Coprolalia

This arcane term, which would translate literally from Greek into demotic English as “talking shit,” refers to a psychological condition whereby victims are overcome with a perverse desire to utter socially inappropriate or unacceptable words such as swearwords and racial epithets. The condition is regarded as part of Tourette’s syndrome, named after Giles de la Tourette, who coined the word in its French form coprolalie in Archives de Neurologie 1885 (IX, 19). The word rapidly gained psychological currency, an article in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders in 1886 commenting that “Echolalia (the meaningless repetition of words and phrases)and coprolalia may form part of the symptoms of insanity.” (XIII, 412). Havelock Ellis in his Affirmations (1898) was more specific: “These extremes are of two kinds: the first issuing in a sort of coprolalia, or inclination to dwell on excrement…. The other is that of pruriency, or the perpetual itch to circle round sexual matters” (147). About a third of sufferers from Tourette’s syndrome show coprolalia, interpreted more broadly as manifesting itself by involuntary muscular tics, gesticulations, and vocal outbursts.

As with many technical psychological terms, coprolalia has tended to be popularized and trivialized, as in the instance from W. Gaddis, Recognitions (1955): “When you have Tourette’s disease you go around repeating dirty words all the time. Coprolalia. Everybody below Fourteenth Street has coprolalia” (II v 531). Coprolalia is also a form of sexual gratification, now recognized in the simpler formulation of “talking dirty.” Notable sufferers of coprolalia were Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), although both used obscenities in writings.