Illustration:
Kristian Hammerstad But things might look different to an expedition of anthropologists visiting from Mars. They might conclude that Americans today are as uptight about profanity as were our 19th-century forbears in ascots and petticoats. It’s just that what we think of as “bad” words is different. To us, our ancestors’ word taboos look as bizarre as tribal rituals. But the real question is: How different from them, for better or worse, are we?
In medieval English, at a time when wars were fought in disputes over religious doctrine and authority, the chief category of profanity was, at first, invoking—that is, swearing to—the name of God, Jesus or other religious figures in heated moments, along the lines of “By God!” Even now, we describe profanity as “swearing” or as muttering “oaths.”
It might seem like a kind of obsessive piety to us now, but the culture of that day was largely oral, and swearing—making a sincere oral testament—was a key gesture of commitment. To swear by or to God lightly was considered sinful, which is the origin of the ｅxpression to take the Lord’s name in vain (translated from Biblical Hebrew for “emptily”).
The need to avoid such transgressions produced various euphemisms, many of them familiar today, such as “by Jove,” “by George,” “gosh,” “golly” and “Odsbodikins,” which started as “God’s body.” “Zounds!” was a twee shortening of “By his wounds,” as in those of Jesus. A time traveler to the 17th century would encounter variations on that theme such as “Zlids!” and “Znails!”, referring to “his” eyelids and nails.
In the 19th century, “Drat!” was a way to say “God rot.” Around the same time, darn started when people avoided saying “Eternal damnation!” by saying “Tarnation!”, which, because of the D-word hovering around, was easy to recast as “Darnation!”, from which “darn!” was a short step.
By the late 18th century, sex, excretion and the parts associated with same had come to be treated as equally profane as “swearing” in the religious sense. Such matters had always been considered bawdy topics, of course, but the space for ordinary words referring to them had been shrinking for centuries already.
Chaucer had available to him a thoroughly inoffensive word referring to the sex act, swive. An anatomy book in the 1400s could casually refer to a part of the female anatomy with what we today call the C-word. But over time, referring to these things in common conversation came to be regarded with a kind of pearl-clutching horror.
By the 1500s, as English began taking its place alongside Latin as a world language with a copious high literature, a fashion arose for using fancy Latinate terms in place of native English ones for more private matters. Thus was born a slightly antiseptic vocabulary, with words like copulate and penis. Even today modern English has no terms for such things that are neither clinical nor vulgar, along the lines of arm or foot or whistle.
The burgeoning bourgeois culture of the late 1700s, both in Great Britain and America, was especially alarmist about the “down there” aspect of things. In growing cities with stark social stratification, a new gentry developed a new linguistic self-consciousness—more English grammars were published between 1750 and 1800 than had ever appeared before that time.
In speaking of cooked fowl, “white” and “dark” meat originated as terms to avoid mention of breasts and limbs. What one does in a restroom, another euphemism of this era, is only laboriously classified as repose. Bosom and seat (for the backside) originated from the same impulse.
Passages in books of the era can be opaque to us now without an understanding of how particular people had gotten: In Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” Giles the butler begins, “I got softly out of bed; drew on a pair of…” only to be interrupted with “Ladies present…” after which he dutifully says “…of shoes, sir.” He wanted to say trousers, but because of where pants sit on the body, well…
Or, from the gargantuan Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1884 and copious enough to take up a shelf and bend it, you would never have known in the original edition that the F-word or the C-word existed.
Such moments extend well into the early 20th century. In a number called “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” in the 1932 Broadway musical “42nd Street,” Ginger Rogers sings “He did right by little Nelly / with a shotgun at his bell-” and then interjects “tummy” instead. “Belly” was considered a rude part of the body to refer to; tummy was OK because of its association with children.
Obviously, it was people of a certain class who most avoided profanity in these times. Novelist Frances Trollope was appalled at the amount of cursing she heard among working people when she toured America in the 1820s. At the turn of the 20th century, a slang dictionary notes that the F-word was already in widespread use, although we hardly know it from anything anyone put in writing at the time. In the early 20th century, a cigar-chomping man-of-the-people sort like journalist H.L. Mencken freely used the term euphemized as SOB among friends, despite never venturing it in his newspaper columns.
Still, a sense reigned that one kept the “bad words” out of polite society. The same year that Ginger Rogers was substituting tummy for belly on Broadway, Cole Porter put the SOB term into a song lyric sung by a woman in “Gay Divorce”—but with the joke that when the singer uttered the final word in the ｅxpression, a drum smack from the pit drowned her out. Certain proprieties were assumed in public settings.
We may congratulate ourselves for being beyond such uptightness. When hit television shows like “The Sopranos,” “Girls” and “Louie” would attract criticism for not having their characters regularly use the classic four-letter words, those words are no longer truly profane. They qualify more as salty. That Martian anthropologist would hardly recognize them as “bad words,” as opposed to ones we avoid using in certain public spaces, such as school and work (to an extent).
But we heartily erupt with those same words the second we escape those settings, and young people drink them in avidly in music and social media.
In other respects, we’re actually quite a bit like our ancestors. We are hardly beyond taboos; we just observe different ones. Today, what we regard as truly profane isn’t religion or sex but the slandering of groups, especially groups that have historically suffered discrimination or worse. Our profanity consists of the N-word, that C-word once suitable for an anatomy book discussion of women’s bodies, and a word beginning with f referring to gay men (and some would include a word referring to women beginning with b).
It might seem strained to compare our feelings about the N-word with a bygone era’s appalled shuddering over the utterance of “By God!” But do note that I have to euphemize the N-word here in print just as someone would have once have felt compelled to say, “By Jove!”
As late as the early 1960s, an episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” had middle-class Everycouple Rob and Laura Petrie horrified that their son had uttered what the context suggests was the F-word. The Petries were portrayed as rather “hip” for their era, but Rob actually refers to the word as “evil.”
Today, it is the N-word that such a couple would smack down with precisely this indignation. The response is the same; only the issues of concern have changed.
Society tiptoes around a stipulation, as fragile as it is formal, that black people can use it but white people can’t. A recent book by Jabari Asim is wholly devoted to outlining the justification and parameters of this arrangement, “The N-Word, Who Can Say It and Why.”
Anthropologists call this sort of response the policing of a taboo, much as we might associate that label exclusively with distant lands. Taboos are about what we fear. In one era, it is the wrath of God; in another, hanky-panky; in ours, the defamation of groups.
We may feel that the taboo against discrimination is a moral advance. Indeed, we can celebrate that we are blissfully past the days when, in 1934, an aide to young Nelson Rockefeller would write of a new secretary, “She weighs close to 200, has red hair, and is a niggir [sic],” as Richard Norton Smith recounts in his recent biography.
History does bring progress, as it also has in how we refer to homosexuality. After his lyricist partner Lorenz Hart—who was given to drinking binges—died in 1943, the composer Richard Rodgers grumbled that he had enjoyed writing his latest score by himself, without having to “search all over the globe for that little fag.” A man of Rodgers’s place would be unlikely to say that to the star of his latest show today, and the dismissive ｅxpression “that’s so gay” is increasingly on the ropes among anyone with even pretensions of enlightenment.
But we are just as capable as previous eras of policing our taboos with unquestioning excess. An administrator in Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Public Advocate had to resign in 1999 for using the word niggardly in a staff meeting. At the University of Virginia, there was a campus protest in 2003 after a medical school staffer said that a sports team called the Redskins “was as derogatory to Indians as having a team called n— would be to blacks.” Julian Bond, who was then the head of the NAACP, said that only his respect for free speech kept him from recommending that she be fired. In 2014, the lawyer and writer Wendy Kaminer elicited aggrieved comments for saying, during a panel discussion at Smith College, that when we use euphemisms for the N-word we all “hear the word n— in our head.”
‘Taboos are about what we fear. In one era, it is the wrath of God; in another, hanky-panky; in ours, the defamation of groups.’
The basic idea that slurring groups is intolerable and unenlightened is welcome and urgent. But we fail to make important distinctions when we reflexively insist that it is a moral abomination even to refer to such words. And usages change.
Many black men use the N-word to mean, basically, “buddy.” As black speech, music, greetings and even demeanor become an increasingly large component of the cultural default setting of young Americans of all colors, we will continue to see nonblacks casually calling each other the N-word in emulation. We should check the impulse to compare such usage to the venom of Bull Connor.
Some might object that we should not check that impulse, and that extremism is necessary to create lasting social change. But it’s useful to recall that, when it comes to profanity, there were once people who considered themselves every bit as enlightened as we see ourselves today, with the same ardent and appalled sense of moral urgency. They were people who said “Odsbodikins” and did everything they could to avoid talking about their pants.
Dr. McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy and music at Columbia University. His latest book is “The Language Hoax” (Oxford University Press).