(~6 minutes to read)

How much of a potty mouth are you?

Parents: have your offspring ever heard you swear, or worse, have they learned to swear from you?

Why is there even such a concept as swear words? (Don’t expect an answer to that here!)

Mother Do You Think He’ll Drop the F-Bomb?

This past weekend (March 25th), I was involved in a Monty Python and the Holy Grail interactive movie evening. People were encouraged to come dressed in Monty Python attire and to bring coconut shells, cuddly toys (preferably farm animals) and other paraphernalia. We showed the movie, and threw in three sketches from the TV show to start, split, and end the evening.

Mrs. H. came dressed as the witch that everyone wanted to burn. The Hatchlings (circa 30 years old) came as a killer bunny and a gumby respectively. The Hatchling-in-law also came as a gumby. The whole fam damily was there.

And if that wasn’t enough, one of my ex-cub scouts (now 13 years old and an avid Monty Python fan) was also in attendance.

It fell to me to perform a sketch at the intermission. What better choice than the Albatross sketch? As every MP fan worth his/her salt knows, the live versions of this sketch include the F-bomb. The Hollywood Bowl version also includes the C-bomb. The TV version, by comparison, is tame, and to a certain extent, fizzles out at the end. So I decided to go with the Drury Lane version.

I dressed appropriately (for the sketch you understand, not for anything else!) in skirt, wig, false boobs and make-up, and donned my albatross-laden tray (albatross beautifully created by Mrs. H.). I launched into the sketch, got the appropriate laughs (I think!), and spat out that F-bomb like it was a word of mass destruction.

In the pub afterwards, my gumby hatchling informed me that that was the first time she can remember having heard me use the F-word. My killer bunny hatchling, being male and a couple of years older, declared that he thought he’d heard me use it once before. They and Mrs. H. all declared their sense of shock and surprise that they’d heard me use that word.

F-Blitz

My childhood friends would have been shocked and surprised too. Not that I’d used the F-word, but that my family were shocked that I’d used it.

You see, I grew up in east London. Swear words were used by many of the local population as if they were as acceptable then as they had been in the early middle ages. Except for Dad’s occasional use of “bloody”, my parents didn’t swear. But in order to survive and “blend in” at school, I had to lace my conversations with “those words”. If I hadn’t, I would’ve endured more beatings-up than I did.

In fact, I embraced the F-culture so wholeheartedly that my friends and I could be heard singing rugby songs around our campfires at Scout camps. Baden-Powell was probably gyrating in his grave!

I don’t remember when I cleaned up my act; probably when I entered the workforce. I do remember that parenthood turned me into a puritan; I even invented an expletive for my kids to use, although the details of how to use “schnozbauhrn” are now buried in my sub-conscious.

And I’m fairly sure that everyone in Canada that knows me regards me as one who can usually express himself adequately without recourse to earthy vernacular.

I Swear I Didn’t Know It Was a Swear

I clearly remember my mum berating me for saying “crap” at the age of 13 or so; I had no knowledge of the word beyond the fact that my scoutmaster used it.

Thank goodness Mum didn’t come to scout camps with me!

Likewise, our female hatchling learned the “brown word” at a very tender age. The story about her saying “oh s**t!” in the back of the car using the exact intonation that Mrs. H. has been known to use on (frequent) occasion is part of family folklore.

And following the import to our home of the F-bomb via the mouth of our male Hatchling when he was five or so (he’d learned it playing out in the street with a policeman’s son) I sat down and (stupidly, according to Mrs. H.) told him all the swear words I could think of so that he knew which words to avoid in the future. I still regard this as a valid piece of parenting; how many adults have been prosecuted for breaking a law they didn’t even know existed?

Okay; so male hatchling may have shared his newly-acquired vocabulary with his kindergarten buddies. We don’t know; but if he did, then fortunately we never heard about it.

It Didn’t Used to Be a Swear

A careful search of the wonderweb will inform you that most, if not all, current swear words used to be in everyday speech. The real swears back in the day were those connected with some aspect or other of the Christian faith. Even today, many Americans cannot bring themselves to write, let alone say, words or phrases such as “God damn”; they apologetically write it as “GD”, as if their omniscient god wouldn’t know the difference between the abbreviation and the full two words!

The “brown word” can be found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as Samuel Pepys’ diary, to name but two famous examples. Ditto “piss”.

That dreadful C-word was used (in disguised fashion) in Hamlet by Shakespeare, when he refers to “country matters”. The late, great Kenny Everett (a British DJ) used the same gag in one of his Captain Kremmen sketches. It went along the lines of one person saying “I’ll take you to my club. I’m a country member.” and another person replying, “Yes, I remember.”

And the F-word? Numerous legends exist on its origin (including at least two ridiculous acronym-related explanations), and there are several scholarly articles on the interweb about it. There’s even a book devoted to its etymology (The F-word by Jesse Sheidlower available at Amazon).

But the curious thing is that most of these swear words only became so in the Victorian era. It was at that time that anything sexual or excretory became taboo, and since then people have judged other people by their use (or not) of such words, and parents have taken their kids to task over such utterances.

All manner or euphemisms have cropped up for these words, in exactly the same way that euphemisms for religious oaths came about; cripes, golly, jeepers, oh my gosh, heck, gadzooks and darn, are only seven examples of many such euphemisms.

Feck, frick, frak, ferk—all euphemisms for you-know-what. If you use these words, you’re using the F-bomb by proxy. But did you know about “swive” and “occupy”?

Will There Ever Be a World With No Swears?

Words become swears only because of changing social attitudes—political correctness at work. And the sapiens species, being what it is, will no doubt always declare some words taboo. In my lifetime, the “n” word has made that transition. Who knows how attitudes will change in the future? Will our current swears become acceptable again, while words like “empire”, “moist” or “capitalist” become our new taboos?

Who the schnozbauhrn knows? And frankly my dear, who gives a schnozbauhrn ?