Curse and Cursing

The strict and traditional meanings of curse are the appeal to a supernatural power to inflict harm or evil on a specific person, the form of words itself, and the sense that a person or place is harmed or blighted by being “under a curse.” Cursing now has the generalized sense of a profane or obscene expression of disgust, anger, or surprise, especially in American English, where it is commonly used as a synonym for swearing , see for example, Timothy Jay’s study Cursing in America (1992).

The original potency of the term, like that of charm and spell , derives from belief in word magic and the authority behind the words, institutionalized in excommunication and the anathema. Over time, with the secularization and enlightenment of society, these beliefs have steadily diminished, so that curses have increasingly come to be regarded as mere forms of words rather than as serious forms of malediction. However, as Montagu shows, there are survivals in various European societies (1973, 35-54). Nevertheless, the recent public curse that a Dutch politician might die of cancer, uttered by an Islamic imam on November 25, 2004, provoked a scandal.

Curse first appears as a noun in late Old English (ca. 1050), but according to the Oxford English Dictionary its origins are problematic: “No word of similar form and sense is known in Teutonic, Romanic or Celtic.” The original meaning of a prayer or wish that evil or harm befall someone was extended in the course of the Middle English period to include a formal sentence of anathema or excommunication. This is the dominant sense in Chaucer’s Prologue l. 655: a guilty person should beware “the ercedekenes curse” (“the archdeacon’s excommunication”).

Shakespeare often interrogates the potency of curses, setting them deliberately against the new skepticism of the Renaissance. The benighted and primitive world of King Lear echoes with the verbal power and horror of primal curses invoking sterility (I iv 299-305) and lameness (II iv 165-66). There is grim irony that Lear’s specific invocations of sterility conform to the behavior of witches as spelled out in the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witchcraft”), the major text of the witch hunts of the Inquisition, first published in 1486. Chapter 6 carries the title: “How witches impede and prevent the power of procreation.” Timon of Athens is even more vehement, invoking syphilis, sterility, and social chaos.

Since that time curse has steadily lost force as a verb, although the noun still has potency. It extended into various forms, now fossilized or lost, such as curst, meaning “contrary or perversely cross,” much used of Kate in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1594). Another variant is cursedly , defined by Dr. Johnson in 1755 as “miserably, shamefully,” but regarded as “a low cant [slang] word.” All of these have now become obsolete. In American slang reference works curse is now either unlisted or limited to the comparatively trivial sense of “a woman’s menstrual period.” The main survivor is the colloquial equivalent of cursed , namely cussed , recorded from about 1848 and still thriving. The general semantic trend of the word is thus loss of intensity.