SWEARING

Geoffrey Hughes was born in 1939 and grew up in England, East Africa and the Middle East. Since reading English at Oxford he has lectured at the University of Cape Town, been an Honorary Research Associate at Harvard, a visiting Professor at the University of Turin and is Ad Hominem Professor of the History of the English Language at the University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), a position he has held for ten years.

In addition to teaching a wide range of literature his special research interests are historical semantics and socio-linguistics, on which he has given papers at several international conferences. He has published over twenty articles and two previous books, Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary (1988) and Watchwords (1995), a collection of columns on topical words. He is the Collins Dictionaries Consultant for South African English and Editor of the journal English Studies in Africa. He is married, lives in Johannesburg, and is currently working on a lexical history of English.

SWEARING

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Preface

IN HIS Worlde of Wordes, published in 1598, John Florio defined Italian fottere as ‘to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy,’ running through the whole gamut of copulatory registers with typical Renaissance exuberance. A century and a half later, two society ladies brimming with propriety, ‘very much commended Dr Johnson for the omission of all naughty words’ from his Dictionary. ‘What! my dears!’ the doughty Doctor archly replied, ‘then you have been looking for them?’ In 1896, Dr J. S. Farmer became involved in a lawsuit when his publishers refused to publish certain obscene words in his dictionary of slang. Today an editor is more likely to incur censure for prissiness or cowardice through omitting words which are widely in use (outside the range of ears polite) but nevertheless regarded as not ‘fit to print’.

These anecdotes and observations bring out the perennial ambivalence of attitudes towards foul language. Similarly, although swearing obviously thrives in astonishing profusion in many quarters and is never heard in others, there is also hesitancy over accepting it as a proper topic for public display or serious discussion. There are sound academic reasons for this, for swearing exists in such variegated forms, from the deadliest curse and most serious asseveration down to the flippant ejaculation of annoyance, that often the exact meaning and intention of the form of words lie only with the speaker. The fields are hedged about with all manner of complex pressures, personal, societal, religious, sexual, and other forms of taboo which still seem only imperfectly understood. Origins and practices are alike elusive and imperfectly documented, as tends to happen when tacit understandings are at work. A researcher from a different period may thus easily misinterpret a meaning or a causation entirely. Why, for instance, should the word donkey make a curiously sudden appearance in the mid-eighteenth century? Why should coney make an equally odd disappearance from the vocabulary? The explanations are similar, involving shifts in the respective semantic fields. Ass was acquiring an uncomfortable phonetic proximity to arse, just as coney was to cunt, requiring both terms to be dropped and replaced. An outsider to a culture may be equally nonplussed: what would a newly-arrived visitor to Australia make of the observation ‘He’s a good bastard’? How do rational explanations cope with the paradox Defoe commented on with exasperation: ‘They call the dogs sons of whores, and the men sons of bitches’?

Not the least of the problems facing an historical study of swearing is that of organization. I am reminded of the memorable images used by Barbara Strang in her History of English twenty years ago, when she wrote in her Preface of the ‘ceaselessly, oceanically, heaving, swelling, flowing, ungraspable mass that historians corset into manageable chunks on to which quasi-scientific labels can be stuck’. This awareness leads to the major question: is it more illuminating to focus on different segments of time and consider developments within each phase, or to trace themes across time? Each mode has its advantages and drawbacks. I have preferred the former approach, chiefly because modes and referents in swearing do not appear to be constant: a topic like ‘Sexual Swearing from Beowulf to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ would have to pass over several of the earlier centuries in tantalized silence, while, conversely, the theme of ‘Oaths of Heroic Undertaking’ would run dismally dry in modern times. The fascinating convention of ritual insult known as flyting has a disjunctive history, flourishing in Viking times, dwindling away in Middle English, reviving as a Scots literary genre in the Renaissance, and then largely petering out in Modern English, although a continuation can be seen in the cognate practice of ‘sounding’ in black American English.

As Murray put it with his usual incontestable clarity in his Preface to the OED, ‘No one man’s English is all English.’ This observation becomes highly pertinent to the demotic domain, where a person may have a huge general vocabulary but will usually have highly personal preferences in swearing, drawn from background factors of family, school, class and calling. My own decent bourgeois background meant that the most vehement personal denunciations and expletives heard from my elders and betters (as they were archaically styled) were ‘that bloody fool!’ or ‘the bastard!’ and the strongest exclamation of frustration or anger was ‘For Christ’s sake!’ I do not recall hearing the unprintable ‘four-letter words’ used until I went into national service: at school the word which excited greatest erotic interest was friction, since it was defined in the dictionary as ‘heat generated by two bodies rubbing together’. Those days are over. Today, in film and television dialogue, as well as in much family discourse, the old taboos are noisily disintegrating, not without resistance or protest. The old censorship of pas devant les enfants has been reversed into pas devant les parents.

Half a century ago, Robert Graves observed in the opening page of his Lars Porsena: The Future of Swearing: ‘Of recent years in England there has been a noticeable decline of swearing and foul language….’ It is unlikely that he would now take the same view. Both the facts of the resurgence of swearing and the possible social explanations supply the matter for the last part of this study.

It may be asked why I have included the older term oaths in addition to swearing, which is obviously more current. The choice is not simply that of preference for a philological archaism. Oaths still resonates with the formality and seriousness which verbal undertakings have traditionally been regarded, while swearing is now common, personal and largely debased. Since this study was partly intended to explore some of the older, highly potent workings of words in society, the more venerable term seemed appropriate.

Clearly, this is a field which Eric Partridge made very much his own. In dedicating this work to him (in absentia), I also acknowledge copious assistance from his pioneering efforts in exploring the linguistic underworld. Ashley Montagu’s fine study, The Anatomy of Swearing, issued some twenty years ago, has also proved a valuable source of historical documentation.

Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Philip Carpenter of Basil Blackwell for his enthusiastic backing of this book right from the inchoate and muddled first draft, and to my Editor, David Crystal, who has always been forthcoming with sound advice and constructive assistance. Andrew McNeillie of Basil Blackwell was most competent and supportive in the final stages of production.

Sources and Abbreviations

THIS study is, of necessity, heavily dependent on the master-work on semantic change in English, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). For economy of reference, a raised ‘O’ is used (e.g. 1934^O) to refer to the main Dictionary (1884–1928), which was the collaboration of Murray (pre-eminently), Bradley, Craigie, Onions and Furnivall, ‘with the assistance of many scholars and men of science’. A raised ‘S’ refers to the OED Supplement (1972–86), produced by Dr Robert Burchfield and his research team at Oxford. The fourth and last volume, published in 1986, completes what is clearly a worthy sequel to its predecessor, so aptly described by Otto Jespersen as ‘that splendid monument of English scholarship’. Although the two sequences were consolidated in 1990 into the Second Edition, I have preferred to keep references to them separate, since apart they record changing policies and attitudes towards swearing, foul language and profanity. This acknowledgement of logophiliac dependence is in no way intended to implicate any Oxford lexicographer in the inferences and conclusions which follow.

A Cursory Introduction

‘THE English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation,’ opined William Hazlitt in 1821.¹ Though this view might be surprising to some, it was not new. Indeed, the nation’s time-honoured reputation for swearing reaches back at least to the time of Joan of Arc, when the French termed them ‘les Goddems [the goddams]’. Their modern descendants have maintained the tradition by acquiring (from the same quarter) the sobriquet of ‘les fuckoffs’ (Mort, 1986, p. 77). Between these two points of reference, one thinks of Harry Hotspur enjoining his wife to utter a ‘good mouth-filling oath’ (as would be befitting a noblewoman), of Queen Elizabeth upholding the practice, of Sir Charles Sedley’s witticism, upon being fined (three centuries ago) the formidable sum of £500, that ‘he thought that he was the first man that paid for shitting’, and of Robert Graves observing (about half a century ago), that ‘Of recent years in England there has been a decline of swearing and foul language’ (1936, p. 1).

