Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (35 page)

If you were paying attention, you probably noticed the similarities to the Song of Songs: Roman candle = penis, burst = ejaculate, stream of rain = et cetera, et cetera. This is an elaborate allegory of masturbation, the main character Leopold Bloom pleasuring himself while watching a girl on the beach, who is herself watching fireworks. If you weren’t paying attention, though, it is easy to miss (and, after 350 pages already, your attention might well be wandering). Certainly twelve-year-old boys aren’t going to pass this around if they can get their hands on a copy of
Romeo and Juliet
.

The book was being published serially in the United States without any problems until this section came up.
*
In 1920
alert reader John Sumner
, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, did notice the masturbation and sued to have publication stopped on grounds of obscenity. In Britain the book was banned by order of the Home Office after critic Shane Leslie pointed out the ways in which it was blasphemous and detrimental to the morals of society.
Ulysses
was banned in the United States from 1920 to 1933 and in Britain from 1922 to 1936. (It was still freely published in France, though.)

Random House possessed the rights to publish
Ulysses
in the United States and figured that such a scandalous book would sell. First, though, it needed to create a trial, one that would declare the book not obscene and thus legal to be published. The publisher tried to get the book impounded by customs, but this proved difficult, even for such an “infamously obscene” work. According to the story, Random House arranged for someone to bring an illegally published copy from France into the United States. When the “mule” went through customs, however, it was too hot for the inspector to bother opening anyone’s luggage. The man insisted that there was contraband in his luggage until the inspector was forced to search his
bag. When the inspector discovered the copy of
Ulysses
instead of a bottle of rum or a packet of opium, he refused to seize it, telling the Random House man, “Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in. We don’t pay any attention to it.” (An estimated thirty thousand illegal French editions had already been “smuggled” in.) The customs chief had to be called in, and he eventually did his duty and impounded the book, paving the way for Random House’s long-sought trial.

The trial happened in 1933
(with a favorable appeals court ruling in 1934) and was a success for Random House, for James Joyce, and for literary obscenity in general. The two courts’ judgments overturned
the Hicklin Rule
, which had governed obscenity trials in America and Britain since 1868. (In a wonderful piece of nominative determinism, this rule had been set out by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn—“cock burn” being the result of indulging one’s libidinous leanings with a poxy whore.) This rule stated that if one part of a work was obscene, it
all
was—a book that contained a single obscene word was thus always in danger of being banned as obscenity. Instead, the American courts insisted that a book be judged in its entirety: “The question … is whether a publication as a whole has a libidinous effect.” If a work contains a few obscene words or suggestive passages, this is no longer enough to push it into the category of obscenity. As the appeals court pointed out, most of Western literature could be indicted for obscenity under the Hicklin Rule, from the
Odyssey
to
Hamlet
(not forgetting the Bible). The Hicklin Rule also reflected the Victorian obsession with preserving the innocence of the lower classes and children—it stated that courts must consider “
whether the tendency
of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” If a work excited lust in those least able to resist such base urges, it was obscene. The U.S. courts insisted instead that the law deal only with a book’s effect on a “normal person,” equivalent to the “reasonable person” posited in tort law,
not with its effects on the parts of the population most liable to libidinous excitation, whether those be the poor, the uneducated, or the boys. Given these considerations, the courts found that
Ulysses
was too sincere a portrait of lower-class life in Dublin, too artful a re-creation of people’s sometimes frustrating and often boring inner monologues, and just too dang long—it is of “such portentous length,” one judge noted—to be obscene.
*

D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was the subject of another key obscenity trial, this one in Britain, in 1960. It tested the new British Obscenity Act of 1959, which, influenced by the American
Ulysses
cases, stipulated that works had to be considered as a whole, not in part, and that the literary merit of a work, evaluated by a panel of experts, should also be taken into account in determining whether it is obscene. Where four-letter words were only part of the problem with
Ulysses
, they were the heart of the problem with
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. One of Lawrence’s projects in writing the book in the late 1920s was to free obscene words from their social stigma, paving the way for a healthier acceptance of sexuality, and healing what he saw as a cultural separation of intellect and body. Or as he put it: “
If I use the taboo words
, there is a reason. We shall never free the phallic reality from the ‘uplift’ taint till we give it its own phallic language, and use the obscene words.” In any case, the phallic reality remained chained until 1960, when Penguin Books decided to publish an unexpurgated edition of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, complete with swearwords and all.

The book had been published in several editions
since 1928, but all had been censored except the first edition, published in Italy. These editions removed passages such as the one in which the game-keeper Mellors, representing the fully sexualized phallic reality, discusses anatomy with his lover Lady Chatterley, who carries the heavy weight of representing both the eternal feminine and the transition from the bodiless and barren world of intellectuals and the
aristocracy to the profound, embodied sensuality of a person who has thrown off the conventions of society:

“
Th’art good cunt
, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha’rt willin’!”

“What is cunt?” she said.

Mellors goes on to explain to the good lady the difference between
fuck
, which is what animals do, and
cunt
, which is “the beauty o’ thee, lass!”

The crown was hampered in its case by a prosecutor who seemed more in sympathy with Cockburn’s original 1868 views than with the revised obscenity law. He famously asked the jurors, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?” A panel of esteemed literary scholars gave their views that
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was an important novel and that the obscene words were a necessary part of Lawrence’s project, not an add-on intended to promote lust among wives and servants. The book was declared not obscene and Penguin’s unexpurgated edition sold 2 million copies in its first year and 1.3 million in its second.

