A Short History of Swearing

Scholars and Fossil-Fanciers, who dig Early Man, believe the first "swearing" was largely a matter of growls, hisses and roars calculated to strike fear in the ear of an enemy. As Finley Peter Dunne once put it, in the dialect of Mr. Dooley: "'Twas intinded as a compromise between runnin' away an' fightin'. Befure it was invinted they was on'y th' two ways out iv an argymint."

This view is both extremely primitive and extremely modern. It takes into account the familiar business of swearing at, but ignores the age-old ritual of oath-talking – of swearing by (God, Zeus, the Beard of the Prophet, etc.) and swearing on (the Bible, the Koran, or some sacred relic or object). And it is from swearing solemn oaths that we evolved the basic language for aggressive-type swearing: the verbal irreverence toward things sacred and taboo that we call "profanity."

Like prayer, profanity has its roots in primitive religion. Granted the gift of speech, Man turned out to be a born liar, and truth was attested to by pledges made in the names of pagan nature gods and superhuman forces. Norsemen swore by Thor and Frigga. Early Goths swore by thunder and lightning, and ancient Arabs swore by all the mysterious laxative powers of the fig.

Regardless of such potent guarantees, many oaths were sworn falsely, however. A guilty Slovenian tribesman would lay his hand upon the Holy Oak and protest his innocence with the words "May Perkun destroy me!" And if Perkun did not destroy him, the shifty knave soon began swearing by Perkun whenever he jolly well felt like it – fearlessly and profanely – until Perkun's power was discredited, and the religion passed away.

It was this sort of irreverence that the Hebrews refused to tolerate on behalf of Jehovah. The Third Commandment was directed specifically against such "vain" swearing, and Levitical punishment for the blasphemous use of God's name was death. Similar strictures were placed upon curses, or prayers that evil might befall others – though circumstances seemed to alter cases, and the Bible remains a handbook of hair-raising maledictions.

Throughout the rest of the ancient world, where the names of deities were not so well protected, truth was pledged by an ever-increasing variety of oaths. Egyptians, who once swore by Isis and Osiris, began to swear by the mystic qualities of the onion, the garlic and the leek. Greeks, who swore by all the gods, invoked the names of the goose, the caper, the dog and the Rhodesian cabbage – a vegetable venerated as a heaven-sent hangover cure. But as the names of animals, vegetables and divinities became debased through misuse, profanity flourished, and the Greek-on-the-street would grumble. "Great Zeus!" or "By the cabbage!" at every Athenian annoyance. Restrictions applied only to Hercules' name, which was reserved for the use of children, who were free to swear with it out of doors but were punished for using it in the house.

For some unknown reason, the playtime profanity of Greek kiddies later became the exclusive expletive of Roman men, in the form of Mehercle! Roman women, not to be outdone in any kind of profligacy, swore profanely by Castor, and Mecastor! became a feminine oath. Latin sexual slang, on the other hand, was used freely by both men and women, and was not considered profanity at all. Names and epithets suggestive of bawdry, nymphomania, bastardy and perversion were familiar terms of endearment, and figured mainly in friendly banter. Julius, a swearing Caesar, who had earned every sexual laurel known to street language, rejoiced in the soldiers' marching song that hailed his triumphant return from Gaul:

Home we bring our bald whoremonger;

Romans, lock your wives away!

All the bags of gold you lent him

Went his Gallic tarts to pay.

Among the many legal terms deriving from Latin are "jury" and "perjury," both of which originate in jurare (to swear, in the formal, legalistic sense). Such oath-taking among Romans reflected the man worship of a powerful state religion, and the most solemn oath was taken on the head of the living emperor. Caligula, who erected a shrine to himself where peacocks and flamingos were sacrificed to his golden image, preferred to have the populace swear by his divine Genius. His own most binding oaths were sworn by the name of his sister Drusilla, one of three with whom he regularly indulged in incestuous intimacies while lying down to dinner in the presence of his wife and guests.

While Caligula's peculiar table manners were occasioning murmurs of "By Jove!" and "Ye gods!" in the original Latin, the deep-freeze warriors of the North were pledging alliances by the power of the sword. It was not until centuries later, when Europe was Christianized, that God was called upon to witness oaths made by the naked blade, and the sword became a symbol of the Holy Cross.

With Frankish fervor, Charlemagne demanded that allegiance be sworn Sic me adjuvet Deus (So help me God), the oath still used in our present-day courts. The Latin name for God, Deus, is profanely echoed in our own word "deuce" – generally considered a euphemism for "damn." The notion that "deuce" was borrowed from the ancient game of dice is given support by most dictionaries, where the origins of "deuce" are traced to duos, the Latin word for "two." The implication is that duos was the Roman equivalent of "snake-eyes," and hence an expression of anger. Unfortunately for the theory, however, Caesar's sportsmen rolled four bones instead of two, and crapped out on a show of four one-spots. This was known as canicula (little dog), and gave birth to a litter of quite different expressions based on Damnosa canicula! (Damned little dog!).

