How Old are Cursing and Obscene Language?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julie Hutt. I’m in Fort Worth, Texas.

Hey, Julie, welcome.

What can we do for you, Julie?

Thanks.

Well, I have been curious for a long time, how far back in history does swearing go?

I ask because I love to watch movies, and when I’m watching a period film, you know, like Gladiator or Braveheart or something, and they start dropping the F-bomb or the S-word or whatever, I’m like, you know, I immediately, it takes me out of the movie, and I’m like, they wouldn’t say that.

And then, so it’s, you know, maybe if I knew they really would say that, then I could watch the movie with more comfort.

There’s like seven topics you’ve just introduced here.

Exactly.

Was there cursing? Yes, there was cursing.

There was cursing.

We have written examples of curse words at least 2,000 years old.

Wow.

We have in the ruins of Pompeii, what was that, 79, on the walls, curses in the graffiti.

Obscene language, like really like even for the time stuff that was considered very naughty.

Wow.

Yeah, the stuff that you might find today written with a Sharpie on the wall of a bathroom in a prison, like that level of really far out there.

And so and that’s not it’s not one offs.

It’s not accidental.

It’s not like, oh, this rare little example of it.

It was really common.

People have pretty much always cursed as far as we know, as far as the written record and as far as the memory of humans goes.

We think they’ve always cursed.

Now, what’s in those curses and what’s considered a curse, now that changes from era to era and from culture to culture.

And it can be very different.

One of the questions we get still pretty regularly, even though it’s been off the air for a while, is about Deadwood.

Did people in the Old West actually curse as much as they do in Deadwood?

Right.

And the thing is, they did.

But what we have here is a change in the way that we reproduce the speech of other people and the availability of that speech to anybody.

So the Internet era, for example, has done a great deal to expose already existing very informal language that you used to only encounter in your conversations with other people or in, say, your letters that you were passing back and forth.

But now what was formerly basically a very closed group of people where, you know, I’d have very informal conversations with my high school buddies or in my house.

Now I put that on the Internet.

It becomes a Facebook post, right?

Or, you know, a Reddit comment, that sort of thing, a Twitter remark.

And so what we have is this – some people have called it an increased informality of language where we are growing more informal.

I’m not 100% sure I completely agree with that.

I will partially say that, yes, there is an increased informality.

But what we’re seeing is the change in the common perception of what coarse language is rather than people being more willing to share coarse language.

Does that make sense?

It does.

And coarse has meant different things over the years.

That’s right.

Whether it’s something that’s more involved with religion, making fun of religion. Obviously, the sexual functions and excretory functions. Body parts, that kind of thing. They’re different kinds.

Yes, and even when we talk about religion, sometimes it was simply using the Lord’s name in vain.

That’s what I mean. Sometimes it was just like really complicated talk about the devil, but God never came up at all.

Right.

In any case, yes, there’s always been cursing, but what we’re seeing is it’s more available to us now. It’s more visible to us now, so it seems like there’s more of it, but actually that’s kind of mostly just an accident of being increasingly in touch with each other and having this text increasingly available to each other. And it’s more acceptable.

Yeah.

I don’t know. We say it more. We listen to it more. No, that’s the thing is like I don’t I think we what the consensus seems to be is that for the most part, people have always cursed and they have always cursed a lot. But the difference is it wasn’t readily available in the common media because the middle to lower registers language rarely made it into print.

Anyway, I can go on about this, but I should close to say one of the ways that you can open people’s eyes about whether or not there’s more or less cursing is to go back and read letters from the American Civil War. And you’ll see this level of amazing informality.

And the cursing isn’t, you know, a lot of F words and that sort of thing.

But you’ll see a lot coarser language than you will say in the newspapers of the day or the speeches of the day or the broadside notices of the day.

You will see this vast difference in the kind and tone of speech.

And this has always existed.

It’s only now, though, that we have the ability and means to share it amongst ourselves.

So more people can see and say, oh, yeah, yeah, people did really talk in a chorus way back then.

Wow. And just to follow up, of course, in movies, the favorite word is the F word.

I mean, do we know how far back that particular word goes?

Because they put it in every movie.

It’s pretty darn far back.

It’s at least the 1500s, and what’s interesting about the F word is that it hasn’t always had the potency that it has now.

Sometimes it was a little less potent.

So, Julie, will this enhance your movie watching now, do you think?

It will. I think I can release some of my analytical side and my judgment and enjoy the film knowing that there’s some validity there.

Take care.

All right, Julie, thanks.

All right, thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye.

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