Alliteration

Swearing employs various kinds of phonetic emphasis, notably alliteration (the repetition of a particular consonant) and rhyme (the repetition of a vowel sound). Historically, alliteration, not rhyme, was the staple poetic arrangement of words in Anglo-Saxon and much medieval poetry. Although it no longer has this literary status, alliteration continues to be a notable feature of swearing.

A number of Geoffrey Chaucer’s contemporaries used the alliterative scheme, notably William Langland in his huge spiritual poem Piers Plowman , creating many powerful satirical effects: thus in the section on the Seven Deadly Sins, Gluttony “pissed in a potel [a large bottle] a pater noster while” (Passus B V l. 348). In a memorable condemnation of the corrupt clergy of his time, Chaucer refers to “a shitten shepherd” ( General Prologue l. 504). This is the only use of a four-letter word in the Prologue , and in this context means “corrupt.” In the Chester Play (ca. 1500) a character is denounced as “a shitten-arsed shrew” (l. 157), although by this time alliteration was generally passé in England. However, as the entry on flyting demonstrates, the alliterative tradition was still thriving in Scotland in the sixteenth century in vituperative contexts. The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (1503) is liberally stocked with couplings such as “Fantastik fule” (l. 35), “Fals tratour, feyndis gett [bastard]” (l. 244), and “Suir swappit swanky, swynekeper for swatis,” which translates very tamely into Modern English as: “Lazy great smart-arse, perpetual pig-keeper for small beer” (l. 77).

Alliteration has clearly atrophied as a literary feature in modern times. Furthermore, whereas previously alliteration covered almost the whole range of the alphabet, nowadays only certain letters are favored above others in swearing. Many of the most commonly used modern terms start with the letters “b,” “d,” and “f,” found in bloody, blooming, blasted, bastard and bugger, damn, darn, devil and drat, frigging, footling, fart, fuck and its euphemistic variants. It is a speculation that the consonants “b” and “f,” which are, respectively, bilabial plosives and bilabial fricatives, offer an effective vehicle for emotive release because of the physical release of air. As Otto Jespersen noted appositely of the others nearly a century ago: “Thus we have here a whole family of words with an initial d , allowing the speaker to begin as if he were going to say the prohibited word, and then turn off into more innocent channels” (1962, 229).