Rob Chirico - Damn!: A Cultural History of Swearing in Modern America

Pitchstone Publishing

Durham, North Carolina 27705

www.pitchstonepublishing.com

Copyright 2014 by Rob Chirico

To contact the publisher, please e-mail

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chirico, Rob.

Damn! : a cultural history of swearing in modern America / Rob Chirico ; Foreword by Keith Allan.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-939578-20-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. English language--United StatesObscene wordsHistory. 2. English languageUnited States--Obscene words. 3. English languageUnited StatesSwear wordsHistory. 4. English languageUnited StatesSwear words. 5. SwearingUnited StatesHistory. 6. AmericanismsHistory. I. Title.

PE3724.O3C45 2014

394dc23

2013049668

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Life is a four-letter word.

Lenny Bruce

Damn! A Cultural History of Swearing in Modern America is a highly entertaining, well-written, comprehensive, and instructive account of dysphemistic language in America. Much evidence is presented that what is offensive changes over time such that, today, religious terms and words for bodily effluvia and sexual acts are becoming or have already become more acceptable in public fora than are slurs against a persons race, gender, and mental or physical deviation from the norm. Thus one footballer insulting another with You black cunt! suffers greater disapprobation for black than for cunt.

Over millennia, attempts to stamp out swearing have met with little to no success. Censorship and repression, whether they amount to full-blown sanctions or merely social niceties, only ever provide a more fertile breeding ground for dirty words to thrive. One only has to look at the oxymoronic behavior of the Victorian middle classes in Britain: when sex ceased to be talked about openly, the sex trade and pornography flourished underground. Analogous is the failure of Prohibition to stamp out social drinking in the 1920s and the current failure of punitive drug laws to stamp out social drug use: instead both have strengthened organized crime syndicates to supply illicitly what people want. And people want to be able to use bad language on certain occasions.

Rob Chiricos book shows that genteel behavior is very superficial. It is a normal part of human behavior to swear and curse and be obscene, and if we hold the lid on it for much of our social life, there are always occasions when the lid comes off. There are many entertaining anecdotes in Damn! to illustrate the point. The reason, as Alan Read pointed out, is the titillating thrill of scandalized perturbation. Swearing is often castigated as the language of the inarticulate, but there is absolutely no evidence for this blatant prejudice. There is some evidence that males may refrain from swearing in the company of female acquaintances, while females are more reticent about swearing in front of authority figures and family than before male friends and peers. Social swearing typically diminishes if there are nonswearers present, because shared swearing patterns indicate in-group membership.

Children of both sexes use swearwords from as young as one year old and the practice continues into old ageeven when other critical linguistic abilities have been lost. People with certain kinds of dementia and/or aphasia can curse profusely, producing what sound like exclamatory interjections as an emotional reaction. However, when called upon to repeat the performance, they are unable to do so because they have lost the capacity to construct ordinary language. The explanation is that swear words are stored in a different location, or else accessed differently, from other vocabulary. This, too, may explain swearing as one manifestation of an emotionally disturbed state of mind.

Most cussing is an emotive reaction to anger or frustration, something unexpected and, usually, undesirable. This is the expletive function of swearingthe use of a swear word to let off steam. Even where used with an audience, such displays are autocathartic: the (unconscious) intention is to display a particular attitude or degree of feeling to oneself and anyone who happens to be in earshot.

An often ignored function of swearing is to spice up what is being said, to make it more vivid and memorable (e.g., On the wall of his office was a framed Elbert Hubbard homily, If You Work For A Man, For Heavens Sake Be Loyal To Him, blasphemously known to the apprentices as the bumsuckers oath). This may account for some of the obscenities that are the hallmark of chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay, who had a celebrated TV cooking series called The F-Word. Ramsay uses obscenities as discourse particleswhere other people might use like, well, I mean, you know, and the like. Like other discourse particles, obscene expressions affect the way an utterance is understood.

Ramsey also abuses people with swear words. Such abuse includes curses, name-calling, and derogatory comment directed toward others to insult or wound them. Speakers also resort to swearwords to talk about the things that frustrate and annoy them, things that they disapprove of and wish to disparage, humiliate and degrade. To insult someone verbally is to abuse them by assailing them with contemptuous, perhaps insolent, language that picks on a persons physical appearance and mental ability, character, behavior, beliefs, and familial and social relations to degrade them. Thus insults are sourced in the targets supposed ugliness, skin color and/or complexion, over or undersize (too small, too short, too tall, too fat, too thin), perceived physical defects (squint, big nose, sagging breasts, deformed limb), slovenliness, dirtiness, smelliness, tartiness, stupidity, untruthfulness, and so forth.

We should not forget the use of swearing and insult as a mark of in-group solidarity, as illustrated in this 1920s Punch cartoon.

FIRST YOUTH: Hullo congenital idiot!

SECOND YOUTH: Hullo, you priceless old ass!

DAMSEL: Id no idea you two knew each other so well!

Apparent insult becomes banter, teasing, sounding, playing the dozens (there are many other terms, too).

Iron is iron, and steel dont rust,

But your mama got a pussy like a Greyhound bus.

At best these involve a confrontation of wit, insight, and upmanship in which people try to outdo each other in the richness of their rhetorical scorn by taunting another person with insults about them or their family.

For the faint-hearted (or pure of lip) there are euphemistic dysphemisms that substitute would-be innocuous words for swear words: shoot/sugar for shit, screw/fiddle-faddle for fuck, the C-word for cunt, gee for God/Jesus, and a myriad more. Rob Chiricos Damn! expatiates on all the matters raised in this foreword and more. I wholeheartedly recommend it to the reader.

Keith Allan

Sunshine Coast, Australia

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.