Ascent of the A-Word Read online

  The Twilight of Profanity

  Those substitutions signaled a dramatic change in the raw material of swearing. Our loose use of profanity as a synonym for “swear word” is a legacy of the Victorian era, when swearing consisted almost entirely of profanity in its narrow sense: oaths involving damn, Lord, God, Jesus, Christ, and above all hell, a word that nineteenth-century Americans were famous for using with a dazzling virtuosity: a hell of a drink, what in hell?, give him hell, the hell I will, go to hell, and countless others. To the Victorians, those imprecations were noisome enough to spawn a whole vocabulary of the substitutes that H. L. Mencken called “denaturized profanities” including heck, goldarn, doggone, dadburned, tarnation, gee-whiz, all-fired, blazes, and the like. Mencken dismissed such words as “by the Y.W.C.A. out of the tea-shoppe,” but they sounded stronger to Victorian ears and had little of the comical overtones that they have for us.10 To reckon by the schedule of fines for cursing posted in a World War I military hospital, goldarn at 15¢ was considered stronger than a plain damn at 10¢ but less culpable than a “damn with an extra”—goddamn? double-damn?—which would set the offender back a quarter.

  But Victorian profanity was never really intended as blasphemous, other than incidentally. For honest-to-God blasphemy—“ evil speaking against God maliciously,” as Milton defined it—you have to go to the popular traditions of Catholic cultures, like the Italian oaths called bestemmie: porco Dio, “pig God,” madonna troia, “whore madonna,” and so on. Rather, the profanity was a working-class response to the condescending sanctimoniousness of the ruling orders: “the response that recklessness makes to hypocrisy,” in the words of the Unitarian preacher Octavius Brooks Frothingham. “The profanity of the streets,” Frothingham wrote in 1876,is certainly disgusting enough to the refined taste, but it is less impious than it sounds. The people who indulge in loud and frequent oaths do so for the most part thoughtlessly . . .“God” is a term oftenest in the mouths of people who repel them by their solemn faces and sanctimonious manners. . . . For the common profanity of men the pious people of the community are responsible to a larger degree than they suspect.

  Frothingham probably exaggerated the theological ignorance of the people he described as “the low-lived and vicious,” but he understood the motive for their profanity. Like the swearing of soldiers in World War II, the point was to demonstrate a contempt for the proprieties dictated by the officer class, whether military or civilian. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman describes the vulgarity of the Victorian working class as a kind of tax evasion, “a protest against . . . bourgeois standards and a defense of their own territories, customs, and traditions.”

  Working-class vulgarity wasn’t like the cant or slang of the working-class or the underworld, which served to mark an in-group status or to conceal what was being said from the casual listener. (Thackeray parodied the cant in Vanity Fair: “Is that your snum? I’ll gully the dag and bimbole the clicky in a snuffkin.”) Swear words had to be readily comprehensible to outsiders, so that they could be shocked by them. For those purposes, it wasn’t terribly important whether the transgression involved the use of religious language in low contexts or the mention of obscene terms, which made the transition from profanity to obscenity nearly seamless: when the former became less scandalous, soldiers naturally reached for the latter.

  What mattered was the effect the words would have on superiors, authorities, or simply the “respectable,” whether or not they were actually present. The soldier’s pleasure in saying “goddamn” or later “fucking” arose from imagining the indignation the language would evoke, or in imagining being able to say the words to an officer’s face with impunity. Paul Fussell recounts a “rumor-joke” popular among enlisted men in the European Theater that gave expression to every soldier’s fantasies of insubordination: General Patton, inspecting a hospital in France, chews out a man for not coming to attention in his presence. The man replies, “Run along, asshole—I’m in the merchant marine.” The joke has a modern successor in the story about the Texan who’s visiting Harvard (with variants about an American asking a Londoner how to find Big Ben, etc.):TEXAN: Where’s the library at?

  PROFESSOR: Here at Hahvahd we don’t end our sentences with a preposition.

  TEXAN: OK, then, where’s the library at, asshole?

  As in the World War II joke, asshole is the rejoinder of the ordinary Joe to pretension or self-importance, the difference being that in the contemporary version the speaker doesn’t have to justify his right to be impertinent.

  Now as then, the subtext of swearing has always been class. In 1901, Professor G. T. W. Patrick wrote in Psychological Review that swearing was particularly prevalent “among soldiers and sailors, in the laboring classes, among the uneducated, and among criminals,” who had not understood that “advancing civilization bids us evermore inhibit and repress.” But swearing was never restricted to the lower orders. Rather, those associations gave it its potency for middle-class speakers, who have always used it to evoke the traits that custom assigns to working-class men—to make themselves sound tough, forthright, and intolerant of pretension and prudishness, particularly in those all-male contexts where the use of bad words is ritualized. The upper-class “dandies” who joined Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba proved to be, to the surprise of the regular army soldiers in the unit, “a husky lot of fellers . . . they was expert on the swear.”

