Les Jones

Word of the Day > Word of the Day: Obscene and Profane

This piece on the dirty words in HBO's Deadwood reminds me that there's an important distinction between the profane and the obscene:

The words those "Deadwood" characters would actually have used had religious overtones rather than sexual or scatalogical ones. They would have peppered their speech with "goddamn," "Jesus," and particularly "hell," a word that 19th-century Americans were famous for using with a dazzling virtuosity -- "a hell of a drink," "What in hell did that mean?," "hell to pay," "The hell you will," "hell-bent," "Hell, yes," "like a bat out of hell," "hell's bells," and countless others.

Back then, those oaths were strong enough to spawn a whole vocabulary of the substitutes that H. L. Mencken called "denaturized profanities" -- "darn," "doggone," "dadburned," "tarnation,' "goldarn," "gee-whiz," "all-fired," and the like. (It's only in the 1920's that you start running into substitutes for "fucking" like "freaking" or "effing" -- another sign that it wasn't used as a swear word before then.) But if you put words like "goldarn" into the mouths of the characters on "Deadwood," they'd all wind up sounding like Yosemite Sam.

One reason for the shift is that old-fashioned blasphemy didn't have the same illicit thrill for a secular age. When I was a kid I was always a little puzzled about the commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain. Not that I didn't know better than to say "goddamn" at the dinner table. But when people list the Ten Commandments, it's hard to see why the profanity rap should get a higher billing than murder, theft, or perjury.

That change in attitudes is what drove the soldiers in World War I into the bedroom and bathroom looking for new boundaries to trespass. That shift was more than a simple change of fashion. The old profanity was a matter of irreverance -- using respectable words in disrespectful contexts. The new obscenity is the opposite of that. It's a kind of linguistic slumming, where we bring unclean words into the rooms at the front of the house. The taboo against profanity comes from on high; the taboo against obscenity comes from within.

Lots of interesting history on the evolution of swear words in America. Some are much older than I would have guessed.

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