Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (36 page)

Rap music, in contrast to pop, is marked by an exuberant and near-constant use of swearwords.
Much of rap music deals
with boasting and bragging (or, as rappers and critics call it, “braggadocio,” derived from a character in Edmund Spenser’s 1590 epic poem,
The Faerie Queene
); battling or “beefing,” like the flyting of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland; and “hustling,” making money, usually through illicit means. “
Lighters
,” by Eminem and Royce da 5′9″, is a 2011 example of braggadocio—“Had a dream I was king, I woke up, still king,” Eminem boasts. The song is so full of obscenities that bits
of it are almost unintelligible when heard on the radio, particularly when Eminem points out, among other things, that “You stayed the same, ’cause cock backwards is still cock, you pricks.”
Rap battling evolved most directly from
“the dozens,” a game originally played by young African American men. In the dozens, contestants show off their verbal dexterity and wit by trading insults, particularly of the “yo momma” variety—“Yo momma so ugly, they filmed
Gorillas in the Mist
in her shower.” As Scottish flyting shows, though, this kind of organized obscenity has evolved over and over in society—it must represent a fairly universal human urge.
Hustling, as rapper Jay-Z
puts it, is “the ultimate metaphor for the basic human struggles: the struggle to survive and resist, the struggle to win and to make sense of it all.” Rap music depicts these basic human struggles in the coarse language of the street. Obscenities are particularly useful in these contexts because they are the words with the most emotive force. They are the go-to words for expressing aggression, for putting someone else down, for resisting “the system” and the dominant culture that expects certain kinds of “good” language and behavior.

The Science of Swearing

As swearwords have become more prevalent and less taboo in society, this more relaxed cultural climate has opened up swearing as a (mostly) socially acceptable field of study. Brain scientists, psychologists, linguists, and sociologists now all do research into different aspects of swearing. The discovery of Tourette’s syndrome in the late nineteenth century really sparked scientific inquiry into our topic, although at that point in time doctors had to conduct their research through euphemisms and elisions and had to fight against the idea that understanding swearing was unworthy of real intellectual effort.

On July 10, 1890
, a mother brought her thirteen-year-old daughter to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore because the girl could not stop her body from jerking and she was making loud barking sounds.
Doctors tried hypnosis to calm her down, but it was unsuccessful. A few months later, her case took a turn for the worse. Her mother wrote the doctors: “Mary makes use of words lately that make me ashamed to bring her to you or to take her out of the house; it is dreadful, such words as———,———,———, etc. She was always a modest child, and it almost kills me for to hear her use such words.” It is fairly obvious that the worrisome words are obscene—the mother implies that they are the opposite of modest—though the doctor can’t mention what they are in a late-nineteenth-century medical journal. (The thirteenth-century English translator of Lanfranc’s
Science of Chirurgie
, say, would not have had such scruples.) Mary was suffering from
Tourette’s syndrome
, described by two French doctors in 1885.

Tourette’s syndrome is characterized by physical and vocal tics such as eye blinking, coughing, shrugging the shoulders, twitching of the limbs, and clearing the throat. The most famous symptom, though, is what got Mary’s mother so upset—coprolalia, the uncontrollable utterance of obscene words. (Touretters also occasionally suffer from copropraxia, which involves obscene gestures such as giving the finger or crotch grabbing, and coprographia, the urge to make obscene drawings.) Only 10 to 30 percent of people with Tourette’s experience coprolalia, but it causes great embarrassment to them and can lead to even greater misunderstandings with the general public. Sometimes the tic is relatively harmless—someone mentions ducks, and the Touretter feels compelled to repeat “fuck a duck.” Other times the outbursts are more meaningful, directed at a person’s race, weight, or sex, in what might seem to be the most hurtful way possible.

In the 1890s, no one had any idea what caused Tourette’s syndrome, or why anyone might be compelled to vocalize the words locked down by society’s strongest taboos.
The problem was thought
to lie, probably, with the mothers—they were too rigid and didn’t let their children indulge in enough free play, so the children never learned to control their bodies and language. Or they were too indulgent of temper tantrums, with the same result. If it wasn’t the mother’s fault, you could always blame penis envy, as in the case of Alice,
a child with uncontrollable movements and strange vocalizations who had the bad luck to draw a picture of a tower in her psychiatrist’s office in the 1940s.

