It appears that we are all swearing way too much. So much so, in fact, that only 5% of Britons get through the day without hearing a swearword, according to an opinion poll. Not so surprising, really, given that the same poll found that 90% of men and 83% of women are regularly hearing themselves swear.
We don't have to look far for further confirmation that we are using lots of obscene language today. On urbandictionary.com, a popular website that allows users to coin and define words, the f-word has collected more than 200 definitions, with approximately 6000 words and phrases based on it, from "fucabomb" (to give out the best sex possible) to "fucxting" (having sex while texting). "Mother", in contrast, has 34 definitions and 600 coinages. Many of these are, predictably, for "motherfucker".
Some people worry that we are swearing more now than ever before, and that this culture of cursing is a sign, or cause, of moral degradation. Other people worry that these words are now so prevalent that they are in danger of losing their charge.
Actually, we are not swearing more now than we have in the past, nor are we historically unique in our fears that this language is a harbinger of social decay. We are not in any danger of running out of powerful swearwords, either. Our swearwords of choice have changed over the centuries: as some taboos have lost power, new ones have always arisen to take their place.
In ancient Rome, swearing was based on sexual taboos, but ones that to us are very strange. For hundreds of years, during the Middle Ages, the worst words were religious oaths such as "by God" or "by God's bones". These were the phrases that shocked and offended people, the period's true obscenities. Clerics routinely complained that oaths abounded. As a 15th century sermon put it: "Among learned and uneducated, among young and old, among rich and poor, from a little child who can barely speak, to an old bearded man from whom age has almost taken his proper speech." There were plenty of people at the time who looked at the prevalence of these "vain oaths" and saw the decay of morality and the incipient collapse of civilisation.
By the Victorian era, religious oaths had lost much of their power, and swearing had come mostly to resemble our own. Fear and anxiety about it were perhaps even greater at this time, however. Sexual and excremental obscenities were so taboo that any word that brought the human body to mind was deemed beyond the pale in polite society. Even innocuous words such as "trousers", "leg" and "sweat" were banned from polite discourse.
Today, the same pattern is being repeated with our sexual and excremental obscenities. They are very slowly losing their charge, as oaths did, becoming more acceptable not just on YouTube but in college classrooms, newspapers and literature. We won't ever face a lack of really powerful words with which to shock and offend, though. Epithets are picking up the f-word's slack and becoming more and more taboo.
These words include racial slurs but also any terms that essentialise or sum up a person, such as "fat". Recently, for example, both an American sports star and a film producer have been castigated for their use of "retarded", while people can be legally prosecuted in Britain for "racially aggravated harassment", which boils down to using racial slurs.
One might even see this change in our swearing habits as a hopeful development – perhaps it says good things about a society in which the very worst words are those that stigmatise and degrade others.
Swearing has been around for thousands of years, and though the specific words in question have changed, the chorus of anxiety that accompanies them has not. Swearwords will not usher in a moral collapse now any more than they did in medieval times – nor will we run out of ways to express ourselves when the f-word is no more shocking than "Christ!"
So swear on, as your ancestors did. – © Guardian News & Media 2013
Melissa Mohr is the author of Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, published by Profile