As Christianity spread, the names of saints, shrines and sacred relics were used as guarantees of truthtelling, and soon found their way into profanity's growing word list. Men swore "by God's wounds," "by God's blood" and "the bell of the abbey church." In an effort to combat the rising flood of impious swearing, Charlemagne made it punishable under law, but penalties were not nearly so severe as under Kenneth II, king of Scots, who chastised Tenth Century offenders by cutting out their tongues. France's Philip II disposed of the problem by drowning swearers in the Seine, while Louis IX set a precedent for the traditional soap-in-mouth treatment by brandiÈg their tongues with a hot iron.

The sainted Louis' pet peeve was the courtly habit of blithely swearing pardieu! (by God!), cordieu! (God's heart!) and têtedieu! (God's head!). Luckily, Louis also had a pet dog named Bleu, and courtiers who had no taste for hot irons were able to swear their way around the law by substituting the dog's name for the name of the Deity – parbleu! corbleu! sacré bleu! and so forth, in the manner familiar to Frenchmen ever since.

The practice of swearing by God's head, heart, blood and wounds resulted from the preachments of the medieval clergy upon the detailed agonies of the Crucifixion, and eventually came to include God's liver, eyelids, feet, toes and nails. The nails of the Cross were known as "God's hooks," and in time became the jocular "Gadzooks!" or "Zooks!" In like fashion we have "'Sblood" for "God's blood," "'Sdeath" for "God's death" and "'Swounds" for "God's wounds" – the last being variously rendered as "Zwounds!" "Zounds!" or "Zoonds!" "Odds bodkins!" which any Twentieth Century child may use indoors or out, originally referred to God's body in the blasphemously diminutive form of "bodikins," and is literally "God's little body!"

That such profanity was common to all Europe is apparent from the exclamations Rabelais uses to describe the public panic during the urinary flood unleashed by the giant Gargantua:

"'Pocapedion! God's head!' roared a Gascon.

"'Das dich Gots leyden Schend!' bellowed a German trooper. 'God's passion roil you!'

"'Pote de Christo!' an Italian voice rang out. 'Christ's power!'

"'Ventre St. Quenet! . . . By the bellies of all the apostles . . . God's virtue . . . by St. Fiacre of the land of Brie!'"

In order to enjoy the comforts of swearing without incurring the penalties of profanity, the French invented a calendar of fictitious saints' names to swear with – St. Lâche, the patron of idlers; St. Nitouche, who watched over hypocrites; and St. Gris, beloved of drunkards – to which the ribald Rabelais adds a medley of his own: "By St. Godegran, stoned to death with apple dumplings . . . by St. Foutin, the fornicator's friend! . . . by St. Vitus and his jig! . . . by Ste. Mamica, the virgin martyr, by our lusty mammical duty to all virgins!"

To avoid profaning the Holy Name, the English began to swear "by the cross of the mousefoot," and made changes in the spelling and pronunciation of "by God" that seem even more blasphemous: "I'cod," "by Gog" and "by Cock and pye." In London Lyckpenny, the oldest English street ballad, "pye" was dropped from the last phrase, and the oath abbreviated to a breezy "Yea, by Cock!"

It was in the same Fifteenth Century that "goddamn" was first heard, bursting from the lips of British soldiers sent to fight in France. So common was this military oath, the French adopted it as a nickname for all Englishmen. When the child monarch, Henry VI, assumed the thrones of England and France, he was known as "Little King Goddamn." British profanity persisted, and the name stuck. Three centuries later, English officers in Paris were hailed with "Here come the goddamns!" and the traveler in Portugal was greeted with a friendly, "How do you do, Jack? Damn you!"

The more specific "goddamn it" and "goddamn you" didn't come into use until the close of the Sixteenth Century. "God damn me" appears as a new phrase in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, where it is described as common to the speech of low women: "'God damn me'; that's as much to say, 'God make me a light wench.'"

Though Shakespeare's queen, Elizabeth, angrily swore "By God's Son!" and "God's death!" the Bard's ladies were generally given to more genteel expressions – as witness Hotspur's comment upon the mildness of Lady Percy's "in good sooth," in the first part of Henry IV: "Heart! you swear like a comfitmaker's wife. . . . Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art a good mouth-filling oath."

No age was more class-conscious in its swearing, and an easy command of vigorous expressions was a sure sign of Elizabethan status. In Ben Johnson's Every Man in His Humor, Master Stephen, a country bumpkin, listens in awe as the swaggering Captain Bobadil thunders, "A whoreson filthy slave, a dung-worm, an excrement! Body o' Caesar, but that I seem to let forth so mean a spirit, I'd have stabb'd him to the earth. . . . By (continued on page 165) Swearing (continued from page 102) Pharaoh's foot, I would have done it!"

