Alright, guys! It is probably pretty obvious by the title and the thumbnail on this video or podcast episode that I'm going to be talking about swearing today. If you do not want to hear about swearing, please do not watch this video or listen to this podcast episode, ok? You have been warned. Enjoy.
G'day, guys! Today I want to talk to you about this book: 'Holy Shit - A Brief History of Swearing'. This was a really, really interesting, as you can probably tell by the number of post-it notes that I have put throughout the book for sections I would probably like to refer to it in the future on the podcast. So, I was going to sort of sit down and try and nut out a bit more of a plan to talk about this book because there was so much in it worth talking about, but I thought if I do that I'm going to forget, if I delay, I'll forget because I just finish this today, so I might just sit down and talk about it now.
So, I found this online whilst I was looking for some books about history of the Australian English, the Australian English, Australian English, but also English in general and I was really curious to know more about swearing in English for obvious reasons, right? It's important, it's a part of the language, it's a part of every language, we do it pretty well in Australia, at least I think, my perspective is a little bit biased, but I've wanted to know more about why we do it and how it's changed throughout history.
So, this book begins talking about what swearing was like in Roman times, right? So, about 0 B.C. around that period when Rome was an empire and there were so many interesting facts, right? So it goes through I'll give you the outline and then I'll tell you some interesting stories from this book, let's see if we can prop it up a little bit high here so that you can see it. The book starts in Rome and it talks about how swearing was seen and how people swore in Roman times and you might be interested to know that obscene words like shit and fuck and cunt and everything like that, excrement related swear words that we find incredibly offensive in English, weren't really seen as that offensive back in the day in Roman times because people were exposed to shit, piss, people having sex, people getting naked and changing all the time, so it wasn't a big deal, it wasn't very offensive to talk about things that happened all the time.
Throughout the chapters they talk about the different periods throughout European history, at least, so going through the middle ages after the Roman Empire went under, so from about I think 400 A.D. to about fifteen hundred A.D. the Middle Ages and in that time this is when we had Christianity kind of going crazy, especially because no one had the capacity to sort of read or write, it was sort of controlled, the religion was really controlled by the guys at the top who decided what you could or couldn't do.
And so they got to interpret the books and understand everything and also sort of control swearing as a sort of result of this, especially the swearing that was in the Bible, but at that time because the place was so much more religious and there was this conflict going on between Catholicism and Protestantism later on in the Middle Ages, the real swearing was using the Lord's name in vain. So, saying things like 'Oh my God' or actually the most common swear word back then was 'God's blood', I think or 'God's bones'.
And the idea in the Middle Ages was that they thought there was swearing, there was giving oaths, and any time that you invoked the Lord's name, he would have to look on you pay attention to you and I guess bear witness to whatever promise or oath or swear you were making, right? So, if you went to a marriage, you're getting married with someone, you swear to God that you're going to marry this person and God sees it and, so has to pay attention to you, and it was a very sacred thing.
So, that was much more important at that time as well than swear words like piss and shit and cunt and dick and all of those horrible ones that we use in English today. Horrible, not so horrible. And it was more so again too because people saw each other going to the toilet, people saw each other having sex, people lived in a single roomed house together at all times and, so you wouldn't use swear words that were related to common things, right? It would be like me telling you to get chewing gum, you know? It's just so common that you wouldn't consider that rude.
And, so what happened was for the Middle Ages it was all about using God's name because every time you used his name, especially when it wasn't giving an oath or swearing something legitimately, it was believed by the Catholics to be causing him harm and that you would say be tearing flesh from Jesus body, Jesus's body every time you used his name in vain, ok? And this is where this sort of culture clash came I think because Protestantism moved away from that belief and Catholicism sort of kept going with it, and obviously in England there was a lot of different sort of wars and controversy over those two religions controlling the country.
