Damn

Within the Christian framework, which has been the basis for Western civilization for two millennia, the terrifying notions of eternal punishment, damnation, and hell have naturally become the subjects of a huge eschatological literature and a great tradition of art. Consequently, the term damn and its relatives have for centuries been regarded as so potent as to be highly taboo. However, with the secularization of society, the term has become weakened in force to the point of trivialization, in common with many other words with religious significance, such as hell, the Devil, demon , as well as the names of God and Christ.

The original sense of damnare in Latin was secular and legal, “to condemn, doom to punishment or inflict damage upon,” which are the early senses of damn in Middle English. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) Mark Antony says of Publius, a political enemy: “He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him” (IV i 7). However, the religious senses developed earlier, in the fourteenth century. The first instance cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is goddem , the common oath of the English soldiers in France during the Hundred Years’ War, further discussed in the entry for goddam. Damn could still be used in a deadly serious way in the late sixteenth century, as in Macbeth’s desperate curse: “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon” (V iii 11), and the denunciation from Queen Elizabeth’s Liturgy (1563): “Filthy and dampned Mahomet, deceiver of the world.” However, it is often difficult to distinguish between the serious and the fashionable senses, exemplified in this exclamation from 1589: “Hang a spawne? Drowne it; all’s one, damne it!” and in Othello’s outburst “Death and Damnation!” (III iii 396). Early evidence of damnable and damnably being used simply as intensives comes from the 1590s, in Falstaff’s confession that he has “misused the King’s press damnably” ( Henry IV Part I , IV ii 14). Shortly afterward, in 1619, John Fletcher alludes to the practice of profanity: “Rack a maid’s tender ear with dams and Devils” ( Monsieur Thomas , II ii).

As damn became less acceptable in public, so it generated euphemized alliterating variants, such as deuced (1774). (This form shows ambiguity, a general feature of swearing, since deuce is generally regarded as a euphemism for devil .) Tobias Smollett, whose novels contain much racy talk, has a character in Peregrine Pickle (1751) say: “I’ll be d?d if I ever cross the back of a horse again” (chapter viii). One of the commonest British euphemisms is dash , recorded from about 1812, followed by dashit some three decades later. In the United States the process of euphemization was under way contemporaneously, but with different forms, namely darn (1770), tarnation (1784), dang (1790), and the rhyming form hang it! (1770). Still later came durned (1876).

As with most religious terms, it is difficult to generalize on usage since interpretation varies according to individual sensitivity. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic The Rivals (1775) contains the mock-serious complaint uttered by Bob Acres, an absurd country squire: “Ay, ay the best terms will grow obsolete. Damns have had their day” (II i), clearly regarding the word as simply a fashionable utterance. On the other hand, Dr. Johnson took the word very seriously, according to this exchange in James Boswell’s contemporary biography (1791):

Johnson:      I am afraid that I may be one of those who shall be damned (looking dismally).

Dr. Adams: What do you mean by damned?

Johnson:      (passionately and loudly) Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly. (1893, 640)

In his Dictionary (1755) Johnson condemned the uses of damnable and damnably as mere intensives as “low and ludicrous.” However, the Duke of Wellington’s assessment of the Battle of Waterloo (1815) was very frank: “It has been a damned serious business—Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice [close] thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life” ( Creevy Papers , chapter x, 236). When the relevant fascicle of the OED came out in 1894, damn carried the comment: “Now very often printed ‘d?n’ or ‘d?.’” This practice seems to us now slightly precious, but for the Victorian bourgeoisie, damn had a great power to shock. In the comic operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), W.S. Gilbert has the Captain declare: “Bad language or abuse, / I never, never use…. I never use the big, big D.” Anthony Trollope emphasized an episode in his novel The Prime Minister (1876) in which the villain Ferdinand Lopez utters the word damned in front of his young wife, Emily: “It was to her a terrible outrage…. The word had been uttered with all its foulest violence, with virulence and vulgarity. It seemed to the victim to be the sign of a terrible crisis in her young married life…. She was frightened as well as horrified and astounded” (chapter xliv).

However, the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) comments that usages of damn and goddam as mere intensifiers are “unquestionably older than the available citations suggest.” The same authority notes that the following quotation from 1865–1867 is “the earliest known example of infixing”: “‘He is, by Jove! A dam incur-dam-able dam coward’” (De Forest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion , 272.) Infixing, whereby the term is integrated into another word, with consequent loss of semantic force, is discussed further under flexibility. The forms dammit (as in “as quick as dammit,” recorded from 1908) and damfool (used by Mark Twain as damphool in a letter of 1881) show the same loss of intensity. At the same period occurs the form damfino , abbreviating “damned if I know.”

The declining impact of damn is largely summed up in the throwaway line in the famous film of Gone with the Wind (1939): “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” At the time of the film’s release, the offending term was a breach of the Production Code, so that a special exemption had to be negotiated and a $5,000 fine was exacted from the producer, David O. Selznik. Today it is generally regarded as a mild idiomatic oath, still having some force in phrases like “I’ll be damned if …” and “Damn you!,” “Damn your eyes!,” but in others like “Well, I’m damned,” being an expression of surprise. Damn is ranked by the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1995) as among the 2,000 most common spoken words. On the rating for “Tabooness” in Jay (1992) it is almost off the scale at 25/28. The term has not developed any particular forms or special currency in other global varieties of English.