Swearing is one of the most basic human acts. Those who believe that brain scanners can tell us things about our linguistic behaviour report that swear words are associated with activity in the limbic system or palaeomammalian part of the brain, which is supposedly linked with ‘lower’ forms of brain activity such as the emotions and memory. Dogs when they bark at you might perhaps be doing something like swearing: certainly Kingsley Amis, a writer not unacquainted with the palaeomammalian brain, used to imitate a dog barking ‘fuck off’. But human swearing is also a complex social activity, which often marks or tests or breaks social boundaries. When Eliza Doolittle says ‘Walk? Not bloody likely! I am going in a taxi’ in Shaw’s Pygmalion she gives away her social origins by her choice of intensifier.
Swearing’ in English covers two distinct but interconnected activities. If I say ‘bugger’ when my grocery bag splits and the yoghurt bursts all over the floor I do something which the OED temperately calls ‘the uttering of a profane oath’ (we should remember that the OED was fuckless and cuntless until its supplement of 1972, and remains a chaste organ: it thinks ‘biscuit’ is just ‘crisp, dry bread’, though it’s more sound on ‘crumpet’). But we also call it swearing when we affirm that we will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth (‘the action of taking an oath’), or swear by black Hecate and the night that we will get our revenge on someone. We can swear on our own (‘Fuck!’), as an act of aggression (‘Fuck off!’), as an expression of frustration (‘For fuck’s sake!’), in company as an act of bravura or camaraderie (‘Fuck you!’), and as a comic performance of anger (‘Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on!’). We can also swear by my hat, by my faith, or by some greater authority, that we will perform a particular act, and we can make such oaths in jest or in earnest. Or both at once.
There is the thesis that monotheism transformed obscenity for good. This doesn’t hold water unless you ignore the extremely rich use of sacred oaths in the ancient world. These mattered so much that they could be said with only slight exaggeration to lie at the very origins of the Western literary tradition. At the start of the Iliad Achilles swears by Apollo that he will protect the prophet Calchas no matter what he reveals about the cause of the plague that is harming the Greeks. He later swears on his staff that he will not fight for Agamemnon any more. These oaths are accompanied by a series of insults to Agamemnon, which, although they sound rather chaste by comparison with Catullus’ threats of irrumation, are in the context of a heroic poem quite strong stuff: ‘dog-face’, ‘people-devouring king’, ‘coward’
I am guilty of having a propensity for intensifiers, you know those muscular Anglo-Saxon words like f... etc. My favourite dismissive intensifier is 'I could not give a rat's fuck what you think!' So there, and you can't get more childish stampy footy that that.
As Geoffrey Hughes noted in his excellent Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, the more charged a swear word is the more susceptible it becomes to grammatical transformation.[*]＊ This means that the boundaries between nouns and adjectives and adverbs can all get completely fucked up by swear words, and before you know it the little fuckers are everywhere. At first swear words are used just on or just over the usual limit of propriety. Then they become a bit more common (in the sense of frequent; they may also come to be regarded as less ‘common’ in the social sense). They do so because they can perform so many social and grammatical functions. They can fill in pauses, establish gender identities, build a group, or serve as all-purpose markers of emphasis.
In different periods, either the holy or the shit is the prime source of obscenity.
Having dealt with the mentulae and cunni (use your imagination) not to mention the verpae (penises with the foreskin drawn back; the contemporary ‘bell-end’ is the rough modern equivalent) of the Roman world, Mohr turns to her principal historical claim: that Judaeo-Christian monotheism shifted the centre of obscenity from bodily and sexual taboos to oath-making and breaking. Yahweh, being a jealous God, insists that people swear by him alone. According to Mohr, ‘swearing is a key weapon in God’s campaign to become the one true God.’ By the Middle Ages, vain oaths by God’s blood or bones ‘had the form of an oath but the force and register of an expletive’, while cunts and turds and coillons (testicles) were ‘ordinary words’. The reason for this was, she claims, that the doctrine of the Real Presence forged a sacred connection between the language of oaths and the body of Christ, and consequently ‘swearing by God’s body parts is in fact a perverse version’ of the Eucharist.
