DAMN AND HELL:

ENGLISH'S FIRST BAD WORDS

In a book about profanity, it's almost awkward that our tour begins with damn and hell, in that most of us don't sense these words as truly, well, dirty.

We may still include both in a standard list of "four-letter words" formally classified as unsuitable for the drawing room. For many, damn is the first we might list, just as we are likely to start with apples when asked to name fruits. We sense damn, as well as hell, as in some sense "bad."

Yet in our times, they really aren't.

The Cusses That Aren't

When I was about eight, I asked my father what dam-un meant, assuming that was how one pronounced the damn I had seen in writing. Dad said, "It's a word you use when you're really, really angry."

The result was that I went away supposing for years afterward that there was a word dam that you used as a kind of everyday, salty exclamation, and a less commonly used word pronounced dam-un that you used when truly irritated.

That is, I was well aware of the word that sounds like dam, as the one bandied about quite often by my parents and others, even when kids were within earshot, for reasons much less extreme than being "really, really angry." In no sense did I classify it as an especially naughty word, even if I knew that I wasn't allowed to say it yet.

Gradually, of course, I realized that there was no separate word dam-un. But the gap between my dad's formal parsing of the word, as a genuine obscenity, and the libertine reality of how he-and even President Nixon, as we'd learn-used it was instructive. For an obscenity, damn, like hell, was used with curious comfort and frequency.

Nor was this freedom a product of the countercultural 1960s, after which we all let our hair down in so many ways. My father was born in 1927, and Richard Nixon was not exactly a flower child. Damn and hell have been profanity-lite for a very long time.

As far back as the 1880s, publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer (whose name appears during my typical workday not once but twice in being doughtily imprinted upon both Columbia University's journalism school building as well as a public school I live near) was known to favor damn. He was especially fond of jamming it into words that hadn't expected it, in a fashion more familiar today with locutions such as "abso-fucking-lutely," resulting in the likes of "indegoddampendent." A young woman recounting her spell as an itinerant in the teens of the twentieth century noted that damn and hell were ordinary talk among her fellow hobos but that they carefully shielded her from other, "real" bad words.

But what about the hubbub surrounding Gone With the Wind? The truth is, producer David O. Selznick was not fined for instructing Clark Gable as Rhett Butler to say, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." The post-Victorian Motion Picture Production Code of the era had indeed forbidden profanity on film for several years by 1939, but Selznick got it altered, without any major trouble, on damn and hell. The update nicely reflected the twentieth-century reality, allowing those two words:

when their use shall be essential and required for portrayal, in proper historical context, of any scene or dialogue based upon historical fact or folklore . . . or a quotation from a literary work, provided that no such use shall be permitted which is intrinsically objectionable or offends good taste.

Moreover, the line was nowhere near the first time damn had been uttered on film. Given how linguistically puritan American film producers generally kept their output until the late 1960s, it is almost bizarre how free with damn and hell some early talkies were. As soon as sound came in, profanity hit the ground running, spoken by pomaded post-Victorians in their fussy clothing. In 1929, the creaky slog of a musical Glorifying the American Girl has a crabby stage mother casually grunting "Dammit!" twice, as she has trouble opening her glasses. In 1932, a sweet, matronly figure casually says, "I'll be damned!" in Blessed Event. Even cartoon characters got in on the action. Flip the Frog was one of many Mickey Mouse knockoffs of the era, as evanescent as they were inevitable, and in one 1930 entry, an anthropomorphic telephone tries unsuccessfully to wake up Flip and looks at the audience and whispers "Damn!" in frustration.

To wit, since the late nineteenth century, damn and hell have been understood as inappropriate in a formulaic sense, while in everyday life many "proper" people have treated them like cinnamon sticks in tea. By the time we got to 1977, when Florida Evans, the staid matriarch of Good Times, cried, "Damn, damn, damn!" after her husband died in a car accident, we neither batted an eye nor wished she had said, "Darn, darn, darn!"

