Can anyone recommend a book or article about what cuss words were used in different historical periods? I’m not talking about formal elaborate curses, but the historical versions of our classic “four letter words” or “the seven words you can’t say on television.”
I’m helping write a story set in the early 1800’s(most of the characters are English speaking) and I want some of the rough characters to swear, but I don’t know if the words we use now were used the same way then. If the mods will pardon the use of this word outside the Pit, if a guy was really upset and you wanted him to say “Fuck!” or something like that.
You need to look at the Oxford English Dictionary, either in bound form or online. You can probably find this at your local library. The on-line version is the best, but not always available. If you live near a University you’ll be better off going there.
Most of those four-letter words were certainly around in the early 1800’s, but not always used as we use them today. That, and the fact that they didn’t make it into popular works at the time, make it hard to ascertain just when they were in common use.
Nearly all of the curse words we used today were used in the early 1800s, too.
The major exception would be “ass”; people would have used “arse” instead. “Ass” only referred to a donkey until the middle of the 19th century (the OED has 1860 as the first usage of “ass” in this sense of “butt,” though it probably was used a little earlier than that).
I see that “zounds” was still used at the time, though it probably wasn’t all that shocking.any more.
Yes, which is why it’s so difficult to give him good answers here. You can bet that lower-class people of the mid-1800s did not use such locutions and instead spoke in ways that have largely not come down to us.
I recommend The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. No etymology included, but it’s indicative of the common language then, and as a bonus is very entertaining. Particularly “a nasty name for a nasty thing”.
I respectfully tip my fedora to the OED and to Reality Chuck. However, in 1595, a Mr. Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which a fellow named Bottom is changed into an ass (donkey.) Now, I’m only a bush-league etymologist, and I’m not a Shakespeare expert, so I don’t quite know what to make of Old Will’s Bottom/ass joke.
They certainly said “fuck” and “fucking” (excuse me) back then. In fact, in the late 1700s, these were pretty common. It’s only in the Regency / Victorian times that they began to take on a lot of the “olden days” prissiness that we think of.
I rather think not. Checking with the Furness Variorum and the Arden editions of the play, neither makes mention of any double-entendre in the words. The transformation into an ass is an ancient plot device, going back at least as far as the Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius (2nd century AD).
Bottom, as a weaver, is named for one of the tools of the trade, the bottom being the core on which the weaver’s skein of yarn was wound.
This actually argues against the use of fuck as a cuss word. A typical verb in standard use as a description of action in polite society (even if distateful to some) does not normally become a taboo word or an intensifying epithet or expletive. One does not hear “fornication,” “adultery,” or “coitus” being thrown around in moments of anger. It would be pretty rare to hear someone exclaim “Urinate on it!” or “Oh, urination!”. (I have seen “fornicating” used in some works of fiction, but it has been pretty clearly used as a minced oath to avoid “fucking.”)
I do not know how accurate was G.B. Shaw’s claim in Joan of Arc that the French ever called the English “goddams,” but the claim has a plausible ring to it. Note that the verbs for uttering taboo words–“cuss,” from curse, and “swear”–indicate that the older taboo forms were based on religious taboos rather than on bodily functions. The words that we know were considered “bad” were words based on either vainly taking the name of the Lord or on calling on some heavenly entity (God or a saint) to witness an action–zounds, for example–or were cursing someone to eternal torment: damn.
My guess would be that as the English speaking society moved further from the cultural hegemony of religion, the older swearing and cursing lost their effectiveness. When polite society began to reject common Anglo-Saxon forms for bodily functions, those words began to be substituted to fill the role of taboo language.
I have not been able to document this, for example, but my strong impression has been that “fuck” did not enter American English as an epithet until it was brought back with returning doughboys from WWI and it seems that they picked it up from Irish troops in the British Army. (This also suggests that the usage arose in Ireland early in the 20th century, since it does not appear to have come over to the U.S. with the great Irish migrations of the 19th century.) On the other hand, my inability to document this leaves it in the realm of wild speculation.
Interestingly, expletives in foreign languages often follow totally different rules. The Spanish used to have a similar taboo on invoking the saints to witness an event (as noted in Cervantes), but I do not know whether they still do or what sort of words are considered expletives in French, German, Greek, Russian, Italian, Polish, etc.
I would think that if no other source turns up, simply having one’s rough characters constantly saying “damn” or calling on God as a witness (with suitably horrified reactions by the more genteel hearers of such expressions) would probably be fairly accurate, although it may suuffer from failing to impress on the less educated readers just how terrible a taboo was being broken.
On the contrary, I think you can make a good case that they are related. I’ve long felt that Skespeare gave Bottom the head of an Ass for a reason. Even if “arse” was the proper word, the similarity is certainly there. He had to choose “Bottom” rather than another spinner-related term for a reason.
In Hamlet Polonius talks about “each actor arriving on his ass…”
, to which Hamlet replies “Buzz Buzz”. This is pretty much agreed to be a “raspberry” noise. There’s no reason for Hamlet to be making a fart noise just as Polonius says “ass” without a good reason.
See Eric Partiridge’s invaluable book Shakespeare’s Bawdy for cites of the use of “ass” meaning “rear end” in Shakespeare.
Most likely, a pun. “Ass” puns on “arse” quite easily, obviously, and Shakespeare loved puns. But Shakespeare’s meaning is clearly ass = donkey, while the sound ass = arse is the pun.
Same with the Hamlet reference: Shakespeare is punning on “ass” sounding like “arse.” Polonius is clearly referring to a donkey.
Remember:
course jocosity
captures the crowd
shakespeare and i
are often low-browed.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I was indeed suggesting that Shakespeare was punning in his use of “ass”. Until I read Partriodge’s book I was unaware of just how often he used bawdy puns.
I’m interested why you would think the Paddies more likely to use the word than the Tommies?
The bottom/ass/arse thing should take into account that the loss of the ‘r’ sound in modern English RP makes the words sound more similar than they were. From all that I’ve learned about Elizabethan English, would be pronounced ASS (short ‘a’ like ‘cat’) and AHRRS (long ‘a’ like ‘Mars’ and sounded ‘r’ - sorry, I don’t know phonetic characters). The vowel and middle R of ‘arse’ really make the words sound very different.
Just a number of scattered incidents of usage I’ve encountered over the years (that I failed to document or investigate until it seemed that they had reached a critical mass in my memory) in which the earliest examples of using “fuck” as an epithet or “fuck you” as a curse appeared, in retrospect, to have been uttered by Irish.
As I said, it is pretty much a WAG that I cannot (at this time) support. I mentioned it here mostly to see if I could tease out either a confirmation or correction from anyone else. It is not a position I would attempt to defend.