These observations and notable practitioners remind us of the continuing currency of coarse speech which, though staple to many tongues, has generally been ignored in standard histories of the language, even some of the most recent. The conventional understanding that the levels of discourse should be separated has hardened into an academic practice whereby studies of the ‘proper’ language (the upper levels) are kept apart from the ‘improper’ (or lower levels). None of the standard histories of the language has accorded the lower registers or the idioms of obscenity much attention. This is true of both traditional studies, such as those of Jespersen (1905), Baugh (1951), Potter (1963) and Barber (1964), and, less justifiably, of the more recent studies offered under the banner of descriptive linguistics, such as those of Pyles and Algeo (1970), Bloomfield and Newmark (1963) and Leith (1983), which purport to deal with the language ‘really’ in use, namely the protean varieties of oral usage. The same reticence is found in several excellent linguistic studies of English as an international or world language. These ignore such basic lexical and semantic points of difference as the copious use of bloody and bastard in Australian English and the use of mother-fucker and cocksucker as a major feature in American English, particularly in black parlance.²

For centuries the division of usage into the decent bourgeois standard and the less acceptable lower varieties of slang has been de rigueur. The split is notable in the dictionary, where one finds a ‘proper’ tradition of Bailey (1728), Johnson (1755) and Murray et al. (1884–1928), and a ‘canting’, slang or underworld tradition (which is actually older) starting in Elizabethan times with works by Harman (1567), Greene (1591) and others, continued by Grose (1785), Farmer and Henley (1890–1904) and Partridge (1937), and is currently showing a resurgence with a variety of works appearing virtually on an annual basis. The title of Francis Grose’s exuberantly witty thesaurus, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, highlights for us the semantic shift undergone by vulgar. Did he intend the old meaning of the ‘common, ordinary or vernacular language used by the majority’, or the more class-bound sense of the language used by those ‘not reckoned as belonging to good society’ or ‘lacking in refinement and good taste, uncultured, ill-bred’, as the OED defines the various categories? The second sense is the more likely, but the persistence of the older meaning reminds us of the robust prevalence of the majoritarian ‘vulgar’.

It is a fascinating speculation to consider how far this public separation of registers accords with the facts of private linguistic life. While we can be fairly certain that, say, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James would have maintained roughly the same level of discourse in private life and in their published works, we can be less certain about, say, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and many modern authors. Such observations, though interesting biographically, can (of course) be of only limited general value, since one needs to focus more on conventional mores than on individual cases. At any rate, a convention of linguistic censorship has not always obtained. It seems ironic that a medieval poet, Chaucer, should, in fact, have been one of the few major literary artists who could fearlessly use the whole gamut of the vocabulary without evident reprisal. All the available coarse vocabulary and a stupendous variety of oaths appear in his work. In the North the traditions of flyting kept both strains flourishing until the mid-sixteenth century. But by the time of Shakespeare, thanks to the efforts of the ill-called Master of the Revels in curbing what was styled as Profanity on the Stage, most of the vituperative energies of the tongue had been driven underground. There they have remained until quite recently, emerging only occasionally in spectacularly outrageous flaunters of convention like Rochester, Urquhart and Motteux, Swift and Lawrence. The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shiterow and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece.

Whatever this Anglo-centric view might suggest, swearing is not universal. According to Montagu, several substantial speech communities, including the American Indians, the Japanese, the Malayans and most Polynesians, do not swear (1973, p. 55). Never the less, in many cultures swearing is fascinating in its protean diversity and poetic creativity, while being simultaneously shocking in its ugliness and cruelty. Whereas Proteus merely changed shape, the same form of an oath or a curse yields many meanings. Swearing draws upon such powerful and incongruous resonators as religion, sex, madness, excretion and nationality, encompassing an extraordinary variety of attitudes, including the violent, the amusing, the shocking, the absurd, the casual and the impossible. Being manifestly not a simple matter, it seems to raise more questions than answers. Why, for example, is swearing not constant in its modes, styles and referents? Why is it that some forms of swearing appear to be universal, while others are more specific to a culture? Within the English-speaking community, what variants emerge over time on the basis of nationality, class and sex? How is it that the categories of the sacred and the profane become so paradoxically intertwined in oaths? Why is swearing taken more seriously in some periods than others, even being raised at some stages of the culture to a verbal art form? What happens when swearing is driven underground? What is to be deduced from those changes which can be detected over time? These are some of the questions which this book will attempt to answer.