"Oh, he swears most admirably," the status-seeking Stephen murmurs. "By Pharaoh's foot! Body o' Caesar! – I shall never do it, sure. Upon mine honor, and by St. George! – No, I have not the right grace."

"He that swereth depe, swereth like a lorde," the moralist Elyot observed – and a cursory survey of Shakespeare's plays reveals that his noblemen were indeed inspired in their use of munchy-crunchy invective. "Bloody, bawdy villain!" Hamlet rants at the peak of princely passion. "Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!" And when Prince Hal berates Falstaff as "this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this hill of flesh," the noble Sir John replies with a barrage of fine phallic scurrilities: " 'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like thee! you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!"

"Swear horrible," Sir Toby Belch advised Sir Andrew Aguecheek; and if profanity began to assume a new sexual emphasis, the cause may be laid to the new secular spirit that arose with the Reformation. In The Shoemaker's Holiday, the work horse of modern sexual profanity made a coltish stage entrance in a wordplay upon the name of the journeyman Firk. The shoemaker, who addresses his wife as "hopperarse" and "Dame Clapper-dudgeon," shouts in a moment of critical stress, "Peace, you bombast-cotton-candle-queen . . . quarrel not with me and my men; with me and my fine Firk; I'll firk you, if you do!"

The suggested word, which entered English by way of the Anglo-Saxon fachan, meaning "to take or seize," appears in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor in the guise of "focative," when Sir Hugh Evans asks, "What's the focative case, William?" Eric Partridge, who has compiled a scholarly glossary of the Swan of Avon's numerous sexual flights, adds the note that "F––k is probably one of the sadistic group of words for the man's part in copulation (cf. clap, cope, hit, strike, thump and the modern slang term, bang), for it seems to derive from the German ficken (to strike), as Klüge maintains. Probably confirmatory rather than contradictory is Sanskrit ukshan (a bull; literally, impregnator), which Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, maintains to have originally been fukshan . . ." In Origins, his etymological dictionary, Partridge states that "F––k shares with c––t two distinctions: they are the only two Standard English words excluded from all general and etymological dictionaries since the Eighteenth Century and the only two Standard English words that, outside of medical or semiofficial reports and learned papers, still cannot be printed in full anywhere within the British Commonwealth."

The much-heralded British court clearance of Lady Chatterley's Lover has changed the situation since Partridge wrote the above in 1950, however. Citizens of the Commonwealth are now free to enjoy the unexpurgated experience of seeing both words spelled out in all four letters, together with such sweet nothings as p––s and s––t. Considered only vaguely vulgar by Elizabethan standards, p––s was employed by Shakespeare as a noun in The Tempest, a verb in The Merry Wives of Windsor and as an adjectival synonym for "brief" ("a pissing while") in Two Gentlemen of Verona. The old five-letter word "shyte," which belongs to the same family as "sheet" and "shoot," appeared in The Metamorphosis of Ajax, the book in which Elizabeth's ribald-rhyming godson, Sir John Harington, published his plans for that most practical of all human inventions, the flush toilet.

In this period of emerging sexual profanity, clerical censure was still directed against the old " 'Sblood" and "Zounds." A plan put before Lord Burghley estimated that by levying fines against such swearing, England could increase her annual income by twenty million crowns, but Elizabeth was too partial to the habit herself to favor such a measure. Puritan agitation was strong, however, and two years after Elizabeth's death, Parliament passed an act imposing a ten-pound penalty upon the use of profanity in a theatrical performance. This was a staggering sum at a time when eight pounds was the most a playwright could hope to make on a new play, and the law had the effect of inhibiting writers to the point where Elizabethan gusto vanished from the stage.

Cheered by success, antiprofanity forces then managed to push through a statute imposing a fine of twelvepence on all swearers, and those who could not pay were sent to the stocks. A public agency was established to enforce the law, and parish deputies were appointed to collect fines on a commission basis, with the result that citizens of Chittle-hampton were held guilty for saying "Upon my life!" Puritan punishment in Cromwell's army was so extreme that one Boutholmey, a quartermaster charged with profanity, was sentenced "to have his tongue bored with a red-hot iron, his sword broken over his head, and himself ignominiously dismissed from the service."

Despite all laws and penalties, people continued to swear throughout the dour days of the Commonwealth. Following the Restoration, milady's expletives and milord's ejaculations were, for the most part, gay revivals of "Zooks" and "Damn." "God" had become "Odd," as in "Odds body" or "Oddsbud," and "Lord" became "Lud" or "La!" Clandestine amours were rampant, cuckoldry was in flower and sexual name-calling a social grace. A short sampler of His and Her stage swearing illustrates the period style:

"A Pox o' this Impertinent Lady Fancy-full, and her Plots, and her Frenchwoman too. She's a Whimsical Ill natur'd Bitch."

"Oh la, Sir, you'll make me asham'd."

"Damned senseless, impudent virtuous jade!"

"My Father calls, you plaguey devil."

"Ah Hussy! Hussy! – Come home, you Slut!"

"Zooks! 'tis the captain!"

"Beasts, Jades, Jilts, Harpies, Furies, Whores!"

"O lud! he has almost cracked my head."

"Zounds, sirrah!"

" 'Sdeath and hell!"

Selected from ten different plays, the above dialog might serve as an actual scene in any comedy of the sexes written during the century between Wycherley and Goldsmith. Of all words, only "pox" need be explained, since it referred to neither the chicken- nor small- varieties, but was the trade name for syphilis at a time when such ailments were on a par with the common cold.

The apogee of Eighteenth Century oddity was reached with the "oath referential" used by Bob Acres in Sheridan's The Rivals. The idea here was to adapt one's swearing to each change of subject. If the talk was of coach travel, the oath was "Odds whips and wheels!" Mention of honor called for "Odds crowns and laurels!" while matters military were greeted with "Odds triggers and flints!" and "Odds balls and barrels!"

"Ha! ha! 'tis genteel, isn't it!" Bob Acres exclaims.

"Very genteel, and very new, indeed!" Captain Absolute agrees, "and I dare say will supplant all other figures of imprecation."

"Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete. Damns have had their day."

Happily, for the sanity of the English, the prophecy was not borneÈout. "Damn" and "goddamn" continued in the repertoire of lords, lackeys and the famed Billingsgate fishwives, whose versatile invective made "billingsgate" a synonym for swearing. A statute against swearing still remained on the books, and anti-profanity groups pressed for its enforcement against all classes. In 1718, a London journalist named Burridge was tried for blasphemy and ordered "to take up a position at the New Church in the Strand and to be from there publicly whipped to Charing Cross" – after which he was fined and given a month in jail.

The ever-present possibility of ruffling the lunatic fringe led the Rev. Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, to indicate even the commonly used "arse" with asterisks. Commenting on the use of dots and dashes, the cheerful churchman wittily observed: "Take the dash away, and write Backside – 'tis Bawdy. Scratch Backside out, and put Coveredway in, 'tis a Metaphor."

In the matter of profanity, Sterne's views were undoubtedly at one with those of his hero's father, Mr. Shandy, who believed that small curses upon great occasions "are but so much waste of our strength." In order to have a selection of large curses for all occasions, Shandy, Sr., kept handy a copy of an actual form of excommunication composed by Bishop Ernulphus, in which a thesaurus of maledictions was compounded in the names of the saints, the angels and every conceivable Holy Personage:

" '. . . May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting!

" '. . . May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin' (God in heaven forbid! quoth my Uncle Toby), 'in his thighs, in his genitals' (my father shook his head), 'and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toenails!'"

The cumulative force of the anathema, which runs to four pages, prompts the bemused Uncle Toby to remark, "Our armies swore terribly in Flanders." To which an equally bemused nephew of Uncle Sam can only add, "So did our American Army during the Revolutionary War." Indeed, Yankee oaths were so numerous and pungent that General George Washington was obliged to issue a personal communiqué on the subject in 1779:

"Many and pointed orders have been issued against that unmeaning and abominable custom of swearing, notwithstanding which, with much regret, the General observes that it prevails, if possible, more than ever. . . . For the sake, therefore, of religion, decency and order, the General hopes and trusts that the officers of every rank will use their influence and authority to check a vice which is as unprofitable as it is wicked and shameful."

In an earlier order issued by John Adams, naval officers were authorized to punish swearing sailors "by causing them to wear a wooden collar or some shameful badge," but such orders were generally ignored by American officers trained in the great British tradition of "damn" and "hell." Washington's own conversation was reputed to be amply spiced with both of these gentlemanly oaths, though he seldom indulged in the hard profanity used in patriot ranks. According to the ear-witness account of General Charles Scott, however, Washington swore one day at Mon-mouth "until the leaves shook on the trees. Charming, delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since. Sir, on that day, he swore like an angel from heaven."

Unfortunately, no one had the foresight to jot down Washington's historic words. But there is some reassurance in the knowledge that the Father of Our Country was capable of virtuoso performance in an American art that began with the early settlers – for all the Pilgrims were not Puritans, and a small band of devoted swearers succeeded in planting the seeds of profanity in the New World against all odds and Blue Laws. By 1699, an English visitor was able to report that, despite their sanctity, the northern colonists were "very prophane in their common dialect." The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, traveling in Maryland at a still later date, complained of the constant use of "obscene conceits and broad expressions," and the British Captain Thomas Morris duly recorded that during an Indian raid, "One of the Delaware nation . . . passing by the cabin where I lay, called out in broken English: 'Damned son of a bitch!' "

The phrase used by this disgruntled Delaware was the last great classical invention in Anglo-American swearing. Dating from 1712, it was contrived as a euphemism for the earlier "whoreson," or "son of a whore," and represented a continuing trend toward verbal evasion. Noah Webster described "darn" as already common in New England in 1789, while "tarnal," "cuss" and "I swan" all came into use in the early days of the Republic. But the majority of frontiersmen, wagoners, circuit riders and politicians preferred their profanity straight, and virtually conquered the continent on the combined strength of their corn likker and cursing.

