So, recently scribe gifted us with a wonderful diary on swearing, in a funny but soulful Dave Sedaris sort of style. Soj then added some nerdy comments on that diary that got me, a fellow nerd, thinking about the nerdy historical/sociological aspects of swearing. These are my 1.95 cents (it’s late and I have a big day tomorrow, so I’ll have to owe you the $0,05)
Soj says that the hangups with swearing in english go back to the days of Oliver Cromwell, when “proper” language became a national obsesion in Britain and that was carried to the US. He also says most other countries don’t have as much hangups as the US.
I think the matter is a bit more complicated. For example, spaniards swear quite heavily (spanish television and movies included). But it’s not because Spain was, historically, such a free, unrepressed country where language was free, but because of the opposite.
During the days of Francisco Franco (who, if I remember correctly, Nixon lauded as a worthy and brave ally) language was as repressed as everything else. In the Spain of Franco, you could go to jail for holding hands in public. Not only was swearing off the table, but any language other than Spanish was forbidden to spaniards.
The region around the capital city of Madrid is where Spanish is from. Other regions of spain, like Catalunya (catalan) or the Basque region (euskera), have their own native toungues and have a distinct culture from the rest of Spain, as well as a desire to be a country of their own. At the same time that Franco violently repressed the urge to secede he violently repressed euskera and catalan. In Catalunya not only could you not speak catalan, you could go to jail for whistling a song with catalan lyrics.
When Franco finally kicked the bucket, all the sexual and linguistical repression in Spain burst like a dam (damn?). Here are a few common swear phrases from Spain with their literal translation:
Me cago en ti: I shit on you
Me cago en tu puta madre: I shit on your whore of a mother
Me cagio en el coño de tu puta madre: I shit on your whore of a mother’s cunt.
Me cago en la hostia: I shit on the communion wafer
Me cago en Dios : I shit on God.
If you are REALLY pissed:
Me cago en Dios, en la hostia, en tí y en el coño de la puta madre que te parió. (God, wafer, you, the cunt of the mother that gave birth to you)
My feeling is, spaniards wouldn’t swear so much if they hadn’t been as repressed historically (also, this is the country that spawned the counter-reformation and gave rebirth to the inquisition). Likewise, a person who was sexually repressed as a youth is likely to become sexually obssessed (or cold) as an adult, whereas a person who was not will have a healthy attitude towards sex. So swearing, specially swearing a lot, is not necessarily a sign of honesty nor of being a free spirit.
The process that all european countries went through, from being a loose collection of feudal states to becoming a single nation state always involved the unification, and thus repression, of language. Every fiefdom had a local dialect, that had to conform to the new standard dialect of the nation. So the idea of a “proper” french, english, spanish, italian, must have come at roughly the same time for all those countries. There is politics in language; Webster’s dictionary, which changed colour into color, was a US nationalist statement.
So those are my very nerdy 1.95 cents. I guess what I’m saying is that the issue of language is always political and historical, and therefore complicated.