Swearing now encompasses so many disparate forms that some broad distinctions need to be made at the outset. We swear by, we swear that (something is so), we swear to (do something), we swear at (somebody or something), and sometimes we swear simply out of exasperation. These different modes might be re-termed by a variety of classical equivalents, asseveration, invocation, imprecation, malediction, blasphemy, profanity and ejaculation, with an admixture of that most complex and unstable category, obscenity. Although we are familiar with all these types now, they have not been constantly present in the past. They represent an agglomeration of various linguistic modes which have evolved over centuries. The crude history of swearing, however named, which this book will unfold in all its strange, violent and comic detail, is that people used mainly to swear by or to, but now swear mostly at.

Although the main framework of the argument will be historical, this introductory chapter will perforce be discursive, surveying various aspects which are integral to the topic. Subsequent chapters will pursue particular themes, tracing their development in given periods of time. Since the main ambit of the argument will be evolutionary, the early chapters will focus more on swearing by, while the later will be more concerned with swearing at.

As was mentioned previously, swearing shows a curious convergence of the high and the low, the sacred and the profane. From the ‘high’ dualistic perspective, it is language in its most highly charged state, infused with a religious force recognizable in the remote modes of the spell, the charm and the curse, forms seeking to invoke a higher power to change the world, or support the truthfulness of a claim. At base these varieties are profoundly serious. Although they may sound farfetched (drat, for example, originally meaning ‘God rot your bones!’ – or any other part of the anatomy), there is always the alarming possibility of the words coming true. However, a major shift has occurred in comparatively recent times in that a quite different emphasis has become dominant. The ‘lower’ physical faculties of copulation, defecation and urination have come very much to the fore as referents in swearing. Though they may be deeply wounding, many of these forms of words, such as bugger off, son of a bitch and so on deal with literal or practical impossibilities. In this respect they are different in literal potential from the ‘high’ variety. However, as we shall see, there is a recurring problem of analysis which concerns the degree to which any person (other than the utterer) can know how literally to interpret forms of swearing.

Because ‘sacral’ notions of language tend to be very powerful at primitive stages of society, taboos have traditionally grown up around offensive usages. Swearing is, in one sense, a violation of these taboos: the ‘high’ varieties violate the taboo of invoking the name of the deity, while the ‘low’ are often violations of sexual taboos, especially those concerning incest. Some of the major problems frustrating an attempt at an historical study are consequently the obstacles of suppressed or garbled evidence, found in uncertain etymologies and incomplete semantic histories. Suppression, discussed more fully in subsequent chapters, is a perennial feature. Garbled, mangled or ‘minced’ oaths are also more common than is generally realized. (Gorblimey! is similar to drat cited above, being a corruption of God blind me!, mainly Cockney in use, dating from c.1870^O.)

To modern ears, most oaths are now usually ‘demystified’ into mere forms of words. Statements are now made under oath only in formal, for instance, legal proceedings, or in such necessary rituals of social and political continuity as taking an oath of allegiance. They form the basic structure of trust on which all society is based, so that every culture has some form of binding oath, as it has some form of verbal taboo. One of the many forms of ritualized reinforcement of an oath is this practice recorded a century ago:

In elucidating the ancient sense of by in forms of swearing, the OED observes that the word originally ‘must have had a local sense “in the presence of”, or perhaps “in touch of” some sacred object’ though ‘to modern apprehension there is apparently no notion of place, but one approaching that of instrumentality or medium’. Invocations of the Almighty, previously so feared and respected, are now generally regarded as ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’, a phrase which has changed revealingly over the past centuries: its original sense essentially criticized the abuse of the mystical power of the Lord’s name; now the kernel of the phrase in vain is more suggestive of scepticism about the validity of that power. Corroborating this point are the great numbers of ‘self-immolating’ oaths and curses, such as strike me dead! blow me down! shiver me timbers! Gor blimey! (cited above) and those clearly derived from judicial oaths, such as so help me! On this point, the brilliant insight of Vico is pertinent: in his analysis, language evolves through three stages, being originally sacred, then poetic and finally conventional (1948, pp. 306–7). His evolutionary framework of ideas is particularly germane to our theme. It also points up the difficulty of knowing exactly what degree of literalism is being invoked in a particular form of words, without an intimate knowledge of the cultural period concerned.

In the past, when honour and language were more closely interlinked, oaths (or their abrogation) changed the fates of nations. For instance, William of Normandy’s claim to the English throne depended initially on no more than his word that Edward the Confessor had formally named him as his successor. When his rival, Harold Godwinson, was shipwrecked and captured on the Normandy coast, William granted him his freedom only upon the exaction of an oath supporting this claim (against Harold’s own). However, Harold was subsequently named by Edward the Confessor as his successor, was elected by the English witenagemot (Privy Council) and crowned, so that William had to assert his claim by conquest.

Duels have been fought over words carrying only the faintest implication of dishonour. The intensely personal commitment which an oath requires was vividly apparent when Francis I of France abrogated a treaty and declared war on Spain in 1528. Charles V of Spain accused Francis of ungentlemanly behaviour and challenged him to a duel. (It did not take place.) We cannot imagine a similar consequence arising from, for example, Chamberlain challenging Hitler to a duel on the parallel grounds of the Führer’s abrogation of their agreement signed at Munich in 1938.

Personal insults can likewise have devastating consequences, belying the naive, childish chant: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. One of the more spectacular social instances arose from the visiting card delivered by the Marquess of Queensberry to the Albermarle Club on 18 February 1894 with the words ‘To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic]’ (Ellmann, 1988, p. 412). This precipitated the lawsuit and accompanying society scandal which ruined Wilde. Today such a sexual slur would be less likely to incur litigation. Indeed, a review of a recent biography of Truman Capote began in cavalier fashion: ‘Truman Capote was the sort who gives sodomy a bad name.’⁴ Never the less, oaths, curses and insults directed at individuals can still have serious repercussions. In modern times, however, cases of crimen injuria are more likely to arise from racist slurs than sexual insults.

WORD-MAGIC AND TABOO

Charms, spells and curses (which are treated in more detail in the following chapter) represent survivals of primitive beliefs in word-magic, which tend to become less potent as a society develops. We can see this evolution encapsulated in the semantic history of the word curse. Of uncertain origin and unique to English among the European languages, its Old English meaning was ‘to damn’; in Middle English the primary sense developed as the ecclesiastical specialization ‘to excommunicate or anathematize’. Since then it has steadily diminished in force as a verb, though the noun still has potency. Dr Johnson defined cursedly as ‘miserably, shamefully’, commenting that it was ‘a low cant [slang] word’. We can trace the weakened fossilized forms in curst, ‘perversely cross, contrary’, much used of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and cussed, the colloquial American variant, recorded from c.1848^O. An exactly parallel semantic development can be seen in the word damn, which has moved from its strictly ecclesiastical ‘infernal’ sense to one of milder disapproval or exasperation, reflected in the altered forms of demn and dem, current in the late seventeenth century and facetiously extended by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby to demnition. (The American forms darned, durned and late eighteenth-century tarnation show the same development.) Otto Jespersen noted appositely, ‘Thus we have here a whole family of words with an initial d, allowing the speaker to begin as if he were going to say the prohibited word, and then turn off into more innocent channels’ (1962, p. 229). Blast has shown similarly pattern of diminishing force since Elizabethan times. So, in a more limited fashion, has take, which had an earlier sense of ‘exert a malign influence’, still heard in imprecations like ‘The Devil take it!’ In one of his horrifying curses against Goneril, King Lear uses the term in this sense:

… Strike her young bones,

You taking airs, with lameness!

(II. iv. 160–1)

Our modern insensitivity to the language of cursing clearly derives from our becoming inured through exposure to the numerous forms of violent expression found in modern life. Consequently, it is a shock to come across words such as these (penned to an ‘agony columnist’): ‘Tremble and repent, unholy monstrous woman. You defile the country and young virgins. I curse you in God’s name and may you go childless all the rest of your days.’⁵

In several religions, such as Brahmanism, Judaism and Islam, direct reference to the name of God is taboo. In such cultures belief in the sacral power of words is, consequently, more explicit. Montagu, in his major study, The Anatomy of Swearing, mentions ‘the behavior of certain Arabs who, when cursed, ducked their heads or fell flat on the ground in order to avoid a direct hit’ (1973, p. 8).