The genteel English visitor, Mrs. Trollope, traipsing around the States in 1829, remarked upon the American fondness for "that most unfailing expletive 'God D-mn,' " and gave up counting the number of times she heard it after the first entry in her notebook: "Seventeen times within hearing." Lacking any more complete record of the way men swore in reality, the student of Nineteenth Century profanity is left largely to his own surmises. "The language of the street is always strong," Emerson hints in his journal of 1840. "And I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckman and teamster. How laconic and brisk it is by the side of a page from the North American Review. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run."

Surely, the philosopher was not referring to such bloodless bombast as Melville used to convey the salty flavor of Captain Peleg's speech in Moby Dick: "Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I'll – – , I'll – – , yes, I'll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-colored son of a wooden gun . . .!"

This, one suspects, is party-dress profanity, calculated to suggest the genuine article without disturbing the sensibilities of schoolmarms and prigs. When the novel's seagoing narrator, Ishmael, blurts "Gracious!" the call of the mild comes through like a shrill, girlish squeak.

Throughout the Nineteenth Century the treasury of tepid "cuss" words increased. "Hell" became heck, blazes or thunder. "Damn" became drat, darn, blast, blame or bother. "Goddamn" was amended to goshdarn, doggone, goldarn, consarn, dad-blame, dad-burn and the like. Lawsy, lawdy, land and lawks were used in place of "Lord." "God" was reduced to gosh, golly, great Scott, good grief, great guns and good gravy. "Jesus" became gee-whiz, jiminy, jeez, Jerusalem, Jehoshaphat and gee-whillikers. "Christ" was cripes, cracky, Christopher and Christmas, while the Savior's full name was rendered as jiminy crickets, Judas' priest, John Jacob Astor or G. Rover Cripes. Too obvious for discussion are the literal four-letter meanings that lurk behind such old folksy subterfuges as Pish! Shoot! Piffle! Shucks! Pshaw! and Fudge!

Writing in London, the spiritual capital of the Nice-Nelly movement, Gilbert and Sullivan lyrically lampooned the hypocrisy of the age in the boast of the Captain of the Pinafore:

Bad language or abuse,

I never, never use,

Whatever the emergency;

Though "Bother it" I may

Occasionally say,

I never, never use a big, big D–

To judge from the deluge of complaints written to the London TelegrÈph, however, big Ds, little ds – as well as Hs, Fs, Bs and s.o.b.s – were very much a part of the actual Victorian vocabulary. As one correspondent claimed: "There is not a delicate ear that is not daily outraged by the unspeakable blasphemies and hideous indecencies of London language, particularly on Sunday, when lounging, loafing and idling are prevalent . . ."

Of course, ladies and gentlemen with delicate ears could always spend Sunday at home with a good clean book, such as The Family Shakespeare, from which Thomas Bowdler had thoughtfully cut – or "bowdlerized" – every jot and tittle of profanity. Going their Puritan ancestors one better, proper Victorians had a new Standard English word to suppress – "bloody," a word which Julian Sharman, England's Victorian historian of profanity, described as "the crown and apex of all bad language," surpassing "in vileness and intensity anything of the kind that has been intense or vile."

Unable to account for British aversion to this strangely decent indecency, Americans erroneously linked it to menstruation. Equally at a loss, some etymologists suggested derivations from " "Sblood" and "by Our Lady," while others traced it to the Crimean War and the Russian word for "obscene," bliudi. Most plausible, however, was the theory that it was merely a translation of the German blutig (bloody), which English troops picked up during Sixteenth Century campaigns in the Low Countries. Used for hundreds of years as a superlative, as in "bloody hot" or "bloody cold," its infamous reputation can be attributed only to the supersqueamishness of Nineteenth Century prudes, who were reluctant to admit that they had bodies, much less pulses that throbbed with a warm "Sanguine fluid."

Bloody well aware of its sensational value, George Bernard Shaw wrote the word into Pygmalion for Mrs. Pat Campbell, who played Eliza Doolittle. A New York Times review of the London opening reported that the word was "waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly." "Not bloody likely," Mrs. Campbell muttered to the thrilled house, and Shaw had a hit on his hands. As euphemisms, the English used "ruddy" and "blooming" – the latter appearing in a tag line of My Fair Lady, when the modern musical Eliza shocks the Ascot racing toffs by shouting to a horse, "come on, Dover! Move your bloomin' arse!"