The trial of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
is often seen as heralding an era of new openness in public discourse. People had been speaking together in private like Mellors and Lady Chatterley for a hundred years, but the publication of their Penguin edition signaled a new acceptance of this language in the public sphere. The trial offers a handy symbol for the cultural liberalization taking place, in which obscene words became more socially acceptable, because the parts of the body they represented were themselves becoming less shocking.

By 1973, the words thought to be so shocking in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
were being said openly on public radio at two o’clock in the afternoon, prompting another key legal case. In 1972, George Carlin had identified “the seven words you can never say on television” and made these the basis of a monologue he performed on a comedy tour. The monologue basically consists of him swearing, with
occasional disquisitions into the strange ways we use these seven words—
shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker
, and
tits
. He has this and more to say about
shit
, for example:

The word shit
, uh, is an interesting kind of word in that the middle class has never really accepted it and approved it. They use it like crazy but it’s not really okay. It’s still a rude, dirty, old kind of gushy word. [
Laughter
] They don’t like that, but they say it, like, they say it, like, a lady now in a middle-class home, you’ll hear most of the time she says it as an expletive, you know, it’s out of her mouth before she knows. She says, Oh shit oh shit [
laughter
], oh shit. If she drops something, Oh, the shit hurt the broccoli. Shit. Thank you.

A man heard part of this monologue, broadcast by a California radio station, while he was driving with his young son. He complained to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is responsible for regulating what is broadcast on the radio and on television in the United States. In the United States, obscene material, which (1) appeals to the prurient interest, (2) depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and (3) lacks serious value, cannot be broadcast at any time.

What was at issue with Carlin’s monologue, however, was not obscenity but whether the FCC had the power to regulate indecency.
Legally, indecency is
“language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.” This is pretty much code for obscene words.
The FCC threatened
the local radio station with disciplinary action if more complaints were received. The Pacifica station sued, complaining that the FCC was chilling Americans’ right to free speech. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the FCC won—in 1978 the Court declared that the FCC did have the power to regulate indecency on television and the radio. Material broadcast into people’s homes or cars is subject to less First
Amendment protection than are books, stand-up comedy tours, or personal conversations, because it is harder to avoid offensive material in such a situation. The FCC can ensure that indecent language is broadcast only between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., when the most vulnerable listeners—children—are supposed to be asleep.

We have only to look at TV today to see that the Supreme Court and the FCC were less like Moses commanding the Red Sea to part and more like King Canute ordering the tide not to come in and watching helplessly as his shoes got wet. The tide of swearing has come in—of Carlin’s original seven words you can’t say on TV, you can now say all but three, depending on when you are talking and how you use the words. And this is only on network TV. On cable, there has been a show,
Deadwood
, whose entire raison d’être appeared to have been swearing, as extreme and as frequent as possible. A group of fans has calculated the “fucks per minute” from the show at 1.73 for the final season and 1.76 for the previous one. And these figures are just for
fuck
, not for
cocksucker, chink
, and the other swearwords in common use on the show. The HBO crime drama
The Wire
featured a scene where two policeman converse about a crime scene using only variations on the word
fuck
in different tones of voice, managing to express frustration, surprise, pain, compassion, and insight with dialogue that is basically “fuck … motherfucker … the fuck? Fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck… . fuckin’ A.” Once you hit the Internet, all bets are off. On YouTube you can find any number of paeans to profanity, including “the Fucking Short Version” of dozens of movies such as
The Departed, The Big Lebowski
, and
Die Hard II
. The title is pretty descriptive—these are the movies pared down to a single word. There is the little boy who can’t say
truck
—it’s a “fire fuck.” There is the Teletubbies doll that says “Faggot faggot faggot bite my butt!” (Actually, unfortunately, it says “faster faster faster” in Cantonese—a language mix-up.) And there are many, many swearing parrots.

On Urban Dictionary.com, the most popular website about contemporary language usage, obscenities receive far and away the most
attention. People vie to come up with the best definitions and identify or invent new slang based on them.
Fuck
, as of this writing, has collected more than 200 different definitions and more than 150,000 “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” votes on their quality. (
Mother
, in contrast, has 33 definitions and 4,500 votes.) It has also inspired approximately 6,000 entries based on it, from
fucabomb
to
fuczoid. Cunt
, impressively, has acquired 414 definitions and somewhere around 200,000 votes while inspiring 2,500 entries, from
cuntabilia
to
cuntzor
. There are also Web pages that list all the bad words in the Bible that explain, sometimes correctly, the etymologies of swearwords; and that describe the most popular obscenities among rappers, the prison population, and gay men.

In March 2011,
three of the top-ten hit songs
on the
Billboard
pop music chart had obscenities in their titles (bleeped, courtesy of the FCC, when played on the radio). Cee Lo Green told various people off with “Fuck You!,” Enrique Iglesias begged pardon for his rudeness in announcing “Tonight (I’m Fuckin’ You),” and Pink told listeners that they needn’t be “Fuckin’ Perfect.” The
New York Times
called this “
some
kind of milestone,” as top-ten pop music had in the past at least theoretically shied away from such blatant swearing. (
New York Times
best-selling books have been ahead of the curve in this respect. The list included Randall Kennedy’s
Nigger
way back in 2003, followed by Harry Frankfurt’s
On Bullshit
[2005], Justin Halpern’s
Shit My Dad Says
[2009], and Adam Mansbach’s
Go the Fuck to Sleep
[2011].)