Stephen Ullmann has reminded us of one consequence of word-magic, namely that ‘Linguistic superstitions and prohibitions have left their imprint on many sectors of the vocabulary’ (1951, p. 76). He mentions the euphemistic, presumably pacifying, circumlocutions which have been resorted to in earlier stages of the culture in order to avoid direct mention of creatures which exercised a totemic force, such as the weasel and the bear:

In the Romance languages there are only isolated survivals of mustela, the Latin name of the animal [the weasel]. In French it has been replaced by belette, a diminutive of beau, belle, which literally means ‘beautiful little woman’. Elsewhere, the euphemism has worked mainly by change of meaning: the Italians and Portuguese call the weasel ‘little lady’ (donnola, doninha), the Spaniards ‘gossip’ (comadreja), whereas in Denmark it is known as ‘beautiful’ and ‘bride’, in Sweden as ‘pretty little girl’, in Greece and Albania as ‘sister-in-law’, etc. In English the weasel once had the by-name of fairy… (Ullmann, 1962, p. 206)

In another area of the bestiary, there are propitiatory or ingratiating phrases used for the bear, namely ‘honey-eater’ and ‘honey-pig’. Given the totemistic aura of the animal among the Germanic peoples, it is a possibility that the heroic name Beowulf, literally ‘bee wolf’, might be a coded reference to ‘bear’.

Virtually all societies, even the most modern, retain some taboos against swearing. Such prohibitions existed in English for centuries before Captain Cook introduced the word taboo from Tongan into English in 1777. In the earlier stages of a culture verbal taboos are greatly intensified, and also very complicated, largely because language in that social setting is highly charged. Malinowski has described the potency of language in non-literate society in these terms: ‘The word has power of its own; it is a means of bringing things about…. Language in its primitive function is to be regarded as a mode of action rather than as a countersign of thought’ (in Montagu, 1973, p. 8).

Donald F. Thompson showed, in his researches among the Australian aborigines of the Cape York peninsula in northern Queensland, that an elaborate etiquette of swearing existed among the tribes of the area, one based more on social position than content. Thompson found that, except in the presence of certain relatives, ‘there is no restriction upon reference to the genitalia or the physiological functions of reproduction, defecation or micturition’. He cites the greeting of a two-year old child at the breast who dropped the nipple to glower at him and exclaim: ‘Devil! excrement foul! excrement foul!’ (1935, p. 465). The dynamic perception of language is graphically illustrated when a man finds that his words have been overheard by one who stands in a certain social relationship to him. ‘He exclaims, “My mouth is foul,” and sometimes takes a lighted firebrand and passes it backwards and forwards before his mouth as a purification ritual’ (1935, p. 468). We recognize in this behaviour an illuminating counterpart to the severe remedy of literally washing out the ‘foul mouth’ of an offender with soap and water.

Thompson also found a clear distinction between situations of what he termed ‘unorganized’ and ‘organized’ swearing. In the first category, swearing and obscenity fall under no sanction and are ‘used by both sexes in quarrels, and as taunts to goad an enemy to fight’ (1935, p. 469). This latter practice, fascinatingly, used to exist in the English tradition and will be discussed in subsequent chapters under the convention of flyting. Thompson’s alternative category (of ‘organized’ or ‘licensed’ swearing) is stranger to us, since it involves ‘swearing and obscenity that is not only permissible, but obligatory, between those who stand in certain relationships under the classificatory system’ (1935, p. 469). Organized swearing has three other remarkable features: it is carried out in public; it is immune from the extreme taboos governing other relationships, and ‘it is supposed to induce a state of euphoria: in the words of my informants, to “make everybody happy” ’ (1935, p. 469). ‘Organized’ swearing consists of two distinct types. One is ‘obscenity pure and simple, consisting of more or less stereotyped references to the pudenda… Certain relatives are also permitted to snatch playfully at one another’s genitalia, and even to handle these organs in public.’ The other is termed ‘bad language, consisting chiefly of references to the anus and to excrement’ (1935, p. 469).

