The Backstory: The #%$@ History of Cursing

Swearing, cursing, cussing... giving somebody the finger. It’s kind of ubiquitous these days, but it’s been around for thousands of years. And now researchers say yelling out a favorite four-letter word can even lower your blood pressure. But where in the &^%* did it all start, and how has it evolved?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hell, Well, that got your attention right? How and why
did we start cursing, swearing, even gesturing when we got
angry or were simply shocked or amused by something we saw,
or because of something somebody did to us. I'm Patty Steele.
What the started the cursing trend? That's next on the backstory?

(00:25):
The backstory is back. Sometimes don't you just want to
grit your teeth and spew out some vile language. I
know it's not very classy, but at the end of
the day, it's a release of sorts. In fact, Mark
Twain said that under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief
denied even to prayer. I guess what people have been

(00:47):
swearing for at least as long as they've been praying.
He also said there ought to be a room in
every house to swear in. It's dangerous to repress an
emotion like that. But how did it start and how
his cursing evolved? Well, actually, did you know that all
mammals have an impulse to vocalize when feeling strong emotions pain, fear, joy,

(01:12):
even sexual excitement. A good scream gives us a sense
of release from all those feelings. Cursing increases our heart rate,
even makes us sweat, but it helps us deal with
emotional upset, and studies show a good swear word can
even relieve physical pain. Of course, how we curse today

(01:32):
is really pretty different from how people cursed centuries ago.
What people consider to be cursing has always depended on
what was I don't know, sort of taboo at that
given point in time. It might be considered crude, or
it might be blasphemous. The earliest expletives were phrases that
had to do with religion. For instance, some of the
worst curses in medieval days included God's bones, God's nails,

(01:57):
or really anything to do with God that was a
religious In the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, cursing was actually
pretty much accepted as a perfectly normal way to add
emphasis to what you were saying. Some popular curses included
calling someone a licorice, glutton, freckled, bitter jobber, noel goose cap,

(02:18):
or a niny lobcock. All name calling in those days,
but amazingly one of the worst curses you can utter today.
The sea word was perfectly acceptable in those times. It
was found in medical text books in literature, even weirdly
as part of street names in areas that were known
for prostitution. For instance, one town in Glastonbury, England, was

(02:41):
called grope, seaword lane Wow. A couple of words were
the equivalent of the F word, including sard and swive,
just basic words for copulation. One book included the edict
don't sart another man's wife. By the late fifteen and
early sixteen hundreds, there was a movement of sorts that

(03:01):
decided swearing was a no no, and as they got
nicer language wise, they began to combine two or more
naughty words, creating new slang, but with nicer terms like gadzooks,
a curse used in place of God's hooks. In the
sixteen hundreds, the word zounds, a shortened version of God's wounds,

(03:22):
showed up in Shakespeare's plays, and in the eighteen hundreds
people in Ireland used the word bijabbers as a nicer
way of saying by Jesus. Even today in England they
used the term bloody, which originally was God's blood. Now
the phrase four letter words was first used to describe
swear words all the way up in the nineteen twenties,

(03:42):
and there was a good reason. Of the approximately eighty
four commonly used American English swear words, twenty nine of
them have four letters, including the F word, the S word,
the C word, the H word, and the D word.
And what about naughty gestures? The most popular these days
is the middle finger aka the bird, but that gesture

(04:04):
has been around for thousands of years. It was used
as a sexual thread of sorts in ancient Greece and Rome,
and was basically seen as a phallic symbol. By the
early eighteen hundreds, it became a common sign of disrespect,
most common among actors, celebrities, athletes, and politicians. The first
documented case of somebody flipping the bird in the United

(04:27):
States was in eighteen eighty six. It happened when Old
Haas Radbourne, a baseball pitcher for the Boston bean Eaters,
got his picture taken flipping off a member of the
rival New York Giants. By the twentieth century, mass media
began to make cursing more mainstream. In fact, Gone with
the Wind, producer David O'selznik had to fight to get

(04:50):
the now classic line, Frankly, my dear, I don't give
a damn into the flick, telling regulators, this word as
used in the picture is not an oath or a
The worst that could be said of it is that
it's a vulgarism. And in the nineteen sixties, comedian Lenny
Bruce was arrested a bunch of times on obscenity charges

(05:10):
for using explicit language in his act. In nineteen seventy two,
George Carlin was arrested for performing his seven Dirty Words
You Can't Say on Television act while performing at an
outdoor festival in Wisconsin, not on TV, but in public.
A year later, his routine was played on the radio,
which led to a number of court cases about what

(05:31):
words should be banned from broadcast, radio, and television. All
of that was just fifty years ago, but that common
usage has really exploded. The entertainment industry has done the
most to normalized cussing. But these days, the film industry's
classification and rating administration goes through every line of every

(05:52):
flick and they decide exactly how many naughty words it
takes to get your movie and r rating. Mel Brooks said,
I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's BS and
trust me he didn't just use the initials. I bet
that felt really good. Hope you liked the Backstory with
Patty Steele. Please leave a review. I would love it

(06:14):
if you'd subscribe or follow for free to get new
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you have a story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook,
It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm
Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,

(06:38):
the Elvis Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer
is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out
to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram
at Real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the

(06:59):
pieces of his history you didn't know you needed to know.