Washington - Swear words, obscenities and other taboo utterances tend – much like the individuals who resort to them in fits of rage – not to be known for their stability. They change, fluctuate, shape-shift. Sometimes they disappear on us altogether, never to be heard from again. Or almost never.
During an especially dramatic scene in the 2012 box-office smash The Avengers, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, imprisoned and irascible, lashes out at Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), ultimately referring to her as a “mewling quim”.
If you recoiled at that moment – or, for that matter, had the faintest idea what was going on – then you should be commended for your solid working knowledge of outdated British profanity. The insult – which would have drawn audible gasps and possible bouts of fainting in mid-19th-century London theatres, had Marvel Comics and the requisite movie projection technology been around at that time – amounts to “whimpering vagina”.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, meanwhile, the word “occupy” was commonly used to refer to the act of sexual penetration, which, among other things, places the Occupy Wall Street movement in a whole new light.
The words “quim” and, of course, “occupy” still exist, but the former is nearly obsolete and the latter is almost never unseemly. They are, simply put, no longer taboo mainstays, and the list of previously offensive English words that have met with a similar fate is long. (The thoroughly delightful 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines scores of them, including “buck’s face” to mean a man married to an unfaithful wife and “town” to mean “prostitute”.)
While there’s nothing new about words becoming more and less taboo with the passage of time, the pace of that process seems to be accelerating – and, even more interestingly, the categories of words that tend to bother people seem to be changing fairly dramatically.
In many instances, what’s super-offensive now is quite different from that which was the height of taboo even as recently as 40 or 50 years ago. And that’s because we’ve changed – both in how we share information, and with respect to what most unsettles us.
“Curse words tend to based on whatever societies find most taboo, and most scary, and most interesting,” says Melissa Mohr, whose book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing examines how and why people have resorted to profane language, from ancient Roman times to the present. “When they lose power, it’s just those taboos getting weaker, and new ones coming in to replace them.”
Early forms of profanity most often involved sexual braggadocio or words intended to disrespect something perceived as sacred – often with religious implications. But gradually the universe of offensive and obscene utterances expanded to include, among other things, words referring to bodily functions and racial epithets.
“There are many ways in which words can be considered taboo or offensive,” says Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Such words can fall out of use for various reasons. The entire category can change, so that, for example, words insulting one’s parentage, such as ‘bastard’ or ‘whoreson’, are now relatively mild curses because we no longer place a particularly high value on such things.”
Sheidlower adds that “bastard” and “damn” were so offensive in the 18th century that “they would frequently be printed b--d or d--m.” But sensitivities change, he says. “Now, they are relatively mild oaths for most English speakers.”
Sometimes taboo words simply fade away for apparently random reasons. “A word is felt to be old-fashioned,” Sheidlower says, “another word takes its place.”
In many cases, that progression is due to overuse sapping a word’s shocking essence or dissociating it from its initial, offensive connotation.
In a June 2012 Dialect Blog post, Ben Trawick-Smith provides a modern-day example. “Dick”, he suggests, may be experiencing “a banal retirement” at the moment. “In many ways, I think ‘dick’ has lost its punch,” Trawick-Smith writes. “This can perhaps be attributed to the word further evolving to be a rather innocuous synonym of ‘jerk’, as in the complaint ‘Stop acting like a dick!’… Such is the comparative mildness of the term when you divorce it from its sexual connotation.”
In some cases, such shifts have taken place over centuries. But today, modern media seem to be more rapidly eroding the taboo quality of many swear words.
Technology aids in the creation and spread of new offensive words, of course, but it also helps facilitate overuse, creating the potential for a more rapid decline in the taboo levels associated with new and old words that offend.
The amount of profanity on TV has increased dramatically in recent years, but even more influential in this regard is the internet. According to Mohr, that swearing is so common online is changing the lifespan of profanities.
“It’s not just that people swear on Urban Dictionary or YouTube,” she says. “They’ll post videos about it, and talk about it. I think that has the effect of making it less taboo.”
The internet allows people to swear in public more easily than was the case before, notes Keith Allan, emeritus professor of linguistics at Monash University in Australia and co-author of Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language.
“Maybe they would have had to have been drunk before. But now they can do it in sort of semi-private, because you sit and do it in a room on your own. That might have an effect in reducing taboos.”
Even some of our most storied and longest-lasting profanities have proved susceptible to a gradual weakening in the face of changing social norms and technology-aided taboo-sapping overuse.
“ ‘Damn’, ‘hell’, ‘s***’, and ‘f***’ are not what an anthropologist observing us would classify as ‘taboo’,” says linguist John McWhorter, author of What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be, among other books. “We all say them all the time. Those words are not profane in what our modern culture is – they are, rather, salty. That’s all. Anyone who objects would be surprised to go back 50 years and try to use those words as casually as we do now and ever be asked again to parties.”
As McWhorter notes, even ‘f***’ – the super-badass, cannot-be-effed-with, undisputed heavyweight champion of all swear words – has not escaped the passage of time with the full force of its offensiveness intact.
Sheidlower, who is also editor of The F-Word – a comprehensive volume that delineates the impressive history of the word ‘f***’ as well as its many uses and variations that have cropped up throughout the English-speaking world – is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on this topic. He has studied the progression of the word with precision and scholarly zeal. There are, he says, “a number of things going on with ‘f***”.
For a start, there’s that all-important connection to sex. “We are no longer as outraged by public discussions of sexuality as we were in the past,” Sheidlower notes. “So even the sexual uses of the words are not as strong as they used to be, and the non-sexual uses are that much weaker still. However, it is true that the increasing quantity of non-sexual uses has weakened ‘f***’s taboo status further. Most uses of ‘f***’ today are non-sexual.”
As a result, the word has become less extreme and less likely to cause a freakout-type response by the average person who hears it. “There used to be a shock value in saying ‘f***’ in public,” says Allan, “but I think that’s totally gone.”
Still, according to Sheidlower, f-bomb enthusiasts need not fret too much. Even conceding that the word has become increasingly common and more widely acceptable in general contexts, we shouldn’t expect it to go the way of “damn” or “bastard” any time soon.
“There is no other word that is broadly used that can replace it,” he says, “so its status as the most offensive widely-used word is probably secure for some time.”
Mohr agrees: “I think it’s going to be a long, long time before we lose it.”
The bad news for proponents of contemporary profanity is that ‘f***’ may be an aberration of sorts when it comes to staying power. Big categories of bad words seem to be falling by the wayside and becoming less taboo by the day.
“Religion, for many people, is not taken as seriously any more,” notes Allan. “So it doesn’t matter if they blaspheme and use profane language in its old sense. I think sex is gradually going the same way.
“ ‘Micturition’, and ‘defecation’, and so forth have kind of lost their sting. ‘Pissed’ is widely used. ‘S***’ is used for all sorts of stuff – the shit hits the fan, in the shit, holy shit, and so on.
“Bodily effluvia is becoming much less taboo. So, you know, what’s left?”
What’s left is the one category of taboo utterances that seems to be ascending in the offensiveness spectrum.
“What you can see becoming more taboo are racial slurs, but then also anything that kind of sums someone up,” says Mohr.
“So people are objecting to ‘fat’. And especially something I’ve noticed just in my lifetime is ‘retarded’. People and kids on the playground just said it all the time. And now it’s really taboo.”
McWhorter refers to these as the “sociologically abusive” words.
These words and utterances, it seems, are tracing a path that is the opposite of the one being traversed by “bastard” and “goddamn” and other classics of the swearing genre.
“Racist, sexist, fatist terms, those sort of things where you insult the way a person looks, or their ethnic identity, have become far more taboo than they used to be,” Allan says.
“People with disabilities used to be looked at and laughed at, but that’s not allowed any more. And it’s becoming more taboo.”
That is good news.
“Not to sound too Pollyannaish, but I think this is a positive development,” says Mohr, “a sign that culturally we are able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes a little bit more than we were in the past, and, at least notionally and linguistically, respect people of all sorts.”
The shift in taboos away from sacrilege and gross-out topics toward more personal and, well, flat-out mean epithets appears to be a move in the right direction.
The increasingly offensive nature of these words – and the visceral, emotional responses they trigger in us when spoken or heard – may just amount to a signifier of social progress.
“There’s got to be something that people take seriously” and see as being out of bounds these days, says Allan. “And, right now, it’s human frailties.” – Slate / The Washington Post News Service