Now, however, we have an idea of how Tourette’s syndrome really works, thanks to advances in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. This in turn gives us insight into
what goes on in “normal” brains
when people swear. Scientists have found that swearing most likely originates in the right hemisphere of the brain, and within that half, in the “primitive” part of the brain, the limbic system. The right half of the brain is responsible for nonpropositional or automatic speech, which includes greetings, conventional expressions such as “not at all,” counting, song lyrics, and swearwords. Propositional speech—words strung together in syntactically correct forms to create an original meaning—occurs in the left hemisphere. The limbic system, particularly the amygdala, records the emotional content of words—their connotations, as opposed to denotations. The amygdala “lights up” during brain scans when subjects read taboo words, and this increased activity can also be measured through the skin with electrodes. Like my grandmother, aphasiacs who have lost their ability to create propositional speech because of Alzheimer’s or problems in their left brain often retain their ability to swear. Medical literature abounds with cases such as that of a man whose entire left hemisphere was surgically removed due to cancer, leaving him with the ability to say “um,” “one … three,” and “goddammit.” (In contrast, one patient whose right brain had atrophied could carry on a conversation more or less normally but had lost the ability to sing “Happy Birthday” or say the Pledge of Allegiance.)

Swearing, though, is a combination of left and right brain, executive and lower functions. When you swear, you do not say just any old bad word—you choose the one calculated to do the most insult, to relieve the most stress, or perhaps to relieve the most stress without offending your Mormon neighbor who is outside gardening. Though the coprolalia of Tourette’s sounds involuntary, more often than not the words are relevant to the situation at hand. Speaking to an obese woman, a Touretter might interject, “Fat pig!”; to an African
American in a purple sweatsuit, “Purple nigger!”; to just about anyone, “Fuck you!” Many people might have thoughts like these, but their prefrontal cortex—the executive area of their brains—is able to override them and shut them down. The current theory is that people with Tourette’s have a problem in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which plays a role in making choices among several actions and inhibiting certain motor functions. The executive areas of their brains can fight against their limbic urges for a time—people can often delay but not suppress tics—but eventually the lower brain wins, and out comes “Fuck me up the asshole!”

Other disciplines have pursued the study of swearing as well. Not so long ago, in the 1930s and 1940s, linguists had to disguise any interest in obscenity, as did Allen Walker Read, who, we’ve seen, wrote an entire article about
fuck
without once ever mentioning the word, and who had to publish his collection of lavatory graffiti privately. For decades, however, most linguists simply pretended that swearwords didn’t exist.
The standard word frequency list
created in 1944 ranked the frequencies of various words within a sample of 18 million. Almost the only swearword among those 18 million was
shit
, as the list had been compiled from
Black Beauty, Little Women
, and issues of
Reader’s Digest
. Another study of English usage,
this one based on spoken telephone conversations
in New York City, excluded 25 percent of the recorded words from its sample because they were indecent. Linguists and psychologists now feel free to include the bad words in their samples of English. Psychologist Timothy Jay found that
on average 0.7 percent of the words people use
in a day are taboo ones. This sounds like a small percentage until it is compared with first-person plural pronouns (
we, us, our, ourselves
), which occur at a 1 percent rate. And Jay found that the rate of swearing varied, from 0 percent (a person who doesn’t swear at all) to 3 percent (someone who says
motherfucker
quite a bit more than
we
and
us
). In 1969,
psychologist Paul Cameron compiled word frequency lists
in three different social settings. He found that when he compared them, the only words on all three lists that were not
pronouns (
he, I
), articles (
the, a
), or prepositions (
to, from
) were
damn, hell, fuck
, and
shit
.