So, that happened throughout the Middle Ages and then in the Renaissance from the 16th hundreds onwards it started moving towards rude words, so it started moving away from oaths as such being the rude rude rude words that you would use and much more towards using different parts of the body, ok? It started shifting that way. And then only in the Victorian age, they talk about the Victorian age, did it really start to become taboo to use any kind of body parts or sexual swear words at all. Religion had kind of taken a back seat and wasn't important as it was in the Middle Ages and people as well because they'd shifted towards Protestantism, they didn't believe that by saying, you know, 'oh my God' or 'Gods blood' or 'Gods bones' that you are actually inflicting pain on God or that he had to notice you the same way that the Catholics had believed previously.
And, so it shifted towards all of these rude words getting power that we're now talking about sexual acts, body parts and excrement, which I found really interesting because it's still like that today. Except it kind of peaked, so they were talking about during the Victorian era, so this is 18 hundreds 219 hundreds, this is when everyone in England, at least in the upper class, was trying to shift away from the bottom class and really be proper and they were using euphemisms galore, right? So, they were using heaps and heaps of long winded, complicated, delicate ways of talking about things that today you would just say with a single word, For instance 'leg'. They wouldn't say the word 'leg' they would use the word 'limb'.
There were a few of those things, you would just never refer to certain body parts, you would have to use a different word or a different way of describing them. And yes, so that was you know women covered their wrists and their ankles and their necks and everything, went nuts and then they go into the 20th century and after the wars happened, World War I and World War II, I think the basic thesis was that men going to these places hanging out together, spending a lot of time together under these kinds of conditions, they started swearing a lot more, they started being a lot more informal and then when they came back after the wars, they sort of dissolved that Victorian prudness, right?
And, so it no longer had the same sting to kind of talk about things like your penis or ankles legs, vaginas, whatever it was, ok? So, it sort of shifted down and then that got absolutely obliterated by the time the 1960s came through and you had the hippie era, you know, free love people again going back to having sex with a lot of partners, being naked, having their breasts out in the street. So, again now because that was much more common, there wasn't the same sting from using those sorts of swear words. That period is where the racial term started to come in, ok? In the 20th century and there the king, they're the ones reigning supreme today of the rudest words in English. The racial slurs and I'll just say them because, you know, it's obviously relevant, but things like 'nigger' things like 'abo' things like 'paki','chink', any of those really, really rude racial slurs are the ones that reigned supreme today.
And interestingly have only just started moving away from the literal meaning of those words, which is when you know they're going to start losing their strength. So, for instance she was saying the word 'nigger' if you say it with an R in it, 'nigger', as American accent, that is incredibly offensive to use that in American English because it was what the white slave owners were using pejoratively to refer to African-Americans. However, the African-Americans took the strength of that word back by using the word 'nigga' and putting an A on the end of it and now it starts to refer to other people, right? Kind of like guys, so she was talking about some tweets where someone was talking about being stung by a wasp and that that 'nigga then just flew off' and someone else said their cat fell into the bath and the 'nigga got really wet'.
So, the word now is starting to move away from its literal meaning, which had previously been it had been used for African-Americans or say 'chink' being used for Chinese people or Asian people, but yeah it's a really good story. I found the book really interesting. There is a lot of vulgar language in there for obvious reasons, you can't really talk about swearing without swearing, but it was a really, really cool story I thought, you know, sort of understanding how rude words tend to be.
The thing in the culture that is the most taboo at the time, and I guess today it goes to show if racial words are the most taboo swear words, it's because being racist is the most taboo thing in society currently. It makes sense and it's going to be interesting to see where that goes in the future, she made some comments about the word 'nigga', which is arguably the strongest word in English today or close to 'paki', I think, the British one that they use that for Indians or Pakistanis.
And again, guys, I'm not suggesting you go out and use these, but the authors suggested that these words might end up being as versatile as words like 'fuck' or 'dam' or 'shit' in the future if society moves on and something else takes the place of taboo words, but yeah, so there was some really interesting stories in the book that I wanted to kind of get to.
In Roman times, and this kind of blew my mind, the Romans had a completely different attitude towards sex and sexuality. It was a lot less to do with heterosexuality and homosexuality and much more to do with dominance and, I guess, subservience, right? So there would be the person who fucks and there's the person who gets fucked. Right. So, there's the person who penetrates and that's the person who gets penetrated and in Roman times it was a lot less taboo to be penetrating a man, say than it is today, right?
