Let’s Blame GIs From the Last Good War for Our Foul Mouths

It’s Not That We Didn’t Swear Before, Just Not as Much as We Do Now

Go back as far as you can through written history and you’ll find the same complaints: young people are rude, traffic sucks, and everybody has such a dirty mouth. Aristotle complained in the 300s BC, Horace did likewise during the 20s BC, the Victorians raved about it during religious services while indulging in it in private, and social critics after the First and Second World Wars had harsh things to say about the rough language brought back by the surviving GIs.

The word “profanity” didn’t exist as we know it until the 1600s and was rarely used until the 19^th century. Rooted in Latin, Medieval Latin, and Old French, it refers primarily to utterances that are “unholy, not sacred, and not consecrated.” In the 1550s, the word came to mean something “irreverent toward God or holy things.” Although a subtle difference, the Century Dictionary of 1895 says that “blasphemy” is more direct, intentional, and defiant. It is aimed squarely at the things most sacred to a religion.

By comparison, to “swear” was to take an oath and use God’s name as insurance. During the Middle Ages, its meaning extended to those who do so without good intent. Once the Protestant Reformation came around, the power of a religious oath lost much of its power. To curse was to do the opposite of swearing. It was to wish evil or harm on someone. Finally, obscenity was using garden variety explicit, immoral, or titillating words. During the Dark Ages, a truly effective insult was to question someone’s parental lineage. If you talked about excrement, it would barely get a notice. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that words we consider dirty today stopped being merely descriptive or medical and became full-on swear words.

While the only place you’d find bad words written during the Victorian era were court records and pornography, early 20^th century war correspondents noted that soldiers swore almost all the time. “Fuck” was their favorite word and rough language began to enter the common written and spoken lexicon. As society has become more secular and free speech more valued, language has become more colorful and less restricted. Here is a short list and history of words North Americans love to use when they want to make a point or be offensive.

Cunt

Where would the modern world of profanity be without slang names for a woman’s genitals? One of the worst insults that can be hurled at most women today is to call them a cunt. It wasn’t always that way. Before the 1600s, it was just a descriptive word of a body part. Probably from the Sumerian word kunta or quna, for female genitals, it is also the root of the word “queen.” It became familiar to the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, and in England during the 1200s, it was often used within a larger word as a place name for an area that topographically resembled a vulva or vaginal entrance. Sometimes those places were also hotbeds for sex workers.

By the 18^th century, though, the word stopped being innocent and, instead, became unprintable, even in dictionaries. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a reputable dictionary included the word and a definition. This is all very ironic since the definition of a vagina requires a penis for meaning since it stems from the Latin for “sword sheath.”

Its companion word, “pussy,” was initially a term of endearment, but by 1699 it had made its way into a naughty poem about an older man asking a younger man to feed his young wife’s pussy. It’s possible that the word was introduced to England by invaders. The word puse did double duty in Low German as both cat and girly bits. In addition to being profane, both cunt and pussy are often used as slurs today. 

Fuck

We may have the Germans to thank for our favorite obscenity. How, exactly, is the stuff of entertaining etymology stories. The descendent of German words that mean to strike, hit, move back and forth, or rub; fuck may have originally been introduced to England during the Viking invasions of 787 AD courtesy of a now obsolete Norwegian word. Since Old and Middle English speakers didn’t tend to borrow words from German, another possibility is that it has Old English roots.

Although fuck was around long before then, primarily as part of a place name, it made its first written appearance in English literature around 1500 in a poem whose title translates to “Fleas, Flies, and Friers.” Using Middle English and Latin, whoever wrote it encrypted the bad words so as not to offend immediately. Once deciphered, lines including “(The friars) are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely.” In 1528, the word was also used to express disdain and frustration, such as “fucking bitch.” Like cunt, fuck faded from public view for a while. From 1795 until 1965, it was such an offensive word that it wasn’t included in dictionaries. That doesn’t mean people weren’t using it.

In 1866, the word appears again in print. An affidavit, to be exact, during which the man stated that he had been told a certain Mr. Baker “Would be fucked out of his money by Mr. Brown.” The word now also meant to cheat someone. Court documents, pornographic books, and even the occasional brave dictionary show that the word was still in circulation and in 1790, “I don’t give a fuck” was introduced to Virginia by a judge named George Tucker. The word became “common” in 1893, taking as many forms as it does today.

Bitch

Anyone who knows about dogs knows that a female dog is called a bitch, which is derived from bicce, an Old English word borrowed from the Germanic languages. Although the Romans are known to have compared women to dogs during the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries BC, it wasn’t until the 1100s that the term meant a lewd or lascivious woman, but by 1811, a dictionary declared its common use to describe any woman as “the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman.” The word became a verb in 1930, when it expanded to mean “to complain,” but, like cunt, its noun form is often used today as a slur.

To avoid trouble but still get our point across, the use of Latin words like “defecate,” “fornicate,” “copulate,” and “excrete” have given us plausible deniability because they have the illusion of being polite, technical, and delicate. Since history, and language, are written by the victors, words considered to be “vulgar” by English speakers are generally those used by common people such as the much-maligned Anglo-Saxons.

And today? Today We Swear Like Sailors!

Today, we swear like sailors, partly because it was sailors who brought swearing to popular culture. Profanity has lost a lot of its power as a vehicle for offense. But we still have slurs, and they’re on the rise. Dependent upon speaking ill of a group considered inferior, generally determined by race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability, slurs are personal. While they often use familiar and historic swear words to describe their victims, because of their intent, there is no way to both sincerely direct them at others and remove their sting.

I love to swear. And yes, I was raised by a member of the military and a member of the Catholic church. If anyone was born to swear, it was me. So, I am totally down with everyone swearing as much as we want. But seriously, language is fun, let’s play with it but let’s also be nicer to one another while we do it. Make it silly, make it sexy, make it emphatic, but goddamn it, don’t use it as a fucking weapon.