Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English

"This is the one probably most like my own book. My book is a history of swearing and so is this one. This is really interesting because he talks about the way swearing has changed over the years and has a lot of great examples and funny stories. For me, the most interesting parts are his exhaustive word lists—he’s got 50 or so euphemisms for “God,” for example, from “gog” to “cokk” to “Great Scott!” He also talks about some of the interesting ways swear words change, like the “feminization of ambisexual terms,” where words that were once neutral or positive when used of men become insults when used of women, as with “scold,” “wench,” and “harlot.” “Sard” and “swive” both mean “fuck.” They start out as direct but non-offensive words for having sex. “Sard” appears in an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Bible: rather than “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, it’s “Don’t sard another man’s wife,” which today would be “Don’t fuck your neighbour’s wife.” Swive too appears all over the place in the Middle Ages. By the time we get to the Renaissance, though, people are starting to categorize them as “obscene,” just like “fuck.” And then they disappear, replaced by “fuck.” Having too many swear words for the same thing dilutes the charge. “Having too many swear words for the same thing dilutes the charge” Most of our current swear words were around in the Middle Ages too, but weren’t considered bad . “Cunt” appears in some manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales , for example, and in people’s last names—“Gunoka Cuntles,” “Robert Clevecunt,” and in names for streets and plants. “Fuck” appears a little later, and in my book I say that it is obscene from the get-go, but there’s new evidence that it too was around for much longer, and like its brethren not obscene. A “John le Fucker” was discovered in some court records from 1278. We always knew about people with “fuck” as a last name—there was a “Fuckebegger,” a “Fukkebotere” (Fuckbutter), and (my favorite) Roger “Fuckbythenavele”—but scholars dismissed these as not really examples of “fuck.” They were supposed to be variant spellings of words meaning “to hit” or “soldier,” not “to have sex.” But with the discovery of yet another Fucker, and all the medieval people with bad words like “cunt,” “shit,” and “arse” in their last names, I think probability is on the side of “fuck” meaning “fuck” here. Yes, there’s “piss” in the King James Bible. It talks about destroying “him that pisseth against the wall.” People speculate that that’s just a vivid way of saying “all men”—a reference to men peeing standing up. In an earlier translation, from the 14th century, you get “the part of the body by which turds are shat out,” “arses,” and “bollocks.” Again, these were direct, but not “bad” words at the time. But, of course, it’s totally inappropriate to our understanding of religious language now. In 1616, George Chapman published, not the first, but what he hoped would be the definitive edition of Homer, and he called one of his poetic rivals a “Windfucker” in the preface. Yes, those are the two stereotypes. In Henry IV Part I , Hotspur says to his wife, “you swear like a comfit-maker’s wife”, and tells her instead to swear “like a lady as thou art.” So, we have the idea that swearing is both aristocratic as well as lower-class. And that does tend to be borne out in studies. “We have the idea that swearing is both aristocratic as well as lower-class. And that does tend to be borne out in studies” Another book that I could have put on the list is Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present by Tony McEnery. It studies English speakers by class and how much they swear and what sorts of words they use. I think the lower classes swear the most, but the upper classes swear almost the same amount and use more powerful swear words. Yes. That’s where it’s not just that lower-class people are doing it and it’s fine, but it becomes interpreted as a sign of their terrible morals and their lack of education. It becomes seen as vulgar and wrong."