Geoffrey Hughes. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. M.E. Sharpe, 2006.
According to notions of “received wisdom” concerning the sociolinguistic modes of English society, which still preserves its traditional class structure to a surprising degree, swearing is a low-class habit. Phrases like “the language of the gutter” can still be heard. Historical study shows, however, that this is a popular oversimplification. The consistent pattern emerging historically in English society is that swearing is more prevalent among the upper and the lower classes but is generally avoided by the middle class. As the entry for “U” and “Non-U” also shows, verbal gentility is more the preserve of the bourgeois. The dynamic in America is naturally more complex.
There is no evidence of class differences in linguistic behavior in Anglo-Saxon times, probably because of the limited survival of texts. However, the medieval word cherle meaning a peasant (still surviving as churl) had an explicit association with bad language shown in the phrase cherles termes, meaning foul or coarse language. As the entry for Chaucer shows, the correlation between class and language in the Canterbury Tales is very clear. The Knight tells a romance of chivalry in appropriately decorous language, whereupon the drunken Miller responds with a scurrilous bawdy farce, provoking the Reeve into a riposte. Both use the whole available range of “four-letter” words and some scandalous oaths, for which Chaucer apologizes, saying that they were both “cherles.” However, the Parson in his discourse on the Seven Deadly Sins makes a different correlation between swearing and class. He criticizes those who “holden it a gentrie or a manly dede to swere grete oaths” (“regard it as a classy or macho thing to swear powerfully,” l. 601). This observation on gentrie indicates a mode of fashionable upper-class swearing that was to become established in later centuries.
According to certain quaint medieval notions of genealogy, the churls of the world were descended from Cain. This idea is clearly dramatized in the religious plays known as the Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (acted ca. 1554-1576), in which Cain is a lively character, and his speech is larded with obscenity and blasphemy. As the entry for medieval period shows, he tells his brother Abel to “kys the dwillis toute!” (“kiss the devil’s backside”), is rude to the Almighty, and bids the audience a crude farewell: “By all men set I nat a fart.” This tradition has continued and was endorsed by H.C. Wyld in his Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1934), in which he defined bloody as a “meaningless adjective much used among very low persons.”
However, the freedom of swearing enjoyed by the upper classes is famous, or notorious. Alluded to in Chaucer and in the entry for God’s wounds, it becomes a social feature of comment in the Renaissance. The most spectacular examples come from the swearing matches indulged in by the Scottish nobility and covered under the entry for flyting. South of the border Sir Thomas Elyot in The Governour (1531) recorded the disapproving saying that “They will say that he that swereth depe, swereth like a lorde” (I, xxvi). Henry VIII swore freely, and his son Edward VI, upon ascending the throne at the age of ten in 1547 “is said to have delivered himself of a volley of the most sonorous oaths” (Montagu 1973, 132). More surprising, Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, is said to have sworn “like a man.” On her abilities in this regard Nathan Drake observed: “A shocking practice seems to have been rendered fashionable by the Queen … for it is said that she never spared an oath in public speech or private conversation when she thought it added energy to either” (Shirley 1979, 10). Ashley Montagu asserts (without authority) that “God’s wounds was a favorite oath of Queen Elizabeth’s, and it is said that the corruption ‘Zounds first originated with the ladies of her court, who also used it in the form zooterkins” (1973, 139). In addition, numerous anecdotes attest to her blunt speech and her relish of the vulgar jest or naughty story (Shirley 1979, 10). John Aubrey, the first collector and publisher of anecdotal biography in England, retails the following episode:
This Earle of Oxford [Edward de Vere] making his low obeisance [bow] to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, “My Lord, I had forgot the Fart.” (Brief Lives)
This was a time when the insouciance or carefree attitude of the nobility was expressed in various forms of exhibitionism, in magnificent codpieces, and in spectacular but also crude language. Shakespeare creates a particularly revealing scene in Henry IV, Part I, where Harry Hotspur, a bold and outspoken aristocrat, lectures his wife on the swearing appropriate to her station:
Swear me Kate, like a lady as thou art
A good mouth-filling oath.
(III i 257-58)
This context, revealing of expectations of both class and gender, is discussed more fully in the entry for swearing in women. But at the heart of Hotspur’s speech is the assumption that the upper classes are not bound by bourgeois prissiness, norms, and expectations.
This emphasis on upper-class swearing in Shakespeare should not obscure the equally clear awareness that swearing was also despised as low-class behavior. The strongest example is Hamlet, who in his state of frenzied frustration swears furiously, but is simultaneously disgusted, that he
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab [prostitute]
A scullion! [kitchen servant]
(II ii 616-24)
Hamlet is the most verbally sensitive and acute character in Shakespeare, and thus the social markers he chooses for swearing, whores and scullions, are highly significant. (Scullions were the lowest rank of kitchen servants, and notorious for their foul language; in 1592, Thomas Nashe accused Gabriel Harvey of being a “kitchen-stuff wrangler [quarreler]” in Strange News, I, 229, 31-35.)
Queen Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was something of a linguistic anomaly. On the one hand his diatribe in 1604 against the evils of smoking, “A Counterblaste to Tobacco” (then a new vice), ends in the mode of a hell-fire sermon: “and in the black stinking fume thereof most resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless” (James avoids “Hellish,” preferring the classical Stygian). But his correspondence with his favorite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, “is astonishing, swapping four-letter words” (Stone 1987, 104). (More details are given in the entry for homosexuals.) Likewise, he commissioned the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611), yet the language he used to describe his passion for Buckingham was blasphemous. He told his council in 1617: “Jesus Christ did the same and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John and I have my George” (Fraser 1974, 168).
