John Mcwhorter - English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever
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- Book:English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever
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- Year:2021
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A lively and informative study, not to mention wonderful cocktail party material.
Kirkus Reviews
Erudite and entertaining, McWhorter shows us foul language in its wonderful, fertile variety. We see how speech taboos that once applied to religion and the body now apply to groups of peopleand why there should be such power (and pleasure) in transgressing them.
Aaron James, New York Times bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory
A bawdy, bodacious, and brilliant excursion through the wonderful world of profanity, filled with delicious tidbits (who knew that Edna St. Vincent Millay practiced slinging the sh*t while darning?) and linguistic amuse-bouches. In other words, its a f***ing great read.
Ross and Kathryn Petras, New York Times bestselling authors of Youre Saying It Wrong
Effing delightful. A treat for every adult who used to look up swears in the dictionary (or still does).
June Casagrande, bestselling author of It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences and Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies
Dispensing his vast linguistic expertise with the lightest and deftest of touches, John McWhorter shows brilliantly how the nastiest words can teach us about the dynamic and unruly nature of all language. Anyone interested in words (and not just the nasty ones) should read this book.
Joe Moran, author of First You Write a Sentence
Nine Nasty Words takes the reader round the back of the English language, only to showwith irrepressible humor and a dash of forbearancehow what we find there is central to who we are.
Rebecca Gowers, author of Horrible Words: A Guide to the Misuse of English
If you want to get down and dirty in the gutter of English (and, be honest, who doesnt?) youd better go with a guide who knows his sh*t. McWhorter gives a jovial, expert tour of the bedrock swears, from the offensive and profane to the merely salty, not just where they came from, but how they have shifted and morphed in force, meaning, grammar and in the effect they produce.
Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages
Only a kick-ass writer could wrest such erudite historical fun from languages sh*thouse. Damn, this is one hell of a book, and this p***y will never curse the same again.
Ann Patty, author of Living with a Dead Language
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright 2021 by John McWhorter
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McWhorter, John H., author.
Title: Nine nasty words: English in the gutter: then, now, and forever / by John McWhorter.
Description: [New York]: Avery, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020030508 (print) | LCCN 2020030509 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593188798 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593188804 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English languageObscene words.
Classification: LCC PE3724.O3 M38 2021 (print) | LCC PE3724.O3 (ebook) | DDC 179/.5dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030508
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030509
p. cm.
Book design by Laura K. Corless, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
For Vanessa Hamilton McWhorter, who I get the feeling is going to have a witty feel for at least some of these words as we travel on
Babe Ruths parents had a rocky marriage. Mr. Ruth ran a bar. Apparently the bartender and Mrs. Ruth had eyes for each other and did something about it. Mr. Ruth knew it and got a lawyer to have the bartender sign an affidavit. The document survives, and reads:
I the under sign fucked Mrs Geo. H, Ruth March 12 1906 on her dinging room floor whitch She ask me to do
That piece of paper is what many of us would find the most interesting thing concerning Babe Ruth until he broke baseballs home run record in 1920, despite that he was neither the miscreant nor the cuckold involved. Why?
A friend of mines mother had a certain fondness for blue language and, as her children became teenagers, began cursing rather freely in their presence. One Christmas Day, when everything seemed to be going wrong and she was complaining about it, her daughter said, Mom, I thought on Christmas everybody was supposed to be jolly! The mother shot back, Oh, jolly shit! My friend was still laughing at that years later, when it cracked me up, too, and I cherish the memory of that episode forty years after it happeneddespite that I wasnt even there. Why?
And youre probably waiting for me to get to George Carlins famous routine about the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. It would be downright antisocial not to list them now: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. The question is, though, why that routine is so well remembered almost fifty years later, while some of us would be hard-pressed to remember anything else Carlin said, or anything that comedian David Brenner, also a phenom at the time, ever said at alland if you draw a blank on Brenner completely, case in point.
The Babe Ruth tale entices because we are intrigued to see people in a post-Victorian era, when public mores were so much starchier, using a word we even today think of as distinctly dirty. Perhaps nothing could make long-gone people seem realer to us than evidence that they used words like fuck. Profanity channels our essence.
Oh, jolly shit! is funny first in that a womana mother, no lesswas saying something with such a smutty feel in front of her kids but also in that it shows how our urge to curse often bypasses our fundamental instinct to make sense. What did Oh, jolly shit! mean, and if the answer is nothing, then why do we say such things? What the fuck is that? is subject to similar questionswhat part of speech, exactly, is fuck in that sentence? Profanity channels our essence without always making sense.
And Carlins routine still resonates in pointing out the wholly arbitrary power of curse words. Carlin coolly rattled them off in a way that no comedian could have on a commercially released album ten years before, and the sky did not fall in. But even in recent years, thenVice President Joe Biden made national news by not saying but whispering, This is a big fucking deal! to President Barack Obama after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and as quaint as tits may now seem on Carlins list, characters on television still use it much less than their real-life equivalents. Boobs is one thingwere not surprised to hear it on Modern Family despite the fact that no one would have said it on All in the Family. But tits
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