Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever, by John McWhorter

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University. He’s written about twenty books. I’ve only read one previously: a thin book called The Language Hoax, where he debunks the idea that because a language doesn’t have a word for something that the people experience the world differently. A people who don’t have a word for “blue” for instance still see blue, their eyes aren’t different, they just haven’t found a need to distinguish that color from others. McWhorter also contributes good thinking to the cultural conversation about race and racism. I’ve enjoyed hearing him on podcasts, although I’ve not read any of his books on the subject.

Nine Nasty Words is in the mode of The Language Hoax: a light read, mostly apolitical, meant for fun. Although his analysis includes serious linguistics the tone is irreverent and it’s about, well: damn, hell, fuck, shit, ass, dick, nigger, faggot, bitch. Magnanimously he also covers related words: cock, cocksucker, pussy, dyke, cunt, and a bonus addendum devoted to motherfucker. What part of speech is “fuck” in the phrase, “Fuck if I know”? Fuck if I know, but McWhorter will parse it for you.

It is fun, but at times it made me squirm. While it’s fun to learn about the derivation and the grammar of a word like “shit”, reading an entire chapter also requires thinking about shit for far longer than I normally care to. That’s the power of these words, after all.

McWhorter’s best insight, which he comes back to several times throughout the book, is that the words a culture considers nasty change over time. Notice the order in which he discusses the nine words. Our first bad words were religious words: damn and hell, from a time when religious transgression was the worst possible offense. It’s from that era that we still call these “swear” words, or “curse” words or sometimes, “oaths.” Damn and hell are profanity because they are literally profane. Not to use the Lord’s name in vain is even one of the ten commandments, not so for the other words. Meanwhile, words like fuck, and shit, simply described unremarkable realities for a largely agricultural society.

By the nineteenth century, though, religion began to lose it’s power and our culture became more urban and more concerned with privacy and hygiene. Damn and hell continued to be “bad” words, but the really profane words, now meaning unsayable, switched to words associated with the body. McWhorter points out that in 1939 Rhett Butler could say, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn” in Gone with the Wind, but he could not have said “I don’t give a fuck” as we would today. McWhorter gives another example form Catcher in the Rye (1951) where Holden Caulfield freely uses “goddam” and “hell” but not shit, ass, or fuck. McWhorter misses, however, the famous moment in the Catcher in the Rye when fuck does appear. Near the end of the book Holden is visiting his sister Phoebe, age 10, at her school and sits on the stairs to wait for her.

“But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant…”

So fuck is beyond the pale for Holden, who has no problem with hell and goddam. (Nowadays the most PC of us wouldn’t use “crazy” either when we meant angry.) But for his sister, Holden’s use of “goddamn” is still too much. Here’s a quote from a few pages earlier:

[Holden] “Old Spencer’d practically kills himelf chuckling and smiling and all, like as if Thurmer was a goddam prince or something.”

[Phoebe] “Don’t swear so much.”

or, later in that scene:

[Holden] “You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?”

[Phoebe] “What? Stop swearing.”

Holden uses “hell” as a universal metaphor: “boring as hell” “sleepy as hell” and so on. Now that “hell” has lost its bite, we’ve switched to using “shit” as the universal metaphor. Shit is no longer unsayable; but it’s still a bad word which makes it useful to add heat to language. Ass is the same: broke-ass, ugly-ass, dumb-ass. Or, “Philla-fucking-delphia.”

I just finished reading James Joyce’s Ulysses which was the subject of an infamous obscenity complaint. Ulysses doesn’t use the words shit or fuck, but it includes several passages where characters use a chamber pot, an outhouse, a scene where Bloom masturbates, a scene at a whorehouse, another where Bloom kisses his wife on her bottom. Nobody would ban Ulysses today because of those passages, because now, McWhorter points out, our unsayable words have shifted again, from words associated with the body and bodily functions to words associated with group identity. He places the shift around the time of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Faggot is an old word meaning a bundle of sticks. The association of faggot with gay men has nothing to do with homosexuals being burned at the stake, they weren’t, the common punishment was hanging. Instead, the evolution was this: faggot meant a bundle of sticks, back when folks frequently carried bundles of sticks for firewood. From there, a faggot became a bundle of anything, like a faggot of herbs, for instance. From there, a faggot became any single member of a bundle of things, for instance a faggot could be a dummy soldier used to fill out a regiment for census purposes. From that, faggot meant something superfluous, or useless. And then a slur against a person considered worthless.

McWhorter spends some pages talking about the ways that group slurs are reclaimed by members of the group. The idea being that an out-group can create social cohesion by members of the group using the word with each other, meaning “I’m one of you”, “we’re all in this together”. I think he imagines that gay men use faggot more than we do in this way. In my experience gay men are more likely to use “girl” when we’re being campy together.

Notice how even this blog post gets a little more uncomfortable as we get to the later words that are actually still taboo in our language. And I’ll let you read for yourself McWhorter’s comments about his final two identity slurs. So there is running through this book a sense of subversiveness despite the light-touch and academia that McWhorter brings to the subject. I suppose it’s good that we consider some parts of our culture so sacred that we speak about them only carefully or not at all. And it reveals something about a society which areas it deems so sacred, to notice how the sacred thing has evolved, and to wonder what will be sacred next.