Though "bloody" never took hold in America, its acceptance in Australia was such that it became known as "The Great Australian Adjective," and Robert Graves has quoted it with suitable British blanks in an "Australian Battle Hymn" of World War I:

Gird yer ------ loins up, get yer ------ gun,

Set the ------ enermy an' watch him ------ run.

Git a ------ move on, have some ------ sense,

Learn the ------ art of self de ------ fence!

With the dashes transposed into the key of F, and sung in Shakespeare's "focative case," the song might have passed for American or English during World War II, when our modern version of the old Sanskrit Fukshan became the "crown and apex of all bad language" on both sides of the Atlantic. By 1941, "bloody" had become so worn with use that it even managed to slip into the pages of the London Times. "Clashing her wiry old ringlets in a kind of palsied glee at her own audacity, Auntie Times has printed a little poem containing the line 'I really loathe the bloody Hun,'" D. B. Wyndham Lewis reported in the Tatler. "Don't say we didn't warn you if Auntie is seen dancing down Fleet Street ere long in her red flannel undies, bawling little French songs."

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam was wagging his whiskers at the increasing vogue for tabooed expletives in American writing. As Cole Porter had tunefully observed, authors who once knew better words, now only used four-letter words writing prose. Anything went – at least in the novel – and being bannÈd in Boston was better than a dozen rave reviews. Asked to name a single book responsible for this reversal of the American attitude toward literary profanity, pundits are prone to pick Joyce's Ulysses. Closer to home and more influential, perhaps, was Owen Wister's best seller of 1902, The Virginian, in which swearing received its first popular support in the Twentieth Century. "You're such a son of a ----- when you get down to work," the Virginian's old pal Steve says with an affectionate grin. "I expected he would be struck down," the novel's narrator confides. "He had used to the Virginian a term of heaviest insult. . . . Evidently he had meant no harm by it, and evidently no offense had been taken. Used thus, the language was plainly complimentary."

An uncomplimentary use of the same term in a later scene gave the nation a catch phrase that survives to this day. "Your bet, you son of a -----," the cowardly Trampas growled during a game of "cyards" at the local saloon. "The Virginian's pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice gentle as ever . . . he issued his orders to the man Trampas: 'When you call me that, smile!' "

A little more than two decades later, Broadway audiences not only smiled, but roared laughter at the third-act tag line of Hecht and MacArthur's The Front Page: "The son of a bitch stole my watch!" The second-act curtain had rung down with an equally blatant "Goddamnit," and it seemed as though the blankety blanks had been filled in for all time.

By 1935, Depression-inspired dramas of social significance were using swearing in some of their more tender love scenes, and Sidney Kingsley's Dead End kids were bringing a new naturalness of expression to the stage. "Oh, so you're the one!" Tommy's sister, Dina, shouts angrily at Spit. "Come on!"

Spit (thumbs his nose): Like hell I will.

Dina: Come on!

Spit: Frig you!

Dina (flaring): I'll crack you . . . you talk like that!

Spit: Ah, I'll sock yuh inna tit.

Dina smacks him, and an argument erupts between Tommy and Spit. "Ah,yuh mudduh's chooch!" Spit snarls. To which Tommy retorts, "Ah, yuh fad-duh's doop!"

"They're really horrible brats," an outraged dowager comments at one point. "And their language!"

"Ah, shut up, yuh fat bag a hump!" Tommy mutters. And, when a gentleman with glasses intervenes, the manly little chap responds with a shouted "Balls to yew, faw eyes!"

This was swearing such as most city dwellers could have heard by opening a window. Sprinkled with Old World exotics, like the Italian "Fongoola!" and the Yiddish "Gay cock of'm yam!" it possessed a vitality that was missing in the Spanish-type swearing Hemingway used a little later in For Whom the Bell Tolls:

"'Thy duty,' said Augustín, mockingly. 'I besmirch the milk of thy duty.' Then turning to the woman, 'Where the un-nameable is this vileness that I am to guard?'

"'In the cave,' Pilar said. 'In two sacks. And I am tired of thy obscenity.'

"'I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness,' Augustín said.

"'Then go and befoul thyself,' Pilar said to him without heat."

More chitchat follows, and more unswearing. "Daughter of the great whore of whores," Augustín obscenities. "I befoul myself in the milk of the springtime."

"Pilar slapped him on the shoulder.

"'You,' she said, and laughed that booming laugh. 'You lack variety in your cursing. But you have force. Did you see the planes?'

"'I un-name in the milk of their motors,' Augustín said . . .

"'That's something,' Pilar said. 'That is really something. But really difficult of execution.'

"'At that altitude, yes,' Augustín grinned. 'Desde luego. But it is better to joke.'"