The Way We Were

Damn and hell were once more potent. As with profanity in all societies, the words were never anywhere near absent from ordinary speech, as their taboo status inevitably lent satisfaction to their utterance and lent them a space within the full range of human expression. The difference between then and now was the genuflection to that forbidden status one was expected to maintain, the studious display of disgust. They truly qualified as "bad" words, however commonly they were heard.

As in: it isn't hard to glean that premarital sex was common before the pill. Any number of clues tip us off-the date of first children's birthdays, deathbed confessions, widespread venereal disease, the sheer existence of prophylactic devices. It is equally easy to see that public attitudes about it were quite different from private ones, about those who ventured the deed without "benefit of clergy."

An analogous split between public ideals and private reality is the source of our hangover sense even today that there is something unclean about damn and hell. But people maintained the pretense much more vigorously a century or so ago. Whatever Pulitzer was shouting in his shirtsleeves in the smoky just-the-boys atmosphere of his office, in the Gilded Age there was a sense that damn and hell had no place in one's public persona.

Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore number "I am the Captain of the Pinafore" summed it up when the captain informs us:

Bad language or abuse

I never, never use

Whatever the emergency.

Though "bother it" I may

Occasionally say,

I never use a big, big D___.

"What, never?" the chorus asks.

"No, never!" he answers.

"What, never?" the chorus pushes, upon which he admits, "Hardly ever!" So one was to at least tamp it down. Even as late as 1935, Thomas Edison's erstwhile assistant Miller Hutchison was eliding the hells in letters in a similar fashion, quoting his old boss as having said in 1915: "I want to be able to tell an Admiral to go to ____ if he is in the wrong."

This gingerly approach was more about etiquette-book stipulation than reality, but the stipulation itself contrasted with our times.

Frank Lloyd Wright urged that in architecture, form follows function, but was hardly consistent about it. Sometimes he pursued a form because he felt like it. Regarding his gorgeous but weirdly laid-out Unity Church in Oak Park, Illinois, around 1905, he groused to a colleague, "I don't give a damn what the use of it is; I wanted to build a building like that." Wright's contemporary equivalent would use in the same place shit or fuck-i.e., what we think of as "real" profanity.

Another revealing facet: damn and hell were considered vulgar enough-"on paper" at least-that bourgeois propriety enforced a distinct gender segregation. In 1861, poet Algernon Swinburne wrote a letter to a woman where he wrote that certain scenery was "of the sort which must be called, not in the way of profane swearing, but of grave, earnest and sorrowing indignation, the d____ sort." He appended, "I wd. rather die than write it at length." Here, then, is the kind of context where, as late as the 1910s, cartoonist Art Young would describe Greenwich Village as where "a woman could say damn right out loud and still be respected!"-i.e., notably bohemian.

This had been the general Anglophone sentiment on the two words since their emergence in Old English more than a thousand years before, and nothing testifies to this more vividly than that English has long had euphemisms for both, such as darn, doggone, dang, heck, and H-E-double-hockey-sticks. The prolificity of these prim little terms only makes sense amid a widespread sense that damn and hell are not just ordinary words but taboo terms-like Voldemort. We have no substitutes for snow, yesterday, or kitchen sink.

When Swearing Was Swearing

This diligent euphemizing goes back to the ancients, for whom the rub was what they considered most taboo in contrast to us. Namely, it came down to the issue of swearing.

Hold up: Swearing is what this whole book is about, right? But our use of swear as a synonym for profanity is actually a holdover from an earlier usage that made more sense. After all, one might ask just what swearing in its literal meaning-affirming your belief in something-has to do with what you yell when you stub your toe. To the medievals, swearing was about swearing-in the actual sense-to God and Jesus, and was taken seriously to an extent difficult for most of us to wrap our heads around today.

I got my first sense of this from Peter Shaffer's play Lettice and Lovage, lesser known than his Amadeus and Equus but just as substantial (and funnier). Lettice is a woman of a certain age with a theatrical temperament and an antiquarian bent, who resists being dismissed from a job as a tour guide in a medieval castle.

I swear-I swear to you-if I can do this job, I shall not deviate by so much as a syllable from the recorded truth! . . . I shall read and read! I shall...