Swearing & Slurring

   The night light which turns on automatically when the darkness arrives, just came on at mid-day. The day is also damp as well as dreary so I might as well jot down a few words. Since I have no profound year-end thoughts to offer, I will return to a consideration of profanity which began in my recent eulogy for Reinhold Aman who was a scholar of it. I am not, although I swear a fair bit. What follows are a few thoughts and sources about ‘bad language’ which were left out of the quickly written paean for the late Professor Aman.

   On the one hand, we speak cautiously these days, on the other, the middle finger is often raised. Even the cursing stand-up comedian is expected to display some comity when discussing a particular ethnic group or gender. If you are considering a career as a politician, you might want to take another career path if you told a Polish joke at the company picnic back in the last century when some of us thought them funny. Ethnophaulisms have been eliminated and pejorative terms purged from our conversations and essays, but we can curse like a m***f***g sailor as long as the speech is not deemed to be ‘hateful’.

Take The F-Word For Example

   Unlike the N-word, the F-one is okay. It was used over 500 times in the Wolf of Wall Street and now appears in the title of some films. It also appears in the titles of many books. Here are a few:  F*ck Feelings: One Shrink’s Practical Advice for Managing All Life’s Impossible Problems, is written by the same father-daughter team that produced F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding A Lasting Relationship. The author of F*ck Love also wrote F*ck Marriage. Perhaps you can get a bulk discount from Amazon if you also order these three: The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don't Have with People You Don't Like Doing Things You Don't Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide), by Sarah Knight. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, Mark Manson. What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, by Benjamin K. Bergen.
   I confess to having read one F-book and it is the one you should read if you are interested in all things f***able. It was written by a lexicographer and published by the Oxford University Press: The F-Word, Jesse Sheidlower. He is the same person who wrote the nice piece about the passing of Reinhold Aman.
  You will learn from the book that it is not true that the F-word is an acronym derived from such phrases as "Found Under Carnal Knowledge" or "Fornication Under Consent of the King". You will learn when the word first appeared in films, print, etc. and where it is concealed in songs such as “If You See Kaye”. The entries in the book are arranged like those in the OED (where Sheidlower did some editing) and show how the f-word is used as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection or infix. The first entry provides an example of an infix - ‘absof***inglutely. The last one is ‘zipless f***k. If you don’t believe me, “F***k you and the horse you rode in on” (p.100).
   For a very good and funny account about how the use of crude language has crept into articles in newspapers and magazines read Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris. In the chapter with the title "F**k This Sh***t " she asks the question, “Has the casual use of profanity in English reached high tide? Her answer: F***k yeah!.

What Would Aman Do?

    In respectable publications (and blogs such as this one) how should one display  a ‘bad’ word, or should one display any at all? But, what if a Prime Minister or Vice President Cheney, says “F***k Off”. Does the reporter use “Fuddle-Duddle” or a bunch of asterisks? Aman, of course, argued that such words are used and should be written as used. He offers the various methods used to censor profanities and they are provided here in order from best to worst:

1. Spell it out . Aman says newspapers have become bolder with words such as fart, piss and ass.

2. Drop vowels (F-ck, sh*t). "If you use f-ck, we all know what it means, so why should spelling it out make anyone more upset?"

3. Drop all letters except the first (F – -, s***).

4. Insert [vulgarity deleted] or [blasphemy deleted]. "At least then the reader has some idea of the genre. 'Expletive deleted' means nothing."

5. Falsify the word (change hell to heck, fuck to fudge). "That method annoys the hell out of me.

6. Employ euphemisms , such as [opposite of father-hater] or [vulgar term for excrement].

7. Substitute all letters except the first with an underline (c____), such as Time magazine does. But Aman protests, "There's a big difference between cocksucker and cunt."

8. Insert ellipses or dingbats ($%@#!). In a column about a college student expelled for yelling racial epithets, Ellen Goodman reported he had shouted "...Jews!" "That's blatantly withholding information from the reader," Aman charges. "When someone is kicked out of school for a hate crime, I want to know what he said."

9. Delete the word altogether . To Aman, a cardinal sin.

Sources: 

   The editorial advice by Aman is found in: "Maledicta Favors the Whole F***ing Truth,"Chip Rowe, The American Journalism Review, Jan./Feb. 1992.

For some general books:

Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk

How Not To Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms, R.W. Holder

Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms , Ralph Keyes

Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr.

In Praise of Profanity, by Michael Adams.

Swearing is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, Emma Byrne

Post Script:

Jonathon Green’s Green’s Dictionary of Slang, in three volumes (2010), lists 1,740 words for sexual intercourse, 1,351 for penis, 1,180 for vagina, 634 for anus or buttocks, and 540 for defecation and urination.

If you want to reminisce about those old ethnic jokes see: A Dictionary of International Slurs (Ethnophaulisms: With a Supplementary Essay on Apects of Ethnic Prejudice), by A.A. Roback.