  By the early twentieth century though, the taboos were fraying. Swearing was becoming common, even in smart middle-class social settings and in mixed company. From the First World War onwards, we run into frequent denunciations of the fashionable use of swear words by would-be sophisticates, a vogue derided as the “mucker pose.” That phrase was first popularized in a 1921 article in Harper’s by the novelist Philip Curtiss, who defined it as “that curious state of mind which induces well-bred, intelligent people to disclaim superciliously any refinement, education, or natural good taste which heredity or opportunity may have given them, and to set themselves deliberately to the worship of the coarse and the commonplace. ”Writing in the same magazine a few years later, the historian James Truslow Adams wrote that the mucker-poseurs“ do not content themselves with talking like uneducated half-wits. They also emulate the language and manners of the bargee and the longshoreman . . . and assume as protective coloration the manners and thought level of those who are beneath them.” He cited the “young scion of American aristocracy with every social and educational advantage” describing his new position in banking to friends at his club as “the God-damnedest most interesting job in the world.”

  Nor was the use of risque language the exclusive province of men: “If one wants to acquire an extensive and varied vocabulary of the most modern sort,” Adams said, “one has merely to watch the young ladies of the mucker-poseur type playing tennis at Southhampton or Newport.” Writing in Harper’s in 1927, Mary Agnes Hamilton noted that anyone who listened to modern conversation would be struck by the “high proportion, in that vocabulary, of words such as, in the older jargon, ‘no lady could use,’” in particular the “expletives and ‘swear words’ that have no real significance in this unbelieving age. They are all over the place; they act as a sort of obbligato to a modern conversation.” The point was illustrated by a drawing from a 1931 book called The Deb’s Dictionary that defined damn as “a feminine expression of annoyance.”

  Ordinary middle-class Americans were slower to adjust to the more permissive climate, and many of the official sanctions on profanity remained in place for a long time. As late as mid-century, a number of American newspapers hesitated to use even softened profanities such as damfool and helluva, while the Hays Code prohibited the appearance in movies of items like God, Lord, and Jesus Christ “unless used reverently.” When he made Gone with the Wind in 1939, David Selznick happily paid a $5,000 fine for the privilege of including Rhett Butler’s closing “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But as profanity became more common in literature a
nd the theater it inevitably lost a lot of its shock value. As Hamilton wrote, “Playwrights are out to shock audiences who, as a matter of fact, are immune to the kind of shock they seek to give them. . . . Dramatists thoroughly involved in the effort to do ‘strong’ things get ‘stronger’ and ‘stronger’; their audience’s reaction gets weaker and weaker.” When the World War I drama What Price Glory opened on Broadway in 1924, a story went the rounds about a young man who took his elderly aunt to see the play, unaware that it was laced with soldierly profanities. Increasingly uncomfortable on her behalf, he suggested at the end of act one that they leave, to which she replied, “Just let me find my goddamned handkerchief.”

  The enfeeblement of profanity led some to predict the disappearance of swearing. The critic Burges Johnson wrote in 1931: “When man began to lose his belief in a petty-minded, interfering God, then oaths and curses began to lose their true value . . . [Now] even the surviving cuss-words, maledictions, and execrations of ancient and half-forgotten lineage are dying of anemia, sharing the fate of zounds and gramercy and odsblood.” And H. L. Mencken wrote in 1944 that “all recent writers upon the subject seem to be agreed that profanity is now in one of its periods of waning.” That was the very same perception that stimulated the coining of obscene counterparts for profanities among the working class, as we saw, and these too were soon being picked up by middle-class sophisticates, led by avant-garde writers like Dos Passos and Pound. Denatured obscenities like “freaking” for fucking entered the language in the 1920s, an indication that people were feeling the need to suggest the word without actually saying it. So, too, did the phrase “dirty word” in its modern meaning as an obscenity.11

  Vulgarity in Mufti

  It was some time before the secondhand obscenities would enter the register of general middle-class speech. At first, the language that the discharged GIs brought back with them struck many as an incomprehensible register. Mencken may have lamented the weakening of profanities, he but took no solace in the appearance of their obscene counterparts; writing in 1948, he said:We have lately seen the heroes of a great moral war march home with a repertory of invective almost tragically thin and banal. Like any other Christian soldiers, they used a great deal of foul language in field and camp, but very little of it got beyond a few four-letter words. These four-letter words were so cruelly overworked that . . . they came to mean anything or everything. A soldier simply threw in one or another of them whenever his flow of ideas began to run sluggish, which was usually.

