Melissa Mohr

A humorous, trenchant and fascinating examination of how Western culture's taboo words have evolved over the millennia

A Brief History of Swearing

Holy Sh*t

Gavin

Cool blast through three-and-a-bit millennia of talk of Christ’s bowels and fucking shit. She distinguishes between ‘obscenities’ and ‘oaths’ (the first takes profane subjects, the second sacred) and then between the proper and the vain oath (e.g. “Bejasus! Godammit! Hell’s teeth!”). 

Adding the generalisation that ‘we swear about what we care about’, she can use known changes in the expressive power of swearwords to cleverly trace the movement of taboos across cultures and over time. (Very broadly: power went from Shit’s precedence to Holy and now back and with more political terms.) Rome’s nasty little sexuality is seen to be the model of a lot of our crap associations; in the Middle Ages vain oaths were criminal while scholars and physicians used ‘cunt’ in textbooks without heat. 

In our time, racial slurs (very young as slurs – only around WWII for their worst malevolence) have taken the biscuit from sex, excrement and God - which you can see as encouraging (if that means we now care about the targets of racial language) - or depressing (if that means we now care more about Race, dividing lines for their own sake). 

Mohr is full of fact without being trivial; she lets graffiti, court records, and primary quotation damn the damnable – e.g. DH Lawrence’s holy cock-mysticism, the spume of Twitter bigots.

Almost everyone swears, or worries about not swearing, from the two year-old who has just discovered the power of potty mouth to the grandma who wonders why every other word she hears is obscene. Whether they express anger or exhilaration, are meant to insult or to commend, swear words perform a crucial role in language. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history, offering a fascinating record of what people care about on the deepest levels of a culture--what's divine, what's terrifying, and what's taboo. Holy Sh*t tells the story of two kinds of swearing--obscenities and oaths--from ancient Rome and the Bible to today. With humor and insight, Melissa Mohr takes readers on a journey to discover how "swearing" has come to include both testifying with your hand on the Bible and calling someone a *#$&!* when they cut you off on the highway. She explores obscenities in ancient Rome--which were remarkably similar to our own--and unearths the history of religious oaths in the Middle Ages, when swearing (or not swearing) an oath was often a matter of life and death. Holy Sh*t also explains the advancement of civility and corresponding censorship of language in the 18th century, considers the rise of racial slurs after World War II, examines the physiological effects of swearing (increased heart rate and greater pain tolerance), and answers a question that preoccupies the FCC, the US Senate, and anyone who has recently overheard little kids at a playground: are we swearing more now than people did in the past? A gem of lexicography and cultural history, Holy Sh*t is a serious exploration of obscenity--and it also just might expand your repertoire of words to choose from the next time you shut your finger in the car door.

Holy Sh*t A Brief History of Swearing

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