One might venture the opinion that it is also better to swear outright. Here is euphemism with a difference, and even the tragic young American, Robert Jordan, is affected. "Oh, muck my grandfather and muck this whole treacherous muck-faced mucking country and every mucking Spaniard in it," he mentally mock swears, until the reader feels inclined to second Augustín's suggestion: "Go to the unprintable . . . and unprint thyself."

The device can hardly be attributed to literary flinching, since Hemingway had already proven himself a rugged four-letter man in Death in the Afternoon. As an attempt at achieving freshness, the experiment was indeed worthwhile – particularly in view of later World War II novels, in which sheer repetition of Armed Forces profanity creates a kind of armchair combat fatigue. When one of Norman Mailer's Marines sinks to the ground and mumbles, "Fug the sonofabitchin' mud," the word-weary reader collapses by his side.

"'Get up,' somebody would cry.

"'Fug you. Fug the goddamn gun.'"

As far back as 1933, the late George Orwell neatly nutshelled both the nature and predicament of modern profanity. "The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious," he wrote. "Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic – indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret – usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word."

Because of this law of diminishing indecency, sexual profanity has lost much of its punch. "Womb to tomb!" and "Sperm to worm!" are West Side Story's death-wishful equivalent of the Dead End kids' fertility-laden invocations of "yuh mudduh's chooch!" and "yuh fadduh's doop!" The fighting words are no longer "son of a bitch" or "bastard," but "Spic!" "Wop!" "Mick!" and "Garlic mouth!"

This is the billingsgate of bigotry, the new profanity of prejudice, whose sting and bite paradoxically derive from the efforts of the enlightened to make such words taboo. In the melting-pot atmosphere of fifty years ago, names like "Wop," "Yid," "Hunkie" and "Mick" had little power to shock or wound, and were freely bandied about. Writing in Show Biz of the influx of Chinese restaurants into the Times Square area after World War I, Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr., recall that "in those uninhibited days, Variety thought nothing of calling them chink joints and using terms like 'yellow peril,' whereas today, if reference to Irving Berlin's origin as a catch-penny singing waiter in Nigger Mike's place on the Bowery comes up, the joint is just referred to as Mike's. Hebe comedians, tad (Irish) comics and Yonny-Yonson-type jokes were terms devoid of politico connotations. . ."

Times have changed, however, and sociopolitical swearing has become the deadliest of all. Among its dirty words are such sure-fire hostility arousers as "Fascist," "Red," "nigger-lover," "Jew-baiter," "scab," "subversive," "reactionary" and the like. Milder and less offensive are such secular vagaries as "huckster," "egghead," "beatnik," "square," "oddball," "queer" and a host of other scurrilities denoting social or sexual deviation.

Obviously, these are of limited use, and would be inappropriate when applied to the average, everyday son of a bitch. For want of new and more universal creations, therefore, the supply of American swear words has become seriously limited. A semi-hip, semi-original euphemism such as "mother" (a socially acceptable abbreviation of the hyphenated classic of incestuous malediction) will darken even an occasional movie soundtrack, as in The Apartment, when Jack Lemmon ordered a martini with the stern injunction, "Gimme another one of those little mothers." But Hollywood's much-touted epithetic emancipation, for all the censorial storms which swirl around it, generally evokes little more than the standard vocabulary of pallid profanities: "damn," "hell" and "bastard," all as lethal in contemporary badinage as marshmallows at a stoning. In theater, even Tennessee Williams' hot-tin-roof types are reduced to lackluster imprecation. "What is it Big Daddy always says when he's disgusted?" Big Mama asks.

Brick: Big Daddy says "crap" when he's disgusted.

Big Mama: That's right – CRAP! I say CRAP, too, like Big Daddy!

With Mamas and Daddies of all sizes swearing each other's hand-me-down oaths, profanity has become chained to a parrot perch, and the dedicated swearer of the old blue-streak school is left wondering, "What the #&%@ is the future of swearing?"

In an entertaining and erudite attempt at an answer, Robert Graves has essayed the opinion that modern profanity has no future – at least none worthy of its past. But we cannot yet bring ourselves to accept this gloomy prognosis. Though the mainstream of Anglo-American swearing has thinned to a muddy trickle, the wellsprings of Asiatic swearing still bubble with a vitality from which the word-parched Westerner may imbibe fresh inspiration.

"May wild asses browse on your grandmother's grave! . . . May the principles of your warmth and cold never be properly adjusted; may hate defile your ancestral tablets; and may your hamstrings snap in the moment of achievement!" Such is the elixir of the East, a heady draught of lively spirits concocted with infinite care. To our own flat and ineffectual "go to hell," the most prosaic Siamese swearer adds a few jiggers of personal imagination. "Go to hell" is only the beginning of the curse – the preface to a painstaking description of innumerable custom-tailored tortures, followed by a fervent wish that the offending party will be condemned to "carry water over the flames in a wicker basket to assuage the thirst of the eternal judge, then that he migrate into the body of a slave for as many years as there are grains of sand in four seas, and after this that he may be born a beast for five hundred generations and a hermaphrodite for five hundred more."

