A Cursory History of Swearing

by Julian Sharman

“February 5th, 1759.—In the evening I went down to the vestry; there was no business of moment to transact, but oaths and imprecations seemed to resound from all sides of the room. I believe if the penalty were paid assigned by the legislature by every person that swears that constitute our vestry, there would be no need to levy any tax to maintain our poor.”

The outbreak must have reached an unprecedented point when we find the president of quarter sessions, Sir John Fielding, alluding to it in the charge to the grand jury delivered at the Guildhall in April, 1763. No language can be stronger than that of Sir John—“I cannot sufficiently lament,” he says “that shameful, inexcusable and almost universal practice of profane swearing in our streets; a crime so easy to be punished, and so seldom done, that mankind almost forget it to be an offence, and to our dishonour be it spoken, it is almost peculiar to the English nation.”

A state of things like this would seem to have given rise to a singular communication addressed to the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ The writer lays the whole blame upon the clergy; they have offered a direct encouragement to swearing by declaring it a sin. He recommends that divines in future should describe it as a virtue, which, he says, may be as easily done as saying the contrary, and he will answer for the success of the experiment. A clergyman of his acquaintance, continues the writer, had already carried this bit of precept into use. To convince the congregation that swearing was far from being a sin, this gentleman constantly practised it in his own discourses. There might indeed be some doubt here which was the worse, the remedy or the disease.

The imprecations that are so severely censured by Fielding are a totally different thing from the imprecations patronised by Lady Grosvenor, if we are to understand the oaths of the populace to have been the hideous and unsightly objects presented for condemnation to the Middlesex jury. And here we hardly need point out the distinction between swearing when at its earnest, and swearing when at its play. In numberless courts and alleys, in the sinks and hiding-places of a great city, we may be sure there are innumerable spots where oaths and imprecations never for a moment are laid aside. They are as punctual and as regular as the ticking of a clock. No word is uttered that has not its accompaniment of an oath; no bread broken that is not devoured with cursing. For why? Human nature is at all times bent upon possessing, and upon increasing what it has acquired. The very act of producing is sufficient to uphold the equilibrium of the mental frame. But this same nature, when pinched and starved, becomes a perfect storehouse of enmity and ill-feeling. Among the denizens of these holes and crannies humanity has been driven very hard. It has been crushed and bruised to a point beyond endurance. The possibility of possessing is very faint, that of enjoying still more remote. No graceful thing—no pleasant thing, can readily come to its hand. Yet there is one chattel they can possess when every stick and stone is denied them. They can be tenacious of their swearing. See how manifestly useful a thing it is! It can give a man an eloquence where none would otherwise belong to him. It can set him up with a semblance of bodily strength, when otherwise he would be puny and fragile. He can assail authorities, and they dare not answer. He can drown down the voice of missionaries, and they are halting in reproval. There are beings so dejected—so penurious—that this swearing constitutes their whole store of worldly opulence. They know it too, in a fashion, although it has never been told them and they themselves are incapable of the telling.

So much for swearing when in grim earnest; how are we to account for it in its transition to sport and play? Unless we are greatly mistaken, there has entered into its composition a spirit of broad humour which has, in a manner, rendered it attractive, if not positively amusing. Were we to put the whole body of bad language to a judicial trial, we should in fairness be compelled to admit the extenuating circumstance of a time-expired claim to the mock-heroic and the ludicrous. It certainly does not sparkle now, but it must have come of a witty stock, and have boasted a mirth-provoking pedigree. To have rendered itself so particularly palatable as it has done, like many other kinds of verbal folly, it can only have taken its rise in a perverted spirit of merriment.

To apply words, and more especially adjectives, in an unwonted and unusual sense is one of the arts which go a long way to make conversation agreeable. To do this with taste, and without corrupting or annihilating the meaning of the word, demands a certain amount of literary skill. To do so at any price frequently demands skill, and is always fraught with consequences of some kind to the listener. Most of these perversions of highly respectable words have now become so trite that they pass unchallenged. The verb “to bag,” for instance, is in jocular use for implying a petty appropriation of property. It must of course at some time have been forcibly wrested from the language of sportsmen, and no doubt with this circumstance secretly underlying it, has been productive, and will be again, of general good-humour. Such another tour de phrase is met with in the verb “to charter.” This originally had reference to the hiring of a ship; but when we hear of chartering a fly, or chartering a stretcher, there certainly arises an odd sense of the incongruous. We are far from saying that the merriment in these cases is acute, but we contend that this kind of pleasantry is at the bottom of every phrase or catchword obtaining universal acceptance.

Examples might be multiplied of this wanton abduction of words. The not very polite expression “the damage,” as signifying the cost of any article of purchase, is one which upon frequent repetition may fail to strike the mind as containing any element of humour. But recollecting the wide region the imagination has to traverse in order to connect the idea of detriment with the idea of price, we are disposed to allow that this mental circuit is enlivened with some shreds of grotesque imagery. Indeed, a large and by no means contemptible portion of the world have derived a high degree of enjoyment from the simple confusion and dislocation of terms. Nothing is more frequent than to find a catch-word ostensibly of no kind of intelligence being exchanged by delighted youths across half the desks and counters of the metropolis. The flippant use of oaths is so far practically explained; the colloquial habit of imputing to unoffending objects a condition of damnation passing in the light of a fairly respectable joke. Joke indeed there is none, but it is the popular repute or suspicion of a jest that exercises this fascination. It is noticeable that a provincial audience witnessing one of Colman’s or Sheridan’s comedies is more genuinely amused by the “zounds” and “dammes” uttered in provoking situations by testy speakers, than by all the polish of epigram and dialogue.

As further illustrating this latent element of humour, which has helped to perpetuate the practice of purposeless swearing, we may be permitted to refer to an occurrence that befell us when, some number of years ago, we happened to be taking a humble part in a legal inquiry at a county assizes. The case was one in which, let us say, Moribundus was plaintiff, and the Juggernaut Railway Company were defendants. It is not necessary to refer to the business of the dispute further than to say that the plaintiff had been shattered almost beyond recovery, and that our province it was to help to prove to demonstration the utter untrustworthiness of the story relied upon by Moribundus. The repast that succeeded the inquiry more nearly concerns us; the lawyers, the London doctor, and the local practitioner having agreed thus to celebrate the evening. We do not recollect that the company were at all disposed to fraternity, as a degree of professional acrimony seemed to preside at that feast. In the course of dinner, one of the party, looking round the board, happens to inquire, “Where’s the damned mustard?” No particular notice is taken of this remark, until presently one of the legal gentlemen solemnly observes, “Where’s the damned salt?” We do not attempt to explain it, but a sudden sense of the ludicrous instantly overcame the men of law and medicine assembled at the Fleece. This incongruous and perfectly irrelevant joinder of words, while it revealed the source from which amusement was supposed to flow, was at the same time a potent satire upon the practice of a disreputable art. It was taking the name of swearing itself in vain. It substituted for any closer argument the incisive logic of ridicule.

It occurs to us to notice that Shakespeare, who was certainly alive to the hidden springs of swearing, has conceived the notion of winging much the same folly with a precisely similar shaft. It had been the fashion among the gay Ephesians of Eastcheap, during Elizabeth’s reign, to swear by their honour. “Where learnt you that oath, fool?” asks Rosalind. “Of a certain knight,” returns Touchstone, “who swore by his honour they were good pancakes.”

With these examples of compromise before us, it becomes almost a matter for regret that there should remain so large a body of protectionists whose resentment at anything savouring of an oath is perhaps one of the surest means of perpetuating swearing. Among the severest codes devised to check the progress of the vice was that designed by the Puritan settlers in Connecticut and Rhode Island. These Blue Laws, as they were called, aimed at establishing an almost theocratic form of government. Adopting the polity of Great Britain as a standpoint, these enactments went considerably further and sought to remodel that system upon the basis of the severest of Jewish ordinances. Among offences to which the Puritan mind would seem to have been especially averse are to be numbered those of swearing and tobacco-smoking. In the case of the latter, however, retribution was only visited upon the after-generation of smokers. People who had already acquired the habit were free to continue in it for the days of their life. In the case of swearing, needless to say, no such licence was extended, convicted swearers being liable to be dealt with according to the gravity of the offence. The penalty seems to have been rated in some instances as low as a fine of five shillings, and to have amounted in others to the punishment of death.