A review of my weekend read

Mohr, Melissa, Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing
2013 Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.   ISBN 978-0-19-74267-7

Reviewed by Dr. George F Simons at diversophy.com

Apocryphal or true, it has been asserted that the last utterance heard on the black boxes of downed airliners has been the title of Mohr’s book book, or at least one word of it, and this seems to be borne in several languages (Schie?e, mierda, merde, etc.).

Whence comes the power of expletives? There seem to be two sources actually both expressed in the short title of this book: the tremendum et fascinosum the sacred – God's realm, the holy; and, what is perceived as filthy, to be avoided or hidden in the worlds of men and women, the sh*t.

Mohr’s historical study is limited to the Western world and starts with the Romans, who actually had more big-time obscenities, sexual and excretory, than we currently do. It ends with the emergence of the late 20th-century WTF, anything-goes attitude that extends into the present day. If you wonder why I'm not quoting and listing words in this review, it's because there are too many prudish robots policing the Internet.

What is the connection between the sacred and the profane when it comes to the language we use? Sexuality has of course had its sacredness, it's gods, goddesses and rituals as well as a connection with violence and violation. Cursing, on the other hand, has its holy dimension as well, in that it frequently calls down superhuman powers to sour someone else's life. God gets in the act and is coerced into testifying in the court of everyday affairs in our favor. Oaths have been part of maintaining the social structure by reinforcing human promises and political agreements. These were appropriate to important affairs, thus taking God's name in vain, swearing in inappropriate contexts or honest intention was condemned as an abuse in Judeo-Christian contexts.

The power of we tend to call “swearing” thus waxed and waned according to the vacillation of belief and the severity of religious discipline and belief in the efficacy of divine intervention. Translations of the Hebrew Bible have sometimes been far more prudish than the actual texts they are drawn from, though euphemisms abound in the sacred pages. Eve was created from "Adam's rib"? Think again about which "bone" the writer may have had in mind. While engaging God and God's various body parts was common medieval oaths, everyday life then seem to have been far more earthy. Expressions for bodily parts and functions that we find obscene today functioned as everyday language then. When it came to talk, people were concerned with what they saw as vile or idle prattle that led to the immoral or dishonest behavior.

In the English language, not surprisingly the aftermath of the Norman Conquest tended to leave some Anglo-Saxon words in the mouths of the lower classes, while upper class refinement and courtesy had their own norms.

Extensive liberty was characteristic of the Renaissance period, spilling down into the Reformation. I can recall in college reading some of the original texts of exchanges between Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther and the texts were flushed with what should be flushed, theological guy talk, not unlike the barbershop linguistic ping-pong of my youth. Roman poets, who at this time were being rediscovered, had been equally epigrammatic.

 The development of the obscene, going forward, was abetted by the creation of privacy for bodily functions, the disappearance of the normality of seeing total nakedness, and in the end particularly by the rise of religious puritanism. Recorded writing and printing started to raise the question of discretion and concealment from both aesthetic and religious and even legal perspectives in new media as they developed. As the holy receded the shi*t piled up, however. Still, obscenity, calling a spade a spade and ultimately a bloody shovel, could still be identified with honesty and this was so even in classical times.

Despite this abundant vocabulary, much of the the English-speaking world shifted in the direction of euphemisms. This reigned in Victorian times on both sides of the Atlantic, to the point where the word "Victorian" seems inclusive of this tendency, which, one might also observe, provides a certain aesthetic and entertaining flair to encounters with the language of this period. Even today, I take perverse delight when US friends visit my French apartment and ask for “the bathroom”. I send them there and they usually return bewildered as the toilet is in a different room.

On the other hand the use of language became an element of class distinction with the rise of a middle class mentality. This meant attributing ignorance to working class folk, assumed to possess a stunted vocabulary.

Mohr’s last and perhaps most significant exploration delves into the origin and use of racial and ethnic slurs, now classified as perhaps the worst of obscenities. Certainly abetted by the rise of nationalism, in our own time this seems to be the most serious concern in the use of language and the development of what we call political correctness.

Throughout the book there is extensive presentation of the etymologies of both current and past obscenities, which is interesting in itself. It saves the reader trips to the online Urban Dictionary.

Censorship and regulatory efforts seem to be on the wane despite a recent history of such efforts in the 20th century. Today it seems we have largely abandoned the sacred side of swearing in favor of a deep immersion in the sexual–excretory dimension in order to give weight to our speech and expression to our feelings. One may speculate whether the significant rise of more fundamentalist religious groups will reverse the trend. Excepting resistance to ethnic, racial and other terms which label people in terms of a devalued or disadvantaged identity, just about anything goes, and normally the best defense is walking away.

The focus of the book is almost exclusively about English, so it would be interesting to hear the impact of swearing and obscenity in other languages. Besides some US English studies, my library holds a hefty dictionary of Spanish obscenities and a fat glossary of nasty German words, but they only give equivalent meanings and lack the kind of historical and social context which Mohr’s book provides.