In India, the ancient art involves the accursed one's whole family, his ancestors, heirs and assigns. "O you father of sixty dogs!" the irate Mohammedan shouts to the driver of a stalled cart. "May your daughter be wedded to a jinn and give birth to three-headed serpents!" If time permits – and it usually does – Hindus engage in a full-scale exchange of curses in crab-bat, a language comprising all the swear words known to Hindustani, plus a choice selection from the more esoteric dialects. For a report on one such brouhaha between an aged cleaning boy and his assistant, we are indebted to Robert Graves, who quotes the account from Frank Richards' Old Soldier Sahib:

"First the cleaning boy let loose his broadside, and banged away until he temporarily ran out of ammunition. Then his opponent replied, with shot for shot. . . . They each went along the other's pedigree, generation by generation, making more and more loathsome discoveries, until our cleaning boy was finally acclaimed the victor. He had gone back two thousand years in his rival's genealogical line and given convincing proof that a direct female ancestress had secretly cohabited for years during her widowhood with a diseased bullfrog, thus going one better than her mother, who had legitimately married and cohabited with a healthy pig."

Regrettably, few swearing sahibs of Cincinnati, Pocatello and points west, enjoy sufficient leisure to cultivate such pucka profanity. But it is possible that new sources of swearing power might be had by harnessing some of the many folk idioms imported to our shores from Europe.

The Irish, fleeing a potato famine, were never starved for words, and brought with them a wealth of expostulations besides "begorra," "faith" and "bejabbers" – "By all the ten legions of divils of Killooly! ... By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of Purgatory! ... By tÈe nineteen balls of the twelve apostles! ... By the holy St. Mackerel, the high heels of St. Patrick, and the ripping, roaring, jumping Jerusalem!"

Rich in imagery, and ageless in spirit, are the great Yiddish curses, of which the beautifully succinct "Drop dead!" is but a paltry sample. Consider, for instance, the depth and vigor of such oral masterpieces as "A black ear on your head! . . . May you suffer a burning pain in your seventh liver! . . . May all your teeth ache top and bottom so they have to be pulled by a one-armed blacksmith! . . . You should grow like an onion with your head in the ground forever!"

As Maurice Samuel has pointed out in The World of Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish cursing is as much a pastime as an implement of war – a form of self-expression that is often humorous in intent.

Though the history of swearing is long, the need for such sportive curses has only recently been recognized, and The New York Times made a 1960 headline of the belated discovery that Some are found to curse for joy.

The gist of the story was that a British psychologist named Helen E. Ross spent three weeks in Arctic Norway counting the curses of a group of male zoologists, who were "studying the effects of continuous daylight on birds' diurnal rhythms." Measuring "the rise and fall of swearing against the rise and fall of the zoologists' spirits," the lady scientist found that the "amount of swearing increased noticeably when people were relaxed and happy." Furthermore, "there appeared to be two types of swearing; 'social swearing,' intended to be friendly and a sign of being 'one of the gang,' and 'annoyance swearing,' when someone really has something to swear about.

"Swearing of the 'social' type was at its height when everything appeared rosy," the Times reported. "The 'annoyance' swearing rose as tension and discomfort rose, but dropped off abruptly to 'antisocial silence' when people found the physical and spiritual going really rough."

Thawing out these cold hard facts from Arctic Norway, it would seem that we now have a whole puddle of fresh possibilities for the future, namely: Fun with Profanity; The Power of Positive Cursing; Swear Along with Mitch, Moe, Eddie and all the gang, while studying the daily habits of the human-type birds around you. If new words are lacking, swearing may yet make a happy comeback by adopting a merry mood!

For old-style "annoyance" swearers, who refuse to lapse into "antisocial silence," we can offer no better advice than that of the ancient Chinese: "Be careful whom you swear at: to swear at a man who has justly earned a reputation for virtue and integrity is to make yourself ridiculous; to swear at a man of no reputation at all is to honor him by assuming that he has one. The most suitable victim is someone a little more virtuous than yourself, but with vices differing from your own; if, for example, you are a drunkard or glutton, choose one who is a gambler and frequenter of brothels, and contrariwise. Avoid any appearance of passion. . . . Begin with a great show of courtesy so that he does not suspect your intentions, then gradually unmask your fire. . . . The highest art of swearing consists in thus bringing your opponent to a dead stop. His color will go from pale to red, from red to purple, from pale to ashen. When you have reached this point, stop, otherwise the bystanders will regard you as a bully . . ."

And, shucks, you wouldn't want that to happen, would you?