  When The Naked and the Dead came out in that same year, many critics saw its language not just as repugnant but as alien. Orville Prescott gave the novel a rave review in the New York Times (“the most impressive novel about the second World War that I have ever read”), but took Mailer to task for his excessive use of obscenities:In his effort to carry his realistic portrayal of men at war to the ultimate degree of authenticity he has wallowed in a grotesque and exaggerated fidelity to the coarseness of their language. In the middle of this outspoken century no normal adult has any illusions about the profanity and obscenity of soldier talk. But . . . there is more explicitly vile speech in “The Naked and the Dead” than I have ever seen printed in a work of serious literature before. It is probably truthful reporting, but it is unnecessarily offensive and it is marvelously tiresome.

  More than sixty years later, what strikes us as quaint about that passage isn’t just Prescott’s prim disapproval of Mailer’s more or less faithful rendering of his characters’ language. It’s also Prescott’s assumption that the language belonged to an exotic dialect of “soldier talk” and his conjecture that the reporting was “probably” truthful, as if he were evaluating the accuracy of nautical terminology in a Patrick O’Brian novel set during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Even as Prescott was writing, though, the new vocabulary was becoming more commonplace in sophisticated circles. War novelists such as Mailer, James Jones, Leon Uris, and Irwin Shaw may have had something to do with that, as did the Beats and the writers of noir fiction. In the postwar period, one British publisher noted, a measure of forbidden language was “almost obligatory in any novel that laid claims to realism.” Indeed, by the time Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny was published in 1951, it was noteworthy for its linguistic restraint—in an explanatory note, Wouk said that he had left unrecorded “the general obscenity and blasphemy of shipboard talk . . . which is largely monotonous.” By then, Wouk’s reticence was so unusual that Time headed its review of the book “Realism Without Obscenity”12

  But the new language was chiefly spread by the returning servicemen themselves. During the war, Bernard DeVoto noted in 1948, “military life made most of the monosyllables automatic in the conversation of the soldiers and sailors whom millions of women knew,” even as the taboo on the use of the words in mixed company was being relaxed. Indeed, he noted, among well-to-do and metropolitan women, four-letter words were coming to signify “frankness, sophistication, liberalism, companionability, and even smartness.” DeVoto suggested that the appearance of the words in recent fiction merely reflected their growing acceptability in speech: “Literature lags behind society, and this change was well established before fiction took much note of it. On the upper level of society the words have lost much of the shocking power in conversation that they used to have, and since those are the levels which read fiction, they have therefore lost most of their shocking power in print.” He went on to observe that it is the people who do not commonly read novels who are most distressed at seeing the words in books.

  But the habits of metropolitan sophisticates of DeVoto’s circles in Cambridge and New York weren’t representative of the general drift of American speech. On the contrary, the very fact that an occasional use of the four-letter words was considered “smart” suggests that they were still considered daring or naughty, and that this was an advanced form of elite mucker-posing, not yet part of middle-class speech or even prep-school slang. Holden Caulfield’s swearing in Salinger’s 1950 The Catcher in the Rye is largely restricted to profanities like goddam and hell, and an occasional Chrissake when angry; his obscenities go no further than ass and crap. When he does encounter fuck you written on the wall of his sister’s school, he’s distressed by it:But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it.

  True, Holden might very well have used the expression himself in another context if he was sufficiently provoked (though it’s easier to imagine it coming from Ackley or Stradlater). Still, Salinger didn’t have Holden use fucking as an intensifier or say pissed off, fuck up, no shit, fuck around or other items that would have been routine in the speech of adolescents a generation later—and he didn’t use asshole, though the word would have applied perfectly to half the characters in the novel if it had been part of Holden’s active vocabulary. That clearly wasn’t out of Salinger’s sense of delicacy, given that he had no qualms about including the fuck you’s that kept the book on most-frequently-banned lists for the next thirty years. At the time, upper-middle-class adolescent boys didn’t yet talk that way. A few years later, things would be different. By the mid-fifties John O’Hara’s brittle upper-class women characters are saying things like “You’re damn fucking right I am” and “I feel like a shit” (though asshole doesn’t appear in any of his novels). By then, Holden would have been saying them, too.

  The Repeal of Reticence

  It’s natural to see the spread and acceptance of the new vocabulary as another episode in “the repeal of reticence,” the name the historian Rachel Gurstein has given to the century-long process in which society abandoned Victorian inhibitions about t
he public discussion of sexuality, the body, and the intimate details of personal life. The phrase originated as the title of an article by the Catholic writer Agnes Repplier that sparked a national discussion when it appeared in 1914 in the Atlantic Monthly. Repplier sounded an alarm about the books, plays, and articles about sex that were flooding America, and complained about the breaking of the “obsession of sex which has set us all a-babbling about matters once excluded from the amenities of conversation”:Stories minutely describing houses of ill-fame, their furniture, their food, their barred windows, their perfumed air, and the men with melancholy eyes who visit them. Novels purporting to be candid and valuable studies of degeneracy and nymphomania. . . . All these horrors, which would have made honest old Hogarth turn uneasily in his grave, are offered for the defense of youth and purifying of civilized society.