The Renaissance, Mohr says, changed things. Protestantism stopped people believing in the Real Presence, and so oaths by God’s body began to carry a less profound charge. Capitalism made contracts rather than personally binding oaths the foundation of commerce. She also suggests that the practice of mental reservation or equivocation by Jesuits in making oaths further devalued the holiness of swearing in the late 16th century. By the later 17th century the proliferation of conflicting oaths of allegiance required of loyal subjects accelerated the decline of the holy as the main source of the obscene and enabled the rise of the bodily profane. Enter the Earl of Rochester, his remarks about Charles II’s sceptre and his prick being of a length, and his description of how in St James’s Park the ‘Poor pensive Lover in this place/Wou’d frigg upon his Mothers face/Whence Rowes of Mandrakes tall did rise/Whose lewd Topps Fuckt the very Skies.’ These mark ‘a brave new era of obscenity’, after which we have an age of euphemism, which extends more or less until the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, with Eliza Doolittle’s onstage ‘bloody’ in Shaw’s Pygmalion an early herald of change
Acts of swearing are particularly prone to turn into cliché or aural rubble, and tend to enter written sources at a point when they still have a slight thrill of the forbidden but before they have become completely routine. This means that the force of an oath can be hard to detect in retrospect, since we may simply filter out a phrase which in its day had traces of profane power but which came soon afterwards to function as a more or less neutral conversational filler.
Swearing is an action, and one that can hurt, harm, engage and enrage, as Homer and Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shaw knew. When a swear word is used casually as an intensifier it can carry a residuum of the pain and shock that it is capable of inflicting in other circumstances. That transfer of shock is part of what we do when we swear, whether we want to or not.
However swearing as a mode of communication quickly becomes boring.
However swearing is a good thing. We need to exercise the palaeomammalian brain from time to time, and we should ‘appreciate that our language has so many such useful words that can be employed in such a wide variety of ways’.
So think Robin in Batman, when your next feel like giving Anglo-Saxon air to your frustrations.
Try 'Heavens to Murgatroyd' or, 'Holy Chocolate Éclair'
I am being serious.
One thing Robin never dared say, bless his little golden rayon cape, was ‘Holy Shit’, the uttering of which would certainly have KAPOWED him right off prime-time TV
Source;
Swearing’ in English covers two distinct but interconnected activities. If I say ‘bugger’ when my grocery bag splits and the yoghurt bursts all over the floor I do something which the OED temperately calls ‘the uttering of a profane oath’ (we should remember that the OED was fuckless and cuntless until its supplement of 1972, and remains a chaste organ: it thinks ‘biscuit’ is just ‘crisp, dry bread’, though it’s more sound on ‘crumpet’). But we also call it swearing when we affirm that we will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth (‘the action of taking an oath’), or swear by black Hecate and the night that we will get our revenge on someone. We can swear on our own (‘Fuck!’), as an act of aggression (‘Fuck off!’), as an expression of frustration (‘For fuck’s sake!’), in company as an act of bravura or camaraderie (‘Fuck you!’), and as a comic performance of anger (‘Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on!’). We can also swear by my hat, by my faith, or by some greater authority, that we will perform a particular act, and we can make such oaths in jest or in earnest. Or both at once.
There is the thesis that monotheism transformed obscenity for good. This doesn’t hold water unless you ignore the extremely rich use of sacred oaths in the ancient world. These mattered so much that they could be said with only slight exaggeration to lie at the very origins of the Western literary tradition. At the start of the Iliad Achilles swears by Apollo that he will protect the prophet Calchas no matter what he reveals about the cause of the plague that is harming the Greeks. He later swears on his staff that he will not fight for Agamemnon any more. These oaths are accompanied by a series of insults to Agamemnon, which, although they sound rather chaste by comparison with Catullus’ threats of irrumation, are in the context of a heroic poem quite strong stuff: ‘dog-face’, ‘people-devouring king’, ‘coward’
I am guilty of having a propensity for intensifiers, you know those muscular Anglo-Saxon words like f... etc. My favourite dismissive intensifier is 'I could not give a rat's fuck what you think!' So there, and you can't get more childish stampy footy that that.
As Geoffrey Hughes noted in his excellent Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, the more charged a swear word is the more susceptible it becomes to grammatical transformation.[*]＊ This means that the boundaries between nouns and adjectives and adverbs can all get completely fucked up by swear words, and before you know it the little fuckers are everywhere. At first swear words are used just on or just over the usual limit of propriety. Then they become a bit more common (in the sense of frequent; they may also come to be regarded as less ‘common’ in the social sense). They do so because they can perform so many social and grammatical functions. They can fill in pauses, establish gender identities, build a group, or serve as all-purpose markers of emphasis.
In different periods, either the holy or the shit is the prime source of obscenity.
Having dealt with the mentulae and cunni (use your imagination) not to mention the verpae (penises with the foreskin drawn back; the contemporary ‘bell-end’ is the rough modern equivalent) of the Roman world, Mohr turns to her principal historical claim: that Judaeo-Christian monotheism shifted the centre of obscenity from bodily and sexual taboos to oath-making and breaking. Yahweh, being a jealous God, insists that people swear by him alone. According to Mohr, ‘swearing is a key weapon in God’s campaign to become the one true God.’ By the Middle Ages, vain oaths by God’s blood or bones ‘had the form of an oath but the force and register of an expletive’, while cunts and turds and coillons (testicles) were ‘ordinary words’. The reason for this was, she claims, that the doctrine of the Real Presence forged a sacred connection between the language of oaths and the body of Christ, and consequently ‘swearing by God’s body parts is in fact a perverse version’ of the Eucharist.
The Renaissance, Mohr says, changed things. Protestantism stopped people believing in the Real Presence, and so oaths by God’s body began to carry a less profound charge. Capitalism made contracts rather than personally binding oaths the foundation of commerce. She also suggests that the practice of mental reservation or equivocation by Jesuits in making oaths further devalued the holiness of swearing in the late 16th century. By the later 17th century the proliferation of conflicting oaths of allegiance required of loyal subjects accelerated the decline of the holy as the main source of the obscene and enabled the rise of the bodily profane. Enter the Earl of Rochester, his remarks about Charles II’s sceptre and his prick being of a length, and his description of how in St James’s Park the ‘Poor pensive Lover in this place/Wou’d frigg upon his Mothers face/Whence Rowes of Mandrakes tall did rise/Whose lewd Topps Fuckt the very Skies.’ These mark ‘a brave new era of obscenity’, after which we have an age of euphemism, which extends more or less until the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, with Eliza Doolittle’s onstage ‘bloody’ in Shaw’s Pygmalion an early herald of change
Acts of swearing are particularly prone to turn into cliché or aural rubble, and tend to enter written sources at a point when they still have a slight thrill of the forbidden but before they have become completely routine. This means that the force of an oath can be hard to detect in retrospect, since we may simply filter out a phrase which in its day had traces of profane power but which came soon afterwards to function as a more or less neutral conversational filler.
Swearing is an action, and one that can hurt, harm, engage and enrage, as Homer and Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shaw knew. When a swear word is used casually as an intensifier it can carry a residuum of the pain and shock that it is capable of inflicting in other circumstances. That transfer of shock is part of what we do when we swear, whether we want to or not.
However swearing as a mode of communication quickly becomes boring.
However swearing is a good thing. We need to exercise the palaeomammalian brain from time to time, and we should ‘appreciate that our language has so many such useful words that can be employed in such a wide variety of ways’.
So think Robin in Batman, when your next feel like giving Anglo-Saxon air to your frustrations.
Try 'Heavens to Murgatroyd' or, 'Holy Chocolate Éclair'
I am being serious.
One thing Robin never dared say, bless his little golden rayon cape, was ‘Holy Shit’, the uttering of which would certainly have KAPOWED him right off prime-time TV
Source;
Frog’s Knickers
Colin Burrow
- Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr
Oxford, 316 pp, £16.99, May, ISBN 978 0 19 974267 7
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