May the Devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.
That parboiled imp with the hardest jaw you will see
On virtue’s path and a voice that would rasp the dead....
... May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may
The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange;
but it is most unlikely that this is a faithful example of the swearing of that day. It is known that swearing in the war[4] was of a very violent character, but not a trace of it, beyond an occasional damn or bloody, occurs in Siegfried Sassoon’s otherwise very realistic war-poems. Contemporary newspaper reports of divorce-proceedings are known to have been rigorously cut: such euphemisms were employed as “a certain condition”, “a certain posture”, “a certain organ”, “a certain unnatural vice”, so that it is difficult to know why such interest in these cases was shown by the readers of the newspapers, unless they were possessed of that primitive intuition which the savages in our own Central African reservations still to some measure display.
[4] Field records that a party of deaf and dumb children were in 1918 taken to a cinema-show called The Somme Film and had to be taken away because of the ‘bad language’ on the screen.
‘Two cases are known of a whole edition (150,000 copies) of a daily newspaper having to be destroyed because of a breach of the taboo which escaped the proof-reader. Both are recorded by Brunel in his Recent Press History 1928, but he mentions no names and does not explain the matter in great detail:
The whole country edition of one of our leading dailies had on one occasion to be suppressed because of a one-word change made in a leading article by a printer who was under notice of discharge: the alteration was made after the proofs had been passed. The sentence was, if I remember: