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7 Truly Remarkable Events in the History of Swearing
Swearing: How it started. How it’s going.
N.B. This is an article about the history of swearing, so do prepare for some R-rated language.
We’ve been swearing roughly as long as we’ve been stubbing our toes or tripping over the (Proto-Indo-European) cat on the way to the (Proto-Indo-European) bathroom in the night. But the types of words that fit the category of what we consider to be “swear words” in English have changed dramatically in the last couple of thousand years. As the linguist Melissa Mohr shows in a fascinating history of swearing, Holy Sh*t, what counts as a forbidden or shocking word underwent a major shift from making oaths before God in the Middle Ages to referring to bodily acts in the Renaissance and beyond. If you wanted to offend a medieval, you’d be much better off talking blithely about “God’s arms” than telling raunchy stories about who swived the Miller’s wife when he went into town.
It’s been almost 2,000 years since a Pompeiian took time out of his day to write, “Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates,” on a wall in the courtyard of the Tavern of Verecundus (as shown in the image above), and as charmingly familiar as ancient Roman rudeness is to our own sensibilities, the art of swearing has taken some absolutely wild twists and turns along the way. In no particular order, here are a few notable happenings in the history of swearing.
1. The medievals thought that swearing literally tears God’s body apart …
According to Mohr, swearing an oath for the medievals was asking God to witness your statement with His very body, so that “When you swear ‘by God’s nails,’ you tear the nails out of God’s hand as he sits in heaven.” This isn’t to say that this sort of swearing was forbidden — it was just an incredibly potent reason not to take an oath trivially or falsely.
