Holy Sh*t summary

So, ancient Romans used claims about oral sex to slander people, but the Old Testament employed an entirely different type of swearing: the oath. In this context, swearing wasn’t a way to shock and offend people, but was instead used to back up claims.

In other words, the Old Testament teaches people to swear oaths by God because doing so is essential to the smooth operation of society.

If the Old Testament is all about oaths, the New Testament focuses on obscene language, or more specifically, its regulation. To do so, it outlines rules for speech that forbids vulgar language and even restricts euphemisms.

For instance, the Old Testament is full of euphemistic language, like one passage from Song of Songs that reads, “My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him.” Here, “hand” actually refers to “genitals,” although lots of scholars claim this piece of writing has nothing to do with sex and is instead about God’s love for Israel.

Most people think of words like “bollocks,” “cunt” and “whore” as modern curses, but they date back to medieval times, where they were commonly bandied about. The difference is that, back then, these and other words relating to the body weren’t considered obscene.

For instance, “cunt” and “arse” were the standard words for describing those respective body parts and were often found in children’s books designed to teach Latin. In fact, these books even contained such useful phrases for a young boy as “you stink,” “turd in your teeth” and “he is the biggest coward that ever pissed.”

As Protestantism rose across Europe and oaths lost their power to shock and offend, swearing began to shift away from the holy and back toward the obscene.

Protestants believe that God lacks a physical body and therefore can’t be touched. As a result, oaths necessarily couldn’t be thought of as directly reaching God and therefore began to lose their perceived efficacy. In addition, the sheer volume of oaths people were required to take made their swearing by God less meaningful.

As industrialization took hold across the Western world, the Victorians of nineteenth-century Britain found an outlet for swearing – but under a different guise. At this point, privacy was no longer a luxury of the rich; the middle and lower classes were becoming increasingly civilized, which in turn made sexuality and excrement deeply shameful for everyone.

As a result, bodily functions that were once carried out in public with total nonchalance were now hidden, only performed behind the closed doors that the population could now afford. In this way, bathroom time fell out of sight and out of mind, becoming taboo in the process.

The Victorian era was marked by an extreme repression in language and it gave rise to modern swear words. These were obscenities used in a nonliteral manner, solely to assert emotional power.

For instance, bugger was one of the most prevalent. It began its life as a word literally referring to the penetrating party in anal intercourse, but over time its literal meaning faded and it transformed from an obscenity into a swear word. These days, when one describes something as “buggered over,” it’s meant as “messed up” and does not imply any literal meaning.

Throughout the First and Second World Wars, swearing was so normal in the armed forces that saying “fuck” barely garnered a response. A collection of slang words from the First World War might shed some light on this, as it explains that “fucking” simply meant a threat like a shell or attack was “incoming.”

In fact, the word was so frequently uttered that the phrase, “get your rifles!” provoked greater urgency than the same phrase with “fucking” included. This just goes to show how frequent swearing can reduce its impact, and the same goes for sexual swearing.