Upon the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after the Puritan Commonwealth, aristocratic liberty became license, embodied in the decadent example of Charles II. Using his favorite oath, the king commented on the portrait of him painted by Sir Peter Lely: “Odd’s fish, I am an ugly fellow.” (Odd’s fish is a “minced oath” for “God’s face.”) A more fulsome response was that of a gentleman, upon being bitten by one of the king’s spaniels: “God bless your Majesty! And God damn your dogs!” Anecdotes abound of what the diarist John Evelyn called the king’s “unexpressable luxury and profanenesse, gaming and all dissolution”—that is, lust, profanity, gambling, and decadence. The license of the court and the contemporary stage is covered in the entries for Restoration and the Collier Controversy.
After this nadir, the behavior of royalty became more becoming, at least in the verbal domain. Queen Victoria was famous for her severity and Puritanism, and although Edward VII was notorious for his sexual scandals, the Royal Family was virtually oath-free until the latter part of the twentieth century. One famous anecdote concerns George V’s convalescence at Bognor in 1929. When the local council requested some recognition of his stay, the king reportedly responded curtly to his aides: “Bugger Bognor!” But the town did gain the title of royal recognition, namely Bognor Regis.
While Queen Elizabeth II has remained a model of decorum, her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, and their daughter, Princess Anne, show much of the verbal insouciance of their Renaissance ancestors. The Duke is notorious for his abrasive remarks, often about foreigners, and even came out with the archaism “Gadzooks!” Ever impatient of the intrusions of the British press, Princess Anne told them to “Naff off!” in one episode in 1982. (The equivalent would be “Get lost!” or “Bugger off!”) Responding to a security scandal at Buckingham Palace in 2003 when a reporter gained entrance by pretending to be servant, the Princess allegedly described him as “a fucking incompetent twat” (Daily Mirror, November 21, 2003). Even Prince Charles, generally more restrained in verbal matters, explained the low standards of English in his office by commenting in 1989 that “English is taught so bloody badly.” The publicity given to such episodes is partly based, like the revelations of sexual impropriety, on their media value as scandal, but also on the modern egalitarian assumption that such language is inappropriate to those in high office.
It is notable that those British prime ministers noted for using coarse or strong language in public derive almost entirely from noble families, such as William Pitt and Charles James Fox from an earlier era, the last being Sir Winston Churchill. He famously combined acerbity and even cruelty in his denunciations. Adolf Hitler he castigated as “this bloody guttersnipe,” Benito Mussolini was “this whipped jackal,” while socialism was “Government of the duds, by the duds for the duds” (Montagu 1973, 338). Always frank, he said to Hugh Foot, governor of Jamaica, on the prospect of continuing immigration to Britain: “We would have a magpie society. That would never do” (Roberts 1994, n.p.).
In the United States notions of class are ostensibly at variance with the democratic ethos of the nation, although the prevalence of the terms class and classy in various phrases suggests that the notion is not entirely alien. Studies into profanity such as those of Cameron (1969) and Jay (1992) have different social foci, such as schoolchildren and college students, who are assumed to be homogeneous in class terms. There are, naturally, general expectations of status. It is indisputable that, like any nation, Americans expect their leaders to speak with the dignity appropriate to high office. Consequently, one of the most damaging revelations of the Watergate tapes was that President Richard Nixon, the successor of such articulate and dignified presidents as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, spoke like a gangster, even using such banal terms and phrases as crap, bullshit, asshole, I don’t give a shit, and a bunch of crap (Nixon 1974). The ironic linguistic memorial to Nixon’s presidency was the phrase used in editing the incriminating tapes he had so carefully and furtively preserved: “Expletive deleted.”
At the other end of the scale was the extraordinary disjunction between language and action characterizing the sexual scandal concerning President Bill Clinton and his aide Monica Lewinsky (1999-2000). As the evidence of sexual misconduct mounted, so the president’s language became more bizarrely euphemistic, reiterating phrases like “inappropriate action.” Throughout the whole affair, no oaths or vituperation were uttered in public. The fact that Clinton lied in public became an open secret.
However, there is also little doubt that presidents who show “the common touch” by using low-register language usually achieve a genuine affection with the populace. Harry Truman’s popularity in part derived from this trait: his wife once commented that he “liked to call horse-manure horse-manure,” adding mischievously that it had taken her a long time to get the president to use this polite version. Truman commented in 1961: “I fired [General Douglas] MacArthur because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was” (Flexner 1976, 233). Merle Miller’s oral biography Plain Speaking (1974) shows that Truman used the epithet quite freely. More public was John F. Kennedy’s comment on price increases proposed by U.S. Steel: “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now” (April 1962; quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965, 635).
A less expected example comes from President Lyndon Johnson. During the Vietnam War there was some shocking television coverage (on CBS in August 1965) showing Vietnamese villagers being burned alive through the actions of some U.S. marines. Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, received a phone call from Johnson early the following morning. “Frank, are you trying to fuck me?” Johnson asked, adding, “Yesterday your boys shat on the American flag” (Wheen 1985, 88-89).
Although class categorizations are increasingly problematic to establish, it is still a tenable generalization that swearing is more prevalent among the upper and the lower echelons of British society, but is less frequent in the middle class.