The First Dirty Word

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rich Grant calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Rich. Welcome to the show.

What’s up? What can we help with?

Well, I had a question I want to ask about dirty words. Not the actual words themselves, but kind of like the concept. Like, how did the first person to ever use a dirty word know that it was a dirty word? And how did the first person who heard it would actually know that it was a bad word?

What a great question. Have you invented a time machine so we can go back and find out?

I wish I did.

That is really the only way we’re ever going to know for sure. But we do know about some modern dirty words that have been created. And we can kind of surmise based upon more recent words whose history is fully known about those original terms. And it tends to be around the power that we have in certain emotions. The utterances that we make when we’re angry, when we’re surprised, disgusted, regretful, those sorts of things. And they could have been grunts back in the caveman days, so to speak, right? And they become associated with these particular emotions. And in that way, they are invested with power.

Now, in the modern age, when we have sexual terms, there’s a kind of power because I don’t know how to put this exactly, but sexual politics come into play here. Sex acts are invested with a certain amount of power because they are granted or withheld, because we desire it or we don’t desire it with somebody else. And in this way, the act takes on this special significance because we invest it with a higher meaning beyond the act itself, right? You want sexual relations with the person, therefore you attach a lot of emotional power to that. And therefore there’s a transference from the desire to the act to the word. And there’s a lot of dilution, of course, along the way of that power, but there’s enough left to give the word some kind of real oomph.

Well, and there are other words involving power too, like religion, right?

That’s right. It’s been a factor. That’s another. Modern English dirty words, naughty words, taboo words, don’t tend to relate to religion, but there was a time when it all had to do with God and Jesus and the church and the Pope and the Bible and swearing as literally swearing and basically condemning yourself to hell by using these words in the wrong way.

I also kind of wondered why it was speaking about that, why it’s okay to say, like, gosh darn it, instead of it’s more colorful.

We are the masters of cognitive dissonance, are we not? We are able to allow ourselves to believe something is not as powerful as something else simply by changing the spelling and the pronunciation, even though it means exactly the same thing.

Yeah, or bleeping it out. I mean, everybody knows what the words are.

We do. The first letter there, the first sound is there, and the last sound is there, and we know what’s in between. But we kind of give ourselves a pass, right?

It’s kind of the letter of the language rather than the spirit of the language that we’re paying attention to.

And that’s a good way to put it, yeah.

And it’s actually a fair compromise, to be honest, because we’re never going to get rid of this language. The taboo language is never going to disappear from English, just as it’s never disappeared from any language on the planet.

Do you think it’s going to change in the future?

I mean, just talking about it from time immemorial, I just wonder if it’s going to evolve into a few hundred years from now.

It still does. You can look at words like bloody, like the well-known British and Australian English, you know, that’s bloody things not working, you know, right? But in the United States, there’s almost zero tabooness about bloody, almost none.

Right.

And in Australia, there’s a little more, but it’s still not enough. You can still use it on the floor of Parliament. But in the U.K., bloody is not a word that you’re likely to hear in Parliament. And this has changed over the centuries that this has been a term.

Well, thank you.

Thank you for having me on.

Do you swear, by the way? Let me ask that.

That’s a good question.

Well, you know what? I used to swear, like when I was in the Army, I could used to swear like a sailor, but as I get older now, I don’t use those words anymore.

Interesting.

Do you know why? I mean, do you have any idea?

I think it’s when I moved from New Jersey to Texas, people were just a little more upset with the words.

Yeah, I found that when I moved from New York City to California, that what was considered perfectly normal in a boardroom did not work here.

That’s really funny.

Regional cursing.

Yes. Rich, thanks so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

I’ll take this opportunity to recommend a book to you. That is Jeffrey Hughes’ Encyclopedia of Swearing. He covers a lot of this territory. It’s a big, fat book. You can check it out of your library.

Encyclopedia of Swearing?

Yeah, by Jeffrey Hughes.

Okay. 877-929-9673.