So, you could have sex with a man, you could have sex with a woman, you could have sex with whatever, effectively, and if you were the one doing that, if you were the one penetrating, there was very little taboo, there was very little negativity seen towards those people who did that. However, if you were penetrated that was a very, very dirty and bad thing. Especially, if you weren't a woman. So, obviously for women it was a natural part of their biology that they need to be penetrated to get pregnant, to have kids, but if you were a man receiving it, you were it was not so much the fact that you were having sex and being penetrated, but more that that represented you were dominant.
And, so their society was all structured around dominance in that way and the swearing reflected this. So, the worst thing that you could be called back then from the book was, I think, 'irrumatio', which is effectively if you get fucked in the mouth, effectively it means to be the person who causes someone else to have oral sex with you. And, so obviously that was one of the worst things for someone to undergo, voluntarily or not, and so that was the worst word to be called. If someone called you that and suggested that you like to suck dicks, that was much much, much, much, much more strong than any kind of swear word related to God or using the word 'fuck', because again sex was a common thing, was seen in public, people pooed and pissed in public.
So, I found that mindblowing, you know, I had no idea about that aspect of culture back then being so much more centred around dominance and that being ultimately the most important thing as opposed to who you have sex with. And yeah, which one of you is on top. That was an interesting story.
Moving on, another part that I found really interesting was that during the middle ages, again swear words were much more concerned about taking the Lord's name in vain, saying words like 'oh my God' or 'Gods blood' and not using words like 'cunt' or 'fuck' or 'shit'. And again, it was because these things were everywhere, they were ubiquitous. You would walk outside and you would see people pulling in the street or pissing in the street, you would see there would be prostitutes everywhere, at least if we're talking about England in say London, so you would be surrounded by people having sex, going to the toilet, spitting, pissing, talking about these things. So, using these kinds of words as offensive it was just something you didn't do, right? It'd be like me saying, you know, I cough on you or I burp in your face or I turn my back on you.
These things in our culture aren't really taboo, so they're not offensive when you say it, so that blew my mind. And then those words started becoming more and more offensive as we started desiring to make those things more and more private. So, as Europeans went through, I can't remember the phrase they use, but as they effectively started having houses with more rooms, all of us suddenly had more privacy and this was happening in the Renaissance, so I think in about fifteen hundreds, sixteen hundreds. All of a sudden these people didn't live in a single room with a single house.
I remember what it is, it's when they created chimneys, so instead of just having a fire in the centre of the house, people could now have an isolated fire in different rooms and the smoke would go up through the chimney as opposed to through the middle of the house and then out of the roof. And, so now different rooms could be occupied throughout winter as well, you didn't have to share the same room and people started valuing privacy. So, that was something really shocking to me, obviously, in today's world, it's not uncommon for us to have extreme levels of privacy.
We wear clothes, we don't get changed in front of each other, we have change rooms, the cubicles that the toilets are all single person cubicles, you know, back in Roman times you might be sitting next to eight different guys all taking a crap or shitting and it just wasn't a big deal, but during the Renaissance that's when rooms started being built onto houses, extra rooms, people started getting privacy and as a result they started, I guess, having sex in private, going to the toilet in private and those words and those things all started to become more and more taboo because they were less and less frequent in front of other people.
So, yeah, anyway it was a really good book, guys. I really recommend that you read this. It is 'Holy Shit', by Melissa Moore, 'A Brief History of Swearing'. It's fascinating the level of English in it is pretty high, so if you're a beginner in English maybe give it a miss for a little while, but yeah, I thoroughly recommend it.
I hope you weren't too offended by this video. I hope you enjoyed it and I would love to know what you think. What do you think about swearing in English? And is it the same in your language? Are the words the same? Are the things that you consider taboo or rude the same? And where do you think swearing is going to go in the future? Ok, so thanks for joining me, guys. I'm Pete from Aussie English and I'll to you soon. Peace.