Foul Language

“Foul language” is a broad category combining and involving such diverse offensive elements as “dirt,” shit words, obscenity, and pornography, of which the last three have their own entries. The use of terms like foul, filth, dirt , and dirty to categorize offensive or abusive language is profound and ancient. Anglo-Saxon ful (“foul”) was used to gloss “obscene” as well as “dirty.” “Shit worde,” dating from 1250, is historically the earliest categorization of coarse speech, followed by “foul speech,” recorded from about 1455. Shakespeare is the first author to use the modern compound foul mouthed in 1597 when Mistress Quickly condemns Falstaff for being “a foul mouth’d man as he is” ( Henry IV, Part I , III iii l.122).

Other meanings attaching to filthy were “morally or spiritually unclean” and “lascivious,” thus yielding expressions as diverse as the medieval formulation “the foul fiend” for the devil and the modern “filthy book” with its “dirty bits.” The puritanical view that sexuality should be regarded as “foul,” even evil, is an extreme Manichean idea expressed, for example, by King Lear, albeit in a deranged state:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend’s.
(IV vi 129-30)

The discussion of the play in the entry for Shakespeare considers these notions in more detail. The same connection appears in foul play, originally meaning a criminal offense before it became merely sporting.

Dirt originally meant “ordure,” before acquiring the modern sense of “soil,” which also previously had the sense of “ordure,” specifically in the euphemistic phrase night soil, for the contents of chamber pots. Much of the legal debate concerning obscenity and pornography has focused on the phrase “dirt for dirt’s sake,” meaning, in effect, sex for sex’s sake. The entry for Lady Chatterley’s Lover contains a number of prