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OBSCENITAS
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Table of Contents
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Contents Ancient Rome 06 2. The Bible 12 1.
3.
The Middle Ages
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4.
The Renaissance
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4.1 Power of Profanity 22 5.
Victorian Era 24
Minced Oaths 28 5.1
6.
Modern Obscenity 30-42
6.1
The War 30
6.2 Profanity and Pain 34 6.3
Racism 36
Profanity and Intelligence 38 6.5 Profanity and Communication 42 6.4
Profanity and Humour 44 6.7 Profanity and Emotion 46 6.6
The Future of Obscenity 48 7.
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8th Century B.C. Early A.D.
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The Latin word for “obscenity� is obscenitas. Its etymology is unknown, but speculation has derived it from caenum (dirt or filth) or alternatively from scaena, the stage.
The Ancient Roman times were the first introduction of obscenity, which were defined as dirty words that cannot be said (except onstage). Historically, swearwords have been thought to possess a deeper, more intimate connection to the things they represent than do other words. Shit, to put it another way, is more closely connected to the thing itself in all its smelly, sticky yuckiness than is poop or excrement. These words vividly
Ancient Rome
reveal taboo limbs, actions, and excretions that culture demands we conceal.
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(Fascinating, by the way, comes from the Latin word fascinum, a representation of the erect penis.)
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In some ways, Roman obscenity seems very familiar, but in others it is fascinatingly different. Linguists generally agree that the worst words in English are the “Big Six”: cunt, fuck, cock (or dick) ass, shit, and piss (these are in constant flux as language and culture change, it is now time to include the worst racial insult nigger). Ancient Latin had a “Big Ten”: cunnus (cunt), futuo (to fuck), mentula (cock), verpa (erect or circumcised cock), landica (clit), culus (ass), pedico (to bugger), caco (to shit), irrumo, and fello.
Ancient Rome
Cunnus and caco are equally bad in both English and Latin and
used in similar ways, however some words start to reveal differences. Landica was a horrible obscenity in Latin whereas clit is barely on
the English radar. And then there were words such as irrumatio that English just doesn’t have.
LANDICA
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Cunnus and cunt mean the same thing, are
of Latin disappeared, replaced by languages of the
equally shocking and offensive, and are used in
invading Germanic tribes. There is no record of the
similar ways in Latin and English. While it seems
word cunt until the twelfth or thirteenth century,
they are related etymologically, current thinking among linguists holds that they are not. The Old
the red-light district. It’s thought that many of our
English cwithe (womb) or cynd (nature, essence),
profanities come from Anglo-Saxon origin whereas
both of which probably relate to the proto-
Latin usually gives us our proper medical terms for
Germanic kunton, seem more likely for the English
immodest parts of the body - such as vagina and
word’s origin. When Rome left Britain, all traces Ancient Rome
in Gropecuntlane, the name of a London street in
penis, for example.
The middle finger has been present throughout western civilization, even in Ancient Roman times. In The Clouds (written in the 400s BC, contemporaneous with Socrates), someone flips off Socrates. The gesture communicates roughly “fuck off,” “fuck you,” “up yours,” or “go fuck yourself.” Historically, it represented the phallus. In modern cultures, it has gained increasing recognition as a sign of disrespect. Many hand gestures that are innocuous or positive in one country can be incredibly obscene in another. To make things more difficult, a gesture’s meaning can also differ within a country, depending upon the locale. It may also have a particular meaning only to one subset of people, such as gays or the elderly, no matter of where in the country you are.
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The Bible sanctions certain kinds of swearing. Most people have heard the reprimand, “Do not take the name of the Lord in vain.” This involves cursing with a reference to God or taking an oath in bad faith.
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We can infer some rules about swearing from these divine examples. You must swear by God, his name, his holiness, or a part of God (his arm etc). You must swear seriously and only in weighty matters, and you must never use an oath as expletive or insult. Most of all, you must swear sincerely, as God does - if you are swearing to the truth of something, it must be true. The Bible is full of explicit rules for swearing, one of the most famous examples being:
The Bible
This is understood to prohibit the making of false oaths - promises you don’t intend to keep.
“ Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. ”
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5th-15th Centuries
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The Middle Ages witnessed the continuation of biblical swearing and the proliferation of its misuse. There were many more religious taboos, and so the really worst words you could say to someone were, ‘By God’s bones!’
Referencing sex or excrement, were not powerful in the Middle Ages because they did in public a lot of the things that we do privately and are ashamed of. When bodily functions are out in the open, society doesn’t need taboo words for them. The Middle Ages (a huge period of time, roughly 470-1500) was concerned mostly with blasphemous profanities and oaths. Despite using plenty of words that we today consider to be shocking and offensive, medieval English people were unconcerned with profane words such as
The Middle Ages
fuck, shit, cunt or piss.
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Religious oaths at this time were thought to have direct and automatic effects on God - this is what gave them their power. An oath was thought to force God to look down from heaven and witness that a person’s words were true.
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Oaths in certain forms were thought to rip apart Christ’s body as it sat in heaven, having a supernatural power to control God and were also believed to be capable of injuring God physically. Swearing, historically meant one thing - oath swearing. Today, it refers to both oaths and obscene words. There were two kinds of oath swearing; sincere swearing, making an oath before God that what you say is true, or that you really do what you say you intend to. And there is vain swearing, which is a kind of bad swearing - swearing habitually, which trivializes God’s name and power; swearing falsely, which makes God witness to a lie; or swearing wrongly in forms such as “by God’s bones”, which was thought to
The Middle Ages
have had catastrophic effects on God’s body.
BY GOD’S BONES
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The Norman Conquest of England - The Battle of Hastings, 1066
The Middle Ages
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Sincere swearing was extremely important in medieval culture. In the high Medieval Ages, England was a feudal society, in which oaths guaranteed key political relationships between lords and vassals.
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The king granted estates to his nobles; who
A famous example of a broken oath was that
granted bits of land to lesser aristocrats, who then
that caused, or at least justified - the Norman
granted some to peasants. At each stage, the person
Conquest of England. In 1064, Harold swore an
of status swore to protect his vassal and to provide
oath of fealty to the Duke of Normandy - William
enough land for him to maintain his position
the Bastard (as he was known before conquering
in society. The person of lower status swore to
England), promising to defend and further the
provide military service, furnish counsel, and
Duke’s right to the English throne. Some sources
administer the land he had received. There were
have him swearing his oath on a chest full of holy
few written contracts to enforce these relationships,
relics, to give it weight. But within two years of his
God did the enforcing. If you broke your oath,
pledge, Harold had acceded to the throne. William
God was supposed to punish you, either directly,
was outraged at Harold’s violation of his oath and
by visiting a plague on your children or livestock,
went into battle carrying the chest of relics upon
or indirectly, through the strong arm of the person
which his vassal had sworn.
with whom you broke faith.
14th-17th Centuries
As privacy increased, words that had been acceptable to use in the Middle Ages became taboo. Enter the development of sexual and excremental curses. The “s-word” had its heyday of obscene impact during the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages there was not much that was considered shameful to perform or show in public - this would lead to some of the words we consider obscene now to be less highly charged back then.
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There was almost no privacy as we know it, even for the very rich. A dinner party in a typical Great Hall during the High Middle Ages - 1100 to 1300 - would have been eaten with the fingers and a knife, dishes were passed with each person helping themselves with their hands as it passed. Soups and drinks were also passed down the table with people taking a sip. People apparently felt the urge to spit much more than we do today and did it wherever the urge took them - in the washbasin, on the table, over the table. Conduct books assert, however, that the only polite place to spit is on the floor. It was thought to be unhealthy to retain “wind,” so there was probably a lot of farting and belching. People also used to urinate in the corners and floors of buildings such as the Great Hall
The Renaissance
where they would also eat and sleep.
The reason words that are obscene to us today, and were not during the Middle Ages, is because of a lack of privacy.
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Power of Profanity
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People took oaths seriously in this time period - oaths held the power to determine the innocence of somebody since no one dare swear falsely by God - This illustrates just how powerful oaths were.
If someone was accused of a crime; he could swear an oath that he was innocent. If he found a certain number of compurgators or “oath helpers� who would swear that they believed he was telling the truth about his innocence - that his oath was sincere - he would be released from custody. As a way around some of the oaths, equivocation was used which is the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself. Secular authorities hated equivocation, since it allowed suspected criminals to escape incriminating themselves by oath. It was used in effect, to take the threat of divine punishment, upon which any kind of testimony relied, out of the equation.
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18th & 19th Centuries
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Victorians were prim, proper, and most of all, prudish. During this era, cursing grew in power and shrank in practice. You couldn’t even say trousers.
What was so wrong about trousers? Firstly, when you took them off you were naked, and their shape revealed a man’s legs, and a man’s having legs implied that he very likely had other body parts up there. Limb was the preferred term, which was further euphemized to lower extremity. To the Victorians swear words were inexpressibles (1793), indescribables,
etceteras (1794), unmentionables, ineffables (1823), indispensables (1828),
innominables (1834-43), inexplicables (1836), and continuations (mid-nineteenth century). “Liston, in a pair of unmentionables coming half-way down his
legs” (1823) - they were trousers, “an article of dress not to be mentioned in polite circles,” as The Century Cyclopedia of 1889 cautions. Euphemisms enjoyed such prominence because these centuries were the age of decorum. The civilising process that began in the Middle Ages reached the height during these years; the shame threshold was at its widest extent. Bodily functions previously done in public shamelessly were now performed in privacy. All things sexual were hidden away to an even greater degree (such
Victorian Era
as trousers that were not taboo themselves but lay adjacent to taboo areas).
TROUSERS
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Obscenities possessed perhaps their greatest power to shock and offend during this age of euphemism, when even words such as leg and trousers were deemed too scandalous and vulgar for the public sphere.
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There was a newly emerged middle class responsible for a great deal of this increased delicacy around swearing. The civilizing process was thus co-opted by the middle class as a way of differentiating themselves from the lower classes. They asserted this “civility” through language - the euphemisms they chose drew attention to an extreme delicacy, marking them off from the lower classes, who were thought more likely to say it how it was. Swearing and other sorts of “bag language” - was identified as morally wrong, partly because of the taboo subjects but also partly because of the class association. Obscene words such as cunt and fuck and also merely vulgar words such as thing and half pay came to be seen as the language of the
uneducated, who were also ipso facto the morally sketchy - people who would violate linguistic decency, it was thought, would not hesitating to
Victorian Era
commit any sort of outrage against moral decency.
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Some examples include “gosh”, “darn” and “dang”.
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A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane or taboo term to reduce the original term’s objectionable characteristics.
The use of minced oaths in English dates back at least to the 14th century, when gog and kokk, both euphemisms for God, were in use. Other early minced oaths include Gis or Jis for Jesus (1528).
In the English language, nearly all profanities have minced variants. Some societies and religious followers still consider oaths among the strongest profanities. The most famous example is Quebec, where religious
Minced Oaths
oaths, called sacres, are still considered more shocking than obscenities.
A into G Accursed A-hole AMF Arse Ashums A-word Ass Balderdash Balls Bally Bloody Baloney Bang Bastich Beech Beotch BFD Birdbrain Blank Blankety Blankety-blank Blasted Bleeding Bleep Bleeping Bleepity bleep Blimey Blimming Blinking Blood and ashes Blooming Bloody Bollocks Boll-yotz Boobs BS BUFU Bug off Bugger off Bugging Buzzard Bull Bull butter Bull crap Bull hanky Bull hockey Bull plop Buttocks B-word Caca Censored Chit Chizz Chuck you Farley Clusterfrack Clustermug Cock Cock-up Corksucker Cottonpicking Crap Crow Cruddy Crud C-word Dalmation Dang Dangnation Darn Darnation Darn it Darned Dash Derrière Dashed DILF DILLIGAF Dipstick Dirty deed Doo-doo Dren Drokk Ducking Eff Eff all Effing Eff off F F all FA Fanny Fanny Adams Farging Fark F-bomb Feck Fecking Fek Feldercarb/Felgercarb Ferk Feth FFS Fick Figmo Figs Fiki F-ing Fink Flak Flaming Flibbertygibbet Flipping Flying fig Fluffing FO F off FOAD Fooey Fooey on Fook Fool Forget it
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A curse word is an offensive word or phrase used to express anger or annoyance.
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The use of what we consider today’s “curse words” became more acceptable after soldiers returning from modern warfare began to use these powerful words outside of the battlefield.
Some words, like the f-word, are considered more of a joke in modern times - It’s still a ‘bad word’ but you can joke about it, you can use it with your friends. That being said, this cultural acceptance changes with age. Today, the most egregious cultural taboo is the use of racial slurs. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the ascendency of swear words, what we would recognize today as fully developed obscenity. Today, all bets are off, both obscenities and oaths are flourishing in public discourse,
The War
as any look at television, the Internet, or political debate will demonstrate.
FUCK
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The War
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FUCK REALLY WASN’T SUCH A BAD WORD
Language changed as a result of the
Soldiers brought what they heard in
war, some words started to be considered
the barracks and in the field home with
less obscene than they had been in the
them and into print (and later radio and
Victorian era, and - like bloody and bugger
TV) to a degree that hadn’t been seen
- they started to re-enter the world of
before. Swearing in the armed forces was
public discourse. Some scholars have argued
so ubiquitous that fuck really wasn’t such a
that during and after World War I and
bad word. John Brophy and Eric Partridge,
World War II, people began to swear more
who in 1930 published a collection of
than they had in the past. The particular
British songs and slang from World War I,
horrors of these wars - the constant threat
claimed that soldiers used fucking so often
of death by poison gas and machine guns, trench warfare, incendiary bombing - led to feelings of rage and helplessness that needed an outlet in frequent swearing.
that it began to mean nothing more than “a warning that a noun was coming.”
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Speaking swearwords increases your heart rate and helps deal with physical pain, feelings of rage and intense emotion.
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In a recent experiment, subjects were able to keep their hands immersed in very cold water longer when they repeated a swearword such as shit than when they repeated a neutral word such as shoot. Could it be that the horrors of the wars - the constant threat of death by poison gas and machine guns - led to the use of swearwords to deal with feelings of rage and helplessness. Swearing is an important safety valve, allowing people to express negative emotions without resorting to physical violence. Swearwords are the closest thing we have to violence without actual physical contact - they are cathartic, relieving pent-up emotions in ways that other words cannot. Take away swearwords, and
Profanity and Pain
we are left with fists and weaponry.
Blank blank blank blank blankity blank. Blank blank blank blank, Blankity blanking blank blank. blanking blanity blanking blank, blank blank blank blank blank blank blank blank blankity blank. Blank blank, blankity blank blank, blank blank blank blank blank fuck.
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Racial epithets are now some of the most taboo words in the English language.
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By the end of the nineteenth century, English-speakers were using more obscenities than oaths. Obscenities had become the most offensive words in the English language, the ones with which people preferred to swear. A new category of swearing arose during this era, though it would take a further fifty years or so until society as a whole began to Racial Epithets
condemn the use of racial epithets, making them too into obscene words.
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The twentieth century witnessed the beginning of sexual obscenity’s decline and the rise of racial epithets, which are now some of the most taboo words in the English language and, to many people, are some of the most offensive words. It was the end of the nineteenth century that obscene words were finally thought of as and called “swearing,” though they had been fulfilling this function for many years before then.
Swearing appears to be a feature of language that an articulate speaker can use in order to communicate with maximum effectiveness.
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While swearing can become a habit, we choose to swear in different contexts and for different purposes: for linguistic effect, to convey emotion, for laughs, or perhaps even to be deliberately nasty. A study by psychologists from Marist College found links between how fluent a person is in the English language and how fluent they are in swearing. The former - verbal fluency - can be measured by asking volunteers to think of as many words beginning with a certain letter of the alphabet as they can in one minute. People with greater language skills can generally think of more examples in the time. Based on this approach, the researchers created the swearing fluency task. This task requires volunteers to list as many different swear words as they can think of in one minute. By comparing scores from both the verbal and swearing fluency tasks, it was found that the people who scored highest on the verbal fluency test also do best on the swearing fluency task. The weakest
Profanity and Intelligence
in the verbal fluency test also did poorly on the swearing fluency task. This correlation suggests that swearing appears to be a feature of language that an articulate speaker can use in order to communicate with maximum effectiveness. And actually, some uses of swearing go beyond just simple communication.
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Profanity and Intelligence
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´ NOM CRE
Scientists today believe that swearwords even occupy a different part of our brain. Most speech is a “higher-brain” function, the province of the cerebral cortex, which also controls voluntary actions and rational thought. Swearwords are stored on the “lower brain,” the limbic system, which broadly, is responsible for emotion, the fight-or-flight response, and the autonomic nervous system, which regulates heart rate and blood pressure. In 1866, the French poet Charles Baudelaire was laid low by a stroke. He lost his ability to speak, except for one phrase he repeated so often that the nuns taking care of him threw him out of their hospital: “Cre´ nom!” short for sacre´ nom de Dieu. Today, the English equivalent to this would be the
mild goddamn or damn, but in 1866 “cre ´ nom!” so unforgivably offended the
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nuns that they could explain Baudelaire’s outbursts only as a result of satanic possession. Embedded deep within Baudelaire’s brain, remaining even when all other language had been stripped away, were obscene swearwords.
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Swear words can be effective communication devices because they have the power to illustrate an image in our minds.
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Linguistically, a swearword is one that “kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations”, as Steven Pinker puts it. There seems to be something magical about the way obscenities infiltrate the mind. They have an offensive power in excess of their literal meaning. Thomas Elyot’s Latin Dictionary defined obscenity differently to how we would now. Words for excrement are not forbidden on his list, because they have little chance of arousing any sinful desires. He defines the verb caco, for example, as “to shit.” Urina is “urine or
piss,” while vomo is explained as “to vomit or parbrake.” These words are not dangerous because they do not arouse lust and so lead the to
moral corruption. Caco is “to shit,” but cacaturio is the more decorous
Profanity and Communication
“to desire to go to stool.”
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Swearing can elicit humour and create an informal atmosphere. In a survey of over 200 college students, Jay, King, and Duncan (2006) found that anger and frustration were the most frequently mentioned emotions (53%), followed by humour (9%), and pain (6%). Previous research by Jay (2000) yielded similar results, with anger and frustration reported as the primary triggers of swearing (64%), followed by humour (12%), and surprise and sarcasm (5% each). Swearing can thus be regarded as an expression of both positive and negative emotions that involve significant intensity. Considered highly offensive by many at the time, the sketches of Derek and Clive primarily took the form of bizarre, sometime drunken streams of consciousness led by Peter Cook, with interjections from Dudley Moore. Memorable moments from the records include Clive claiming that the worst job he ever had was retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield’s arsehole. Clive also claiming that he was sexually aroused by the sight of a deceased Pope lying
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in state, and a horse-racing ‘commentary’ featuring horses named after sexual organs or their vulgarised derivatives. Though the recordings were far too crude for a mainstream audience, Derek and Clive bootleg recordings circulated. They were mostly unscripted dialogues
Profanity and Humour
incorporating copious swearing - including frequent use of the word cunt.
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Historically, profanities have been used when talking about subjects which people cared about. They identify what was important to people throughout history. Swearwords are perhaps the best words we have with which to communicate extremes of emotion. 46
We have always lived with swearwords, whatever they may have been, and we always will live with swearwords. They are intrinsic to language and to our use of it. Some studies have shown that contemporary English-speakers use eighty to ninety such words a day - we might as well try to get rid of the pronouns we, us, and our, which we use at a similar rate.
Just as a healthy brain needs both its “higher” and “lower” parts, cerebral cortex and limbic system, a healthy society needs its “good” language and its “bad.” We need irreproachably formal and unassailably decent speech, but we also need the dirty, the vulgar, the wonderful obscenities and oaths that can do for us what no other words can. Swearwords were and are perhaps the best words we have with which to communicate extremes of emotion, including both
Profanity and Emotion
negative and positive emotions.
we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we
us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us us
our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our our
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Our sexual and excremental terms may one day be considered as mild as religious oaths are today. It seems safe to say that epithets will remain strong obscenities. It is becoming more and more taboo to essentialize anyone or anything in a single word as epithets do, whether that word sums up a person by race, mental acuity (retard), physical disability (cripple), or size (fat). Epithets are more limited than our most popular obscene verbs, however, lacking the grammatical flexibility of the f-word and, to some extent, the word shit. Perhaps we will find an entirely different zone of taboo that will give us a whole new set of verbs with which to swear. As we live longer, healthier lives, as more and more fifty-year-olds strive to look and act 48
as if they are twenty-five, as the end of life comes to seem less a natural process and more a grave, possibly avoidable injustice, death itself may become obscene. In contemporary American and British culture, our taboos around dying are by and large weak, limited to a preference for euphemisms when referring to death - for example, it is more polite to say “pass away” than “die” - and a general uncomfortableness around people whom it has touched. These taboos could become stronger the more we fool ourselves that we can “conquer” death by curing cancer, stopping our telomeres from breaking off, or popping fish oil capsules and eating less than twelve-hundred calories a day. Dying and corpses, then, could become a source of new obscene words - “Fuck off and die,” for example, would
Future of Profanity
become simply “Die!”
DIE
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Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii Three penis carrying a vulva Unknown origin
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