The Art of Swearing

Those of us who are daring enough to use the c-word need it to be socially risque. Or it ceases to have a point. 

Today, there are bare-naked ladies in the newspapers, sexual perverts in inner-city woodland, and sexually perverted, bare naked transexuals on the internet, and I’d like to bet you have no plans upon visiting a church any time soon. It is all part of the larger picture of time moving on and the habits of a nation changing. And of course, what would once have shocked the country to its core is now considered entirely normal. 

As a nation, it is now perfectly reasonable to sit down, tune into Channel 4, and watch a televised autopsy, hosted by the creepiest man to emerge from the television of recent times: Gunther von Hagens. Yet, contrastingly, we would be astonished and amazed if Nick Clegg suddenly burst out from his position of political lap-dog and made a speech tomorrow morning in which he describes David Cameron as a fuckwit. 

And why is this so shocking? We use the f-word all the time of course. It has entered the common vocabulary of the everyday. Buzz Aldrin definitely used it on the moon and I just know it nestles in the vocabulary of Prince Philip. We think Peter Mandelson used it too, when addressing Jeremy Paxman and the rest of the Newsnight panel during last year’s election campaign, but we can never be entirely sure because a) Mandelson is a slimy, reptilian human manifestation of Lord Voldemort and b) because journalists can’t use it in print. 

We are far removed from the day when the word was first ever used on British television - by the critic Kenneth Tynan - and at the time, it caused national outrage, with one Tory MP suggesting the foul-mouthed perpetrator should be hanged. The f-word was practically taboo amongst the media, despite the fact it was in common usage by most of the country. 

And yet now, just forty or so years later, the status of the f-word as the worst swear word has diminished and dwindled to almost nothing. So why, if words move in and out of common parlance so easily, has the f-word been the ultimate in dirty speech since the dark, muddled dawn of the English language? 

One could easily argue that this is not at all the case. People with pipes, bifocals and v-necked jumpers will claim that it in the not too distant past, words of an anatomical or scatological nature were not frowned upon at all. Because of the general greater influence of the church, all swearwords of the time were religious: Jesus Christ, goddamnit and so on. So they would argue, as a result, that there has been a gradual shift in the nation’s choice of profanity. 

But I really do disagree. And to illustrate my point, I take the worst word in the whole entire world. You know which one I’m talking about, and you’ll know why I can’t even attempt to camouflage such a thing behind a mask of asterisks. 

It can easily be seen, in varying forms, in our literature of the distant murky past, since before the Norman Conquest in fact, although I am basing my historical knowledge on..well, assumption. But to base it in something I have a bit more of a solid understanding of, when Orphelia says Hamlet cannot lie in her lap, Hamlet replies “Do you think I meant country matters?”. These are not the words of delicate innuendo, but a clear example of Shakespeare having a chortle out of the worst word in the world, same as he does in Twelfth Night too, come to think of it. This is something he couldn’t have done without any conviction if it wasn’t still the worst word in the world back then. 

To go back even earlier using my patchy knowledge of our country’s literature, even Chaucer wouldn’t write it bare upon the page, or parchment, or velum, or whatever. He dodged this issue in The Miller’s Tale, infamously full of shameless smut, with the line “Pryvely he caught hir by the queynte”. Mind you, this is pretty obtuse to the modern reader, as to the untrained eye, it just looks like a lack of standardised spelling was causing Chaucer a few issues. 

Following a brief spate of Googling, I now know that the worst word in the world was entered into the dictionary in 1961, but it remains a massive no-no amongst the tweedily decent. The Guardianists and foul-mouthed have crossed the moat, scaled the walls and traversed the bailey of the morally upright, but so long as the keep is held up by the c-word cornerstone, all is not lost. 

Frankly, I’m delighted by this trend, despite the fact I personally despise the worst word in the world. It means that those of us who use it still can with emphasis, because it remains socially risque. 

My own mother is a stickler for no bad language in the house at all. When my dad once exclaimed “bloody hell!”  after dropping a can of paint on his foot when I was nine, it excited a kind of tremulous awareness of all the bad words we could never say. I remember my mother saying to me that those who swear are simply demonstrating that they have a limited vocabulary, at a time when I was very keen to impress my command of the English language. But that simply cannot be so, because for me personally, whenever Piers Morgan appears on the television, I feel postively naked and underequipped if I don’t have some choice of profanities in my quiver Sometimes, only the c-word will do, I suppose.