Disease

Cursing and imprecation typically call down some catastrophe, such as death or disease upon the object of the curse. Plague itself originates in the biblical sense of “a visitation of divine anger or justice,” notably the ten plagues inflicted on Egypt in the Book of Exodus. European society was, of course, greatly afflicted, first by the Plague and then by syphilis, both of which became powerful generators of exclamation and abusive name-calling. Leprosy and smallpox have also disfigured populations at regular intervals, making poignant outcasts of their victims. However, other epidemics like influenza, malaria, and AIDS have had no such semantic extension, possibly because they inflict less disfigurement. Furthermore, disease terms, like many other categories in swearing, follow a pattern of becoming fashionable and then obsolete. In speech communities largely unaffected by these terrible visitations, disease has understandably not really become a linguistic motif.

The principal devastations of the Plague that afflicted England were the pandemic of 1348–1349, in which between a half and a third of the population died, and the attacks of 1360, 1379, and 1664–1666. The disease, now technically termed the bubonic plague (from Latin bubo , denoting the symptomatic swellings of the afflicted), was often known simply in the Middle Ages as the death and the great death . Thus in Chaucer’s Prologue the Reeve’s tenants “were adrad of hym as of the deeth” (l. 605), meaning probably “They feared him like the Plague.” Curiously, the popular name the Black Death is, in fact, an anachronistic invention, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , was “introduced into English history by a Mrs. Penrose in 1823.” Be that as it may, the name has stuck. Syphilis, also called the pox , is generally agreed to have been introduced into Europe in 1493 by the crews of Christopher Columbus’s ships on their return from the Americas.

Pox is a respelling of Middle English pockes and pokkes , the plural of pock , meaning a pimple, pustule, or pit on the skin, still surviving in pock-marked . Although the form pox dates from about 1503 the older forms survive, especially as pocky , meaning “diseased.” There is thus quite a long period when both the pox and pock forms coexist.

Clearly the terms relating to these infestations had both literal or referential uses (“the pestilence killed many”) and emotive or imprecatory uses (“the pestilence on you!”). Generally speaking, in linguistic usage the referential uses come first, as can be seen in the following table:

Disease

The table shows that the literal uses are spread out over three centuries (from 1303 to 1604) without any special concentration, but there is a large gap between 1398 and 1542. The imprecatory senses, on the other hand, show a considerable clustering between 1531 and 1598. More remarkable are the two cases where the imprecatory sense actually precedes the literal: these are pestiferous and plaguey . These anticipations suggest that the plague had become such a fashionable topic in swearing that the emotive use became dominant. The fact that they are both adjectives is surely no accident, since such forms, like devilish , tend to be used very loosely. Dr. Johnson defined plaguey in his Dictionary (1755) as “vexatious; troublesome,” categorizing it as “a low word.” Interestingly, most modern dictionaries now record the primary meanings of pestilent and pestiferous as “annoying or troublesome”—that is, emotive rather than literal. The same is true of pest , “a person or thing that annoys,” and pesky , meaning “troublesome” or “excessively,” exclusively American and originally a New England term thought to be a dialectal adjective from pest + y . It is found in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s reference to “those pesky blackberry-bushes” in Oldtown Folks (1869, 119).

Whereas the Plague was an unavoidable catastrophe, especially among the poor, syphilis was a sexually transmitted disease with its attendant stigma and complex of emotions including taboos, coded references, and black humor. Consequently, whereas pestilence and pestilential appear virtually contemporaneously with the outbreak of the Plague, there is a notable time lag between the arrival of syphilis about 1493 and its overt naming as the pox about 1550. The earlier form of the word appears in this scurrilous rhyme of 1528 about Cardinal Wolsey: “He had the Pockes without fayle, / Wherefore people on him did rayle” (Harley Miscellany, ix 32). Even as late as 1631 in Philip Massinger’s play Emperor of the East , the Surgeon says ironically: “An excellent receipt [prescription]!… ’tis good for … the gonorrhoea, or, if you will hear it in a plainer phrase, the pox” (IV 4).

The naming of syphilis, with its evasions and xenophobic projections, belongs to another entry. However, pox itself (once it had broken the taboo) became used in a great range of fashionable exclamations. Some were quite explicit, as in William Congreve’s The Old Batchelour (1693): “The pox light upon thee for a contemplative pimp!” (III 6). But most were simply ejaculations, such as a pox on it!, a pox of …!, pox take it!, what a pox! , plain pox! , and so on. These show the typical development from a loose grammatical construction to a purely idiomatic use. Of this once-thriving word field, only the related form pest still survives.

Scurvy underwent a parallel but later semantic history. The literal sense referring to the disease dates from about 1565, but is preceded by the adjective meaning “covered with scurf” from about 1515. From this derived the common archaic figurative sense of “worthless” or “contemptible,” first recorded in 1579 in an Elizabethan guide to the underworld, warning the reader “Looke that thou flee from this scabbed and scurvie company of dauncers” (John Northbrooke, Dicing , 64b). Much in use in Elizabethan times, it had petered out by 1900. The related adjective scrofulous was used literally from the early seventeenth century, before acquiring the sense of “morally worthless” (often used of literature) from the 1840s. The difference in attitude between modern and previous times is shown in the fact that scrofula was previously called “the King’s Evil” or simply “the Evil,” the former name deriving from the belief that it could be cured by royalty, a practice followed from Edward the Confessor up to Queen Anne in 1714.

One obvious semantic correlative is leper , which has developed a far more powerful sense as a “social outcast” than the literal meaning of one afflicted with physical leprosy. Bishop Hugh Latimer first used the term in the figurative sense in 1552: “We are lepers of our soules.” The sense became established in various phrases, notably the alliterating comparison “as lonely as a leper.” However, whereas terms relating to the Plague and syphilis have become first fashionable, then weakened, and finally obsolete through overuse, leper has been the subject of protests and pressures to limit its currency. “I feel that it is necessary to launch a protest at the continual use of the word ‘leper’ in medical literature,” wrote R. Cochrane in the Leprosy Review XIX, 39. This was in 1948, several decades before the advent of Political Correctness, and is one of the first of such semantic interventions. The OED now carries a usage note: “The term is often avoided in medical literature because of its connotations.”

It is curious that other major diseases like influenza, malaria, and AIDS have generated no semantic extensions. For a brief period AIDS was (erroneously) termed “the gay plague,” but in general disease no longer figures as a generator of oaths.