taboos

Swearing as a rite of passage

Stan Carey3 Comments

Think about your earliest swearing. Did you graduate from euphemisms? (As a child I used sugar, drat, and flip/feck for shit, damn, and fuck.) Or did you jump right into prodigious profanity? Did you practise in private, and did you try out your new vocabulary among friends – or in front of shocked family members?

Poster for the film Hope and Glory. It shows a schoolboy running towards the camera, grinning broadly. Over his right shoulder there are several airships in the sky, and below them some other children on the street. The boy's jacket swings open, his tie is loose, and he's wearing short pants and shoes, like a school uniform. The tagline above the film title reads: A celebration of family. A vision of love. A memoir of war. All through the eyes of a child.Or maybe, as in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987), you were forced to swear. In this period film, which reimagines the director’s childhood in London during the Blitz, coming of age meant coming to terms with the senselessness of war and the elusive sense of swearwords.

As Boorman writes in his wonderful memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, the film was “a way of looking at my personal mythology”. For a child in wartime, some of that mythology centred on ammunition, an object of constant fascination:

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Jesse Sheidlower answers our questions about “The F-Word”

Nancy Friedman11 Comments

Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower has been researching and writing about fuck for a fucking long time: nearly three decades. He’s also been an invaluable resource for the Strong Language blog since our very beginnings (almost ten years!). To celebrate the publication of the fourth edition of his magnum opus, The F-Word, we asked Sheidlower to share with Strong Language readers a bit about the book’s history, his research process, and what he likes to do when he’s not reading and writing about fuck. The interview was conducted over email.


[Read an excerpt of the new edition of The F-Word.]


[Buy The F-Word]


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That’s bitchin’!

Nancy Friedman2 Comments

A lot of surfer slang consists of in-crowd jargon or outmoded antiques: grommet (an eager young surfer), hodad (a non-surfer; a poser), log (a heavy surfboard), Noah (a shark). But other terms that bubbled up in the surf towns of Southern California, Hawaii, and Australia in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s – bro, dude, Cali (for California), wipeout – are now part of the everyday vocabulary of English-speaking landlubbers who may have no idea about the words’ briny origins. One of the most widespread of these expressions, and probably the most pertinent to our interests at Strong Language, is bitchin’, an adjective or interjection meaning “excellent,” “cool,” or “admirable.” 

It took a long time for bitch and its derivatives to evolve from veterinary noun (Old English: “female dog”) to taboo slur (for a woman c. 1400; for a man c. 1500) to slightly taboo verb (early 1900s: “talk spitefully”; early 1930s: “complain”) to a word so cheerily inoffensive that it’s used in brand names that are prominently displayed in mass-market retail outlets like Costco. Along the way, bitch begat dozens of slangy spin-offs, most of them U.S. in origin and mostly pejorative, that include bitch bath (perfume instead of soap and water), bitch box (loudspeaker), and bitch light (a twisted rag soaked in grease and used for illumination). 

Tubs of Bitchin' Sauce at Costco, Richmond, California
Bitchin’ Sauce at Costco, Richmond, California. Photo: Nancy Friedman

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Strong bad mature filthy language

Stan Carey12 Comments

Listening to a podcast this morning, I noticed the phrase mature language used in a content warning. It’s one of many phrases in the form X language, some of them similarly euphemistic, for what we might more plainly call swearing.

In several of these phrases, the modifier identifies the type of content: abusive language contains abuse, obscene language obscenity, profane language profanity, vulgar language vulgarity. But these categories are tricky to define and tend to overlap in usage; the phrases are often used interchangeably.1

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Gadzooks! Taboo words? Minced oaths? Zounds!

sesquiotic9 Comments

I’m reposting this from my own blog, Sesquiotica. Lest you marvel at the absence of actual swearwords, know that my mother reads it.

Gadzooks! Zounds!

Be careful with those words. They’re ancient holy relics. They’re soaked with a divine spirit. They’re broken bits of oaths, pieces of sacred words of eternal commitment, now used as playthings. I’ll show you… but not quite yet.

We don’t utter oaths as exclamations and imprecations and expressions of emotional intensity much anymore. Most of us are more likely to call on sex and other bodily functions to express dismay at the arc of a crystal glass to a tile floor or a steel hammer to the wrong kind of nail. In general, we feel one of two ways about names for the divine: a few of us consider them so inviolable and sacred that we would never use them to express shock, anger, or other emotions of the edge; the remainder of us seldom consider them of enough account to be satisfactory for the purpose. But there were times when it was otherwise. Continue reading →