May the Holy Cross, which Christ for our salvation triumphing over his enemies ascended, curse him!
May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him!
May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers and all the heavenly armies curse him!
(“Our armies swore terribly in Flanders” cried my Uncle Toby, “but nothing to this. For my own part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog so.”)
Tristram Shandy wrote at the beginning of the best period of English profanity (1760–1820), which owes a great debt to Voltaire and his fellow rationalists. The “Zounds!”, “Icod!”, “Zoodikers!”, and “Pox on you!” of a Squire Western were discarded by men of fashion, and the “oath referential” of Acres, facetiously and indecently blasphemous, succeeded these: spreading their culture downwards and materially helping the national morale in the War years that began the new century.
I do not think that Coleridge’s distinction between the violent swearer who does not really mean what he says and the quiet swearer who swears from real malignity is an essential one. He writes in his apologetic preface to Fire, Famine, and Slaughter: “The images, I mean, that a vindictive man places before his imagination will most often be taken from the realities of life: there will be images of pain and suffering which he has himself seen inflicted on other men, and which he can fancy himself as inflicting on the object of his hatred. I will suppose that we heard at different times two common sailors, each speaking of some one who had wronged or offended him, that the first with apparent violence had devoted every part of his adversary’s body and soul to all the horrid phantoms and fantastic places that even Quevedo dreamed of, and this in a rapid flow of those outrageous and wildly combined execrations which too often with our lower-classes serve for escape-valves to carry off the excess of their passions, as so much superfluous steam that would endanger the vessel if it were retained. The other, on the contrary, with that sort of calmness of tone which is to the ear what the paleness of anger is to the eye, shall simply say ‘If I chance to be made boatswain, as I hope I soon shall, and can but once get that fellow under my hand (and I shall be on the watch for him), I’ll tickle his pretty skin. I won’t hurt him, oh, no! I’ll only cut the —— to the liver.’ I dare appeal to all present which of the two they would regard as the least deceptive symptom of deliberate malignity—nay, whether it would surprise them to see the first fellow an hour or two afterwards cordially shaking hands with the very man the fractional parts of whose body and soul he had been so charitably disposing of; or even perhaps risking his life for him.”
No general distinction of motive can be made between swearers who adopt one or other of these methods. The art of one is that of the whirlwind boxer who comes bustling into the ring and excites admiration in the audience, and, he hopes, fear in his opponent by a great display of unnecessary footwork and shoulder-shaking; the other is an old hand, who saves his strength and misleads his opponent, if he can, by pretended slowness and even by “boxing silly”, but after a few ingenuous leads, such as “I’ll tickle his pretty skin! I won’t hurt him, oh, no!” out comes the heavy right-to-jaw: “I’ll only cut the —— to the liver”; with telling effect. And Coleridge obscures the fact that to refuse to shake hands with a man in public or, even more, to refuse to risk one’s life for him, are breaches of social custom far more serious in male society than an oath.
Frequent swearing, then, is often, no doubt, the accompaniment of debauch, cruelty, and presumption, but, on the other hand, it is as often merely what the psychologists call the “sublimation in fantasia of a practical anti-social impulse”; and what others call “poor man’s poetry”. But if the latter simile be permitted, it would seem that original poets are as rare in modern non-literary as they are in literary society. Occasionally in low life one hears a picturesque ancestral oath or an imaginative modern one coined by some true blasphemer and carefully stored by an admirer for his own use—“as in wild earth a Grecian vase”. But for the most part the dreary repetition of the two sexual mainstays of barrack-room swearing is the despair of the artist. This is a mechanical age, and even our swearing has been standardized.