Abbreviations in swearing are common, not for the usual reason of convenience, but because they provide a useful form of euphemism or disguise mechanism. They may be partial, as in bug for bugger , or use the initial letter as a code, as in “b” for bloody . Today they are common in forms like “the f-word,” “effing,” and so on. The practice has increased in print, where the taboos against the use of improper language were severely policed in the past.
Historically the practice can be traced back at least to Elizabethan times, in the form of minced oaths, discussed below. Some forms are no longer readily comprehensible. In their Dictionary of Slang and Its Analogues (1890–1904) Farmer and Henley have an odd entry under the heading B.C.:
A young woman complained [to a magistrate] of having been abused by a woman who called her a B.C. On being asked the meaning, the young woman said that C meant “cat,” but the B?, well, it was too shocking to utter, and the magistrate allowed her to whisper the word in his ear. It was a well-known word of sanguinary sound [sic]; but though B.C. was hardly a pretty epithet, yet his lordship could hardly grant a summons for libel against the person of whom complaint was made for using it.
This highly amusing Victorian anecdote (dated ca. 1888) is revealing, but frustrating now. It shows that the “sanguinary” word ( bloody ) was clearly taboo, as various contemporary authorities have stated. The other offending term ( cat ) carried an underground sense of “prostitute” from Elizabethan times until about 1910. (The sense has continued as cathouse , a slang term for “brothel” in both British and American English.) It now seems very incongruous that a word meaning “whore” could be uttered in court, but bloody could not. As a consequence, the abbreviation “B.C.” became established in the legal profession for a person bringing a flimsy case for libel.
The Oxford English Dictionary entry for bloody notes that the word was regarded (ca. 1887) “by respectable people” as being “on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) as “b?y.” As a consequence, the abbreviation “b” became established for several decades, especially as “b.f.” for “bloody fool,” from about 1925. The abbreviation probably did not assist the political party called the British Fabians (originally founded 1884) since they were jocularly referred to as “the B.F.s.”
Laurence Sterne contrived a wonderfully absurd situation exploiting evasions of taboo language via abbreviation in his highly eccentric (and popular) novel Tristram Shandy (1760–1767). In Book VII, chapters 20-25, the carriage of two French nuns is mired in a bog, and it is only by uttering two unmentionable words that they can encourage their mules to pull them out. Sterne plays with the taboo and teases the reader by hinting that in “the two words * and there is as much sustenance as if you gave [the mules] a peck of corn.” There follow embarrassed whisperings between the nuns (which the reader cannot overhear), and it transpires that the two taboo terms are bouger (bugger) and fouter (fucker) . However, the nuns ingeniously solve the problem by splitting the terms into two inoffensive halves, one nun uttering first half and the other the second:
Abbess : {bou?bou?bou?
Margarita : {?ger?ger?ger
Sterne extracts the maximum humor from the situation by showing the reader in print format the disguise that the nuns contrive orally, so that the joke is transparent throughout. He goes further, wickedly adding the detail that “the old mule let a f-” (“let off a fart”). The use of the abbreviation for this natural animal function is a form of mock politeness, since the author did not have to add the embarrassing detail at all.
Although this fictional anecdote seems far-fetched, the artful solution arrived at by the nuns dramatizes the process of disguise mechanisms that in fact takes place within a speech community over time. Most euphemisms and disguise mechanisms are really a form of connivance. The use of asterisks or dashes is a transparent disguise or obvious evasion of the offending form. In his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), Francis Grose resorted to the forms c*t, a-se , and a?e . Yet neither Nathaniel Bailey nor Dr. Johnson showed the same prissiness in their dictionaries of 1728 and 1755, respectively.
However, in time the abbreviated forms become entrenched as independent forms. The classic instance is the development of what are called minced oaths, in which the offending term has been removed. Thus the gruesome medieval oath God’s wounds! was reduced ca. 1600 to plain zounds! by the excision of the name of God, while drat! is the survivor of the formula “God rot?.” As the original serious import is lost, so the words take on new, independent, and trivial meanings. Zounds is now obsolete, while drat is mild and passé. The name Jesus also has very ancient forms of abbreviation, found in Jis from as far back as ca. 1528, and Jeez and Gee ca. 1900.
Generally speaking, the greater the “taboo violation,” the larger the number of euphemistic abbreviations. Within the American provenance, the most powerful example lies in motherfucker , still most taboo to respectable people. Consequently, it has generated a great diversity of abbreviations, ranging from M.F., mo’-fo’, muh-fuh , and the “purified” forms mother, momma , and muther , recorded as far back as 1975 by the humorist Irma Bombeck referring to unmanageable shopping trolleys as “these little mothers.” However, an amazing earlier instance comes from Ezra Pound, who in 1948 wrote scabrously of “all them g.d.m.f. generals c.s. all of ‘em fascists” (Canto LXXIV). This decodes into “goddam mother-fucking generals cocksuckers.”
Another strategy of recent decades is to use the formula “the f- word” (from ca. 1973), “the “the n- word” (from ca. 1985), “the k- word” (from ca. 1985), and so on. These are not equally transparent, since they come from different speech-communities: the taboo words in question are fuck, nigger , and kaffir , respectively. The phonetic rendition of the initial letters is also used to generate other forms, such as the word fuck being abbreviated to eff (from ca. 1950), effing (from ca. 1929), and eff off! (from ca. 1958). Other manifestations are HN in Black American parlance for “house nigger,” Af for African and K for Kaffir in South African slang. Abbreviations are also a feature of ethnic insults, found in jap, chink, eyetie, paki , and yank .
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