Scientists have discovered much about the emotional impact of swearwords through traditional psychological testing such as word recall tasks. If you are given a list of words, some of which are obscene and some of which are not, chances are the ones that will stick in your mind are obscene. When Timothy Jay gave people a list of thirty-six taboo and non-taboo words,
the top five recalled were
nigger, bitch, pussy, cock
, and
slut
. Fewer subjects recalled
friend
and
cuddle
; nobody remembered
kiss, pity, crime, lung
, or
frame
. This confirms what we feel instinctively and have seen through brain imaging studies—taboo words are arousing, not in the sexual sense (though of course they can be that too) but in a more general physiological sense. These words excite the lower-brain circuitry responsible for emotion, which creates electrical impulses that can be measured in the skin. Reading Jay’s taboo words caused higher skin conductance frequencies than did the non-taboo words, correlating pretty exactly with the recall of the terms.

Another piece of folk wisdom about swearing
has recently found scientific support. If you ask people why they swear when they hurt themselves, they will likely say that it makes them feel better—it is cathartic in some way. Intrepid researchers have discovered that you can keep your hand immersed in extremely cold water for longer (an additional forty seconds) if you swear than if you say some neutral word. The psychologist Richard Stephens, who led the experiment, summed up his results: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear.”

Many people in the twentieth century and today have been following Stephens’s advice, and not only when they’ve hurt themselves. In the past century, swearing manifested itself in the public sphere to a degree not seen since the vain oaths of the Middle Ages. Like the Victorian period, though, it was an era of the Shit. Twentieth-century speakers still used religious oaths frequently when they swore, but they were much less powerful, less shocking than the obscenities. In the mid-twentieth century, we started to see a change in this schema, however, as sexual obscenities themselves started to lose power to a new class of obscene words—the racial slurs.

Epilogue

In the thousands of years we’ve surveyed, we’ve seen people use many different swearwords to express the same things—aggression, insult, one-upmanship, and denigration, certainly, but also love and friendship, and the surprisingness or awesomeness of our experiences. Swearwords were and are perhaps the best words we have with which to communicate extremes of emotion, both negative and positive.

Over the centuries, these words have drawn strength from two main areas of taboo—religion and the human body, the Holy and the Shit. In ancient Rome, the Shit was in ascendance. Latin obscenity was not the same as contemporary English obscenity, though, given that Rome had a very different sexual schema, and that for Romans some kinds of obscenity themselves had a religious function. In the Bible, the Holy replaced the Shit, and oaths gained power—sincere oaths because they called on God as a witness, and vain oaths because they could injure him in various ways. Oaths remained the most shocking, most highly charged language in the Middle Ages, as taboos on touching God’s body and impugning God’s honor were stronger than those on revealing or mentioning parts of the human body. In the Renaissance, this began to change. Because of the rise of Protestantism and other factors we’ve discussed, the balance slowly began to shift away from the Holy and back to the Shit. By the mid-nineteenth century, we were firmly mired in the Shit—obscene words had become the most shocking, the worst words in the English language. This was the height of the civilizing process, the maximum extent of the shame threshold, with obscene body parts and words taboo as never before or since. It was at the end of the
nineteenth century that obscene words finally started to be thought of as and called “swearing,” though they had been fulfilling this function for many years before then. Most recently, the twentieth century witnessed the beginning of sexual obscenity’s decline and the rise of a new kind of obscenity, racial epithets, which are now some of the most taboo words in the English language.

Just as there has always been swearing, there have always been attempts to stop or control it. Roman obscenity was supposed to be limited to particular genres of texts, or particular occasions—the religious rites of Priapus, or triumphal ceremonies, for example. Yahweh wanted his people to swear by him and by nobody else. Medieval authors of pastoral texts tried to convince, then command, people not to take God’s name in vain. The English Parliament issued laws against oaths onstage and in everyday life during the seventeenth century; prosecutions for obscenity began during the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, euphemisms grew in popularity as obscene words were stigmatized and avoided as vulgar and low-class. The twentieth century saw the regulation of fighting words and more obscenity prosecutions, which, ironically, helped pave the way for the public use of obscene words that they were intended to curtail.