IT’S funny what we take to be swear-words. I can remember first reading John O’Grady’s (writing as Nino Culotta) “They’re a Weird Mob” and being sent into a whimsy of teenaged degenerate exhilaration with the word “bloody”, which appeared with gay abandon in the book.
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We all loved it and it was rare indeed to find a library copy without every “bloody” underlined by a previous reader – as if to be an aid to all the illiterates who might thereafter borrow it and not be able to find them.
It was, in those days of the fifties and sixties, described as “the great Australian adjective” in the more prurient newspapers which refused to print it.
O’Grady’s heinous use of “bastard” wasn’t even hinted at although Shakespeare employed it regularly in its original and literal sense and Bart Simpson, when he found out that it was a legitimate (excuse the pun) word, spouted it a dozen times or so in one episode simply because he could.
Back to the point, I’m not sure that, these days, anyone takes offence at “bloody” at all, unless they are of the opinion that it is blasphemous because it’s short for “by His blood” (the “his” referring to Jesus).
There were lots of these surreptitious curses going on in the later Middle Ages apparently.
If you hit your head on a door-post back in Chaucer’s time you might shout out some imprecation to do with the body of Jesus: “By‘s blood!” or “By‘s eyes!” or “Christ’s nails!”
I guess that the abbreviated forms of “Sighs!” and “Snails” just failed to catch on but the “bloody” bit somehow summed up the feeling perfectly.
Another penchant – quite current up to the middle of the 20th century – was to insert hyphens into words considered obscene (not to mention the habit of avoiding dates and names).
So you might end up with a sentence like, “Dear H__, I’m D----d sorry not to have written but my landlady that b----y Mrs J__ has, since the 13th of __, this year, 19__, withheld all of my d----d mail, the u--y, o-d b----!” Not what you’d call lyrical.
Good old Thomas Bowdler (1754 to 1825) gave us the word “bowdlerise” and you’ll guess its meaning from his promise in the frontispiece to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays to print nothing “but those words and expressions which can with propriety be read aloud in a family”; which got rid of all but three pages of Romeo and Juliet for starters – and we’ve been merrily bowdlerising ever since.
Lenny Bruce (the grandfather of stand-up comedy) was so potty-mouthed that they checked ID and current vaccination certificates at the door.
In one monologue Bruce repeated one swear-word about a hundred times – the punchline being just how bland it became after the umpteenth time.
The question arises, of course, as to whether this means that we become inured to offensive language (we become corrupted by it ourselves), or it eventually becomes part of normal speech (the word – “damned” comes to mind – becomes integrated), or if we decide that it wasn’t really all that offensive at all (we rationalise our own biases).
Indeed, that debate will continue with all and every word that is deemed “offensive” for as long as we go on speaking to each other.
Indeed, the big no-no words today involve anything to do with body shape, ethnicity, colour, gender or religion.
Which, if you ask me, is - pedantic and - ridiculous.