Clearly, these quite different attitudes and practices, now lost to us, invite reflection. Swearing in public is now totally unacceptable, as alien to us as the notion of obligatory swearing. While there are still vestiges of the ‘relationship taboo’, these seem in recent years to have changed from pas devant les enfants to pas devant les parents. So far as euphoria is concerned, it is now commonly only the swearer who may ‘feel better’ after an outburst. Commenting on these findings, Montagu reflects upon the ‘remarkably humane and intelligent manner in which these so-called primitive peoples have handled a problem that the self-styled civilized peoples of the West have failed both to understand and to control, and have therefore condemned out of hand’. He concludes: ‘This form of socialized swearing (which is also found among the Eskimos) constitutes one of the most widely diffused and efficient devices for assisting to preserve the equilibrium of the individual and his society’ (1973, p. 13).

Generally speaking, taboos may be categorized as universal or societal. Virtually all societies have, for instance, taboos against direct reference to death: invariably preferred is some euphemism concerning a journey to an unknown destination, such as pass on, pass away or the more uplifting variant of the Salvation Army, promoted to glory. The common Anglo-Saxon terms for ‘to die’ were steorfan, literally ‘to become stiff’ (recorded only from c.1000^O), forðferan, forðgan and gewitan, literally ‘to go forth’ or ‘to depart’. It may not be a coincidence that die itself is a Norse borrowing, since the Anglo-Saxon terms might possibly have become too direct: the OED observes that ‘No instance of the word is known in Old English Literature.’ Taboo areas paradoxically encourage the opposite verbal reaction to euphemisms, namely dysphemisms, which are startlingly direct and shockingly coarse violations of a taboo: in the field of ‘death’ one could cite pushing up daisies, snuff it and croak as gruesomely dysphemic references to the physical act of death, including the death-rattle and subsequent incorporation into the cycle of nature. A great deal of swearing, foul language and profanity is deliberately dysphemic.

Yet there are different degrees of tolerance within the same broad cultural grouping. Perhaps as a reflection of the optimistic, positive and ‘progressive’ ideology of America, the euphemized vocabulary of death is far more developed in the United States than in Britain. Mortician dates from c.1895^S, and casket is recorded from 1849^S. Although the latter was stigmatized over a century ago by Hawthorne as ‘a vile modern phrase’, both are well established in the undertaking trade, which categorizes its clients in the terms of the sentimental cliché the loved ones. However, invocations of death also figure largely in transatlantic locutions like Drop dead! and, less terminally, in lethal invitations such as Go jump in the lake, Go and play in the traffic and so on. As we shall see, taboos against direct reference to sexual matters were far more stringent in America than in Britain until the 1960s, but since then the floodgates have opened.

Societal taboos, therefore, become revealing indicators of evolving social mores, and reflect differing attitudes towards major forces which sustain, alter or threaten life. These can be very diversified or specific, but commonly involve the deity, death, madness, sex, excretion and strangers. As we shall see, these categories acquire quite different emphases at different stages and sectors of the same basic culture. It would seem, for example, that faeces are universally used in oaths and insults, while sex is used in a culture-specific variety of ways, emphasizing, for example, incest in terms like mother-fucker in some cultural groupings, adultery in cornuto in others, and a polymorphous variety in the application of the terms for the genitalia.

There is also the interestingly exact correlation between degree of taboo in verbal usage and the degree of taboo in actual public exhibition of the referent. The point is graphically made in the following scale:

Action	Word
barely acceptable in public	fart
	piss
totally unacceptable in public	shit
	fuck

This is a rare instance of reactions to language being the same as reactions to referents.

Taboos often reveal divisions within a society, there being different conventions according to class, position, sex and age. In some societies taboo terms may be uttered only by the priestly class (as in such formal cursing as the anathema) while in others they are the sole class prohibited from taboo utterances: it would be most inappropriate for a Western priest to indulge in genital swearing. As the following chapters will show, the relationship between class and swearing in England is fascinatingly complex.

OE	Old English	used interchangeably
A-S	Anglo-Saxon
ME	Middle English
Mn.E	Modern English
ON	Old Norse
OF	Old French
COD	Concise Oxford Dictionary
DSAE	Dictionary of South African English
EDD	English Dialect Dictionary
EETS	Early English Text Society
ODQ	Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
THES	Times Higher Education Supplement
TLS	Times Literary Supplement

SWEARING

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Sources and Abbreviations

1

A Cursory Introduction