Regarding language, the thing about formal speech that makes me cautious or suspicious is situations like “how dare you not address me as ‘sir’, boy?” and all the baggage that comes with such an exchange. People have been beaten or killed for not speaking properly. That goes much farther than the formal speak out one side of the mouth and racist slurs out the other hypocrisy. Constant vulgarity may be a different matter, but at least it lets you see the reality of the speaker versus hiding behind eloquence.
Eloquence is separate from the register of speech. There’s plenty of poetry that is eloquent and vulgar, especially in popular music. There’s also plenty of formal speech that is stilted and painful to listen to.
Isn’t that true! Boy, is there much vulgarity in the Pogues’ “Fairytale Of New York”, but it’s also great poetry. I’d call it creative and eloquent cursing.
Cursing also is regional. New York/New Jersey culture is famous for everybody swearing, from finance bros and CEOs to dock workers and cab drivers to everybody who walks down a street, male or female.
Upstate New York is far different. Cursing is private in groups; you virtually never hear it in public settings. (Like honking car horns: almost never except as a warning.)
From what I’ve read, some cities in Europe are recognized as cursing capitals, while others have a class separation of cursers and non-cursers. (Or cursors, which spell check likes better. Fuck you spell check, I’m right.)
Yeah, maybe two, three depends on how you define it-
"You’re a bum, you’re a punk, you’re an old slut on junk Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap, lousy faggot Happy Christmas, your arse, I pray God it’s our last"
But certainly the song isnt riddled with profanity, that is just one verse out of four.
It makes perfect sense when you consider the extreme historic homophobia of our society; it’s accusing a man of not only performing a homosexual act, but a “submissive” one. So of course it was a super insulting thing to accuse a man of back in the day.
Whenever I hear it I’m reminded of how on another forum a gay poster was called a “cocksucker” and responded with:
With gusto! Insult fail!
Makes hard for me to take it seriously these days.
Following up with a little more detail: as noted above, “cocksucker” seems to have no written attestation before 1885.
Google Ngram Viewer states its incidence rate as pure zero up to the first nonzero value in 1897, followed by a brief and small uptick around 1900 and an extremely low but nonzero rate until, surprise surprise, the 1960s.
Of course, Google Ngrams aren’t a comprehensive list of everything published, and of course plenty of obscene terms circulate in speech long before they’re ever permitted in print. But my best guess would be that “cocksucker” as a term of opprobrium (and homophobic slur) wasn’t invented until about the last quarter of the 19th century.
How commonly it was used once it got invented is an open question, AFAICT, and one that may never be answered due to the widespread contemporary consensus on the literal “unprintability” of such insults.