five and leave that cock-sucker out.” He then smacked the defendant on the nose and called him “cock-sucker” several more times. When at one point the defendant didn’t have enough money to pay for another drink, the deceased also butted in with “Let him stick it up his ass.” Eventually the defendant left the bar, came back with the gun, and shot the man who had repeatedly called him “cock-sucker.”

These examples sound practically contemporary. The words in question,
fuck, shit, ass
, and
cocksucker
, were chosen for their emotive charge, not to denote as directly as possible some part of the body or action. They were employed to shock and offend, or to express the speaker’s emotional state. Most of these are also figurative uses, not literal—
nackle-ass
has nothing to do with the buttocks, to be “fucked out of your money” has nothing to do with sex. It is possible that
cocksucker
was meant literally; the defendant repeatedly asserted that he was
not
a cocksucker. It was still an extremely offensive word, however, with a shock value out of proportion to its literal meaning—it led, after all, to murder. Examples of words like these are much scarcer than ones involving
bloody
and
bugger
. They are considered to be worse today, and were probably more offensive in the past as well (“an outrage upon all that was decent,” as the notary put it in 1866). Whether or not they were used less frequently in life—and they probably were not, given that
fucking
and
shit
were both described as “common” by their dictionary editors—they made it into print far less often. An essayist for the
Gentleman’s Magazine
of 1891 echoes the lexicographers’ insistence that these words were common, opining that “the ‘bad language’ of the present day must be characterized as obscene rather than profane.” The flexibility of
bugger
reveals that
the contemporary grammar of obscenity existed in the early nineteenth century; the ubiquity of
bloody
shows that nineteenth-century people used bad words with abandon. Coupled with the tantalizing but few Victorian examples of obscenities that have come down to us, it seems safe to say that by the 1860s, and perhaps even earlier, people in America and Britain were swearing much as they do today.

Another, related question is when obscene words started to be identified as “swearing,” along with oaths. Many works of the period that address swearing refer to “profane swearing and obscene language,” as if these are still considered to be separate but related kinds of speech.
The entry on
swearing
in
Chambers’s Encyclopædia
of 1892, however, notes that “by oaths are loosely understood many terms and phrases of a gross and obscene character, as well as those words the use of which implies profanity proper.” And the Boston magazine
Liberty
identified both obscenity and profanity as types of swearing in 1887: “
We say that it is no worse
to swear by the realities of nature as exemplified in the human body than to swear by a holy ghost. One is obscenity; the other profanity.” Certainly by the early twentieth century, we achieve our confused state in which “profanity”—originally a religious concept indicating the opposite of sacred—refers almost exclusively to obscene words, and “swearing” includes both oaths and obscenities.

Gamahuche, Godemiche, and the Huffle

Though Victorian people were swearing in much the same way that we do today, not all the bad words of the time are as familiar as
fucking bitch
. Many of these words rich and strange are not swearwords per se but terms for topics so esoterically taboo that they would never have come up in polite conversation. In his 1785
Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
, Francis Grose includes
to huffle
, which is “a piece of bestiality too filthy for explanation.” (The 1788 and 1823
editions decide that discretion is the better part of valor and fail to mention the bestial practice at all.) Grose also lists “to bagpipe, a lascivious practice too indecent for explanation.” Even Farmer and Henley, brave champions of obscenity who boldly explained
fucking
, refuse to define
to bagpipe
in their dictionary—they simply repeat Grose’s definition manqué. One hopes for something really spectacular from these words, but they are simply the Victorian version of
blow job
, slang for fellatio, a practice evidently much more shocking one or two centuries ago. Another popular Victorian word for this lascivity was
gamahuche
. It derives from French, so it probably was a euphemism used in order to lift the tone of
huffle
and
bagpipe
out of the gutter. It more properly means “mouth on genitals,” as it can be used for both fellatio and cunnilingus.