I’ve been browsing through lots of old (50s, 60s) comics lately, and the kids/teens say golly, gee, or gosh a lot. They also did on TV shows from the same period (like Leave it to Beaver). Was that actually common kid language, or was it just what old(er) people writing comics and scripts thought kids talked like, while getting it cringingly wrong?
Some of my friends when we were young teenagers delighted in using “real curse words”, while others would use minced oaths instead. My siblings and I, though, would never use either, especially in my parents’ presence, until we got older. We’d still not use them around the parents, though. Mom and Dad considered the minced oath just as bad as the real curse word.
Yes. In my childhood in the 50s and 60s, in northern Indiana, we all said that until we got to be 10 or 11.
Google Ngram says that golly and gee remain common, while gosh has increased in its use since about 2002:
People in general were much more formal before the counter-culture revolution of the 60s and 70s. You were expected to dress properly for dinner. Only low-class trashy people wore tattered jeans and an old T-shirt.
In addition to “golly” and “gee”, you’d also hear phrases on old TV like “go wash up for dinner”, which also was a thing in real life. Dress properly, clean up, be proper. Otherwise, you’re a trashy person, and you don’t want to be a low-class trashy person.
Most kids didn’t say swear words, at least not regularly. If you did say swear words, it was shocking. Do it often enough, and your peers would think that you were some low-class trash, not worth hanging around with. Sure, you could let a swear word or two fly every once in a while, but when you did, it was something generally notable. It wasn’t just standard conversation like it is these days.
All of that formality and the idea of being “proper” went out the window in the late 60s and into the 70s. All of a sudden it became cool to do things that would upset the older generation. If you were a young kid in the 70s, you still didn’t swear around your parents like kids do today, but you heard a lot of swearing from teenagers around you.
The TV show Deadwood (set in the old west) originally wanted to use period-authentic swear words, but then they did some research and found out how mild these would sound to our modern ears. So they used words that were as offensive to modern ears as those much tamer words would have been to those at the time.
What is considered to be acceptable and what is considered “shocking” have changed rather dramatically over the years.
When I was a teenager, swearing around adults was still considered to be something that should not be done, and swearing around other teenagers did happen, but wasn’t anywhere near as common as it is today. But I was raised in a working class neighborhood, and I didn’t really care if the more upper class kids around me thought that I was lower class trash or not.
I suspect it probably has less to do with that than with what Standards & Practices and the Comics Code would allow in those days - the three examples you list are all euphemisms for God or Jesus, which wouldn’t have been allowed to be used as oaths on TV or in comics at the time.
I remember when I was about 5 or 6 years old in the early 60s. It was summertime, and I happened to be walking past a neighbor’s house whose door was open for the breeze. There was a loud argument going on inside the house, and one of the parties said, “Shit!”… I didn’t hear the rest of the discussion, because I was so shocked that anyone would use such language. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard the word spoken, and it was like a slap across the face.
I would guess that my brother-in-law-in-law (he’s my brother’s brother-in-law) probably expressed those exclamations as a kid. He’s 70 now, and says “gee whiz”, “gosh dang it” and “gosh darn it” a lot. I’ve known him for about 50 years, and I have never heard an actual swear/curse word from him.
Those would also have been considered to be a lot more offensive in olden days.
Again, getting back to Deadwood, the producers said that when they researched real swear words from the old west, they weren’t usually sexual words like the F word or the C word and other common words today, but instead were religious swears like “tarnation” (instead of damnation) and “crimony” (instead of Christ).
I know that “darn” instead of “damn” was common thing said by me and my peers. To me though, in the late 60s and early 70s, “golly” and “gee” sounded too much like Leave It To Beaver, which was old-fashioned by our 1970s-ish standards. “Gosh darn it” was something that we would have said though.
I suspect that the “golly”, etc., crowd were largely the offspring of religious people. Or, ref @Smapti, characters in entertainment subject to the religiously-based censorship common in the 1950-1960s.
I was the product of irreligious folks who did very well for themselves in the postwar boom. But who were of working class sensibilities despite their big houses and nice cars & fancy friends. Who in hindsight I suspect probably looked down on my parents and on us kids.
I & my sibs then used no sexual slang as we would today. Nor did we give a shit about using religious curse words; “god dammit” was invoked hourly, with no regard for our audience. As were a colorful variety of scatological terms, not to mention the various terms for “illegitimate” (as the religionists would say) offspring & parentage.
“Fuck 'em if they can’t take a joke” was my attitude. Even if I didn’t adopt “fuck” into my vocabulary until about age 20 in the late 1970s
Well, we certainly didn’t curse around our parents. Even the most permissive parent in the 50s would be sorely tempted to spank a kld who dropped the F-bomb at home.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t know every obscenity - and the hierarchy of swear words - as well as our parents did, and we were capable of using them in our peer group. When we got home, it was back to golly and gee around our parents and our bratty sister who might squeal on us.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1960s and no one ever said “golly” or “gee” in my area. “Gosh” was used rarely. We always thought Beaver was “goofy”, as Wally would say, because of how ridiculous those words sounded. We assumed it was a holdover from the 1950s, along with saddle shoes and bobby socks. Or a rural thing, maybe, like on Lassie.
Just wanted to thank the thread for a learning experience. I’m waaaaaaay to young to comment, but seeing the degree to which it was a real phenomenon while perhaps being also exaggerated in media brings the change in attitudes towards swearing into focus.
[ my formative years being the 80s is a whole 'nother kettle of fish ]
Rad, dude!
I still use “gosh” occasionally, as an expression of mild surprise.
How did you know what it was, if you’d never heard it? It certainly wouldn’t have been written anywhere children would be likely to see it. At that age it would just have been a noise to me, or just a word I didn’t know, which wouldn’t have shocked me.
“Go wash up for dinner”, in my house in the 1950’s, meant “go wash your hands”. Nothing to do with changing clothes, at least unless you were only wearing a bathing suit. But we did put on skirts or dresses (and my father a jacket and tie) if we were going into town; even if it was just to do the grocery shopping.
I don’t remember saying gee or golly; but I don’t remember not saying them, either. And I certainly don’t remember people routinely swearing in public until at least the late 1960’s.
I had read it somewhere and had it explained by my parents, but I’d never heard it spoken. I was a very early reader. My parents were both journalists, my mother was studying to become a school teacher and began teaching us to read when we were around 3. We took to it like ducks to water. I may have been as old as 7 when this happened. I don’t remember exactly. But the incident stands out very large in my memory, because words like that just weren’t used in polite company.
Gosh, golly, gee and other “swear” substitutes were used in our home.
As an ‘80s kid who grew up in Ocean Beach, San Diego, most of the slang I used as a kid I learned from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and/or my parents’ beach bum buddies.
“Gosh darn it!” and “Jeeze” we’re in pretty heavy rotation in Kindergarten (1968). “Golly!” was something my grandfather would say with some frequency, but would have sounded weird from one of my peers.
When my husband was in graduate school, a bunch of us got together to read Shakespeare plays. We would borrow a stack of copies of a play from the college library, and each take a character and read that person’s lines.
The books were all different editions, printed at different times. And many of them were bowdlerised, but they’d been bowdlerised at a variety of times. So some had the sexually naughty bits edited out. And others had the blasphemy excised. It was awkward and funny when one person read their lines and the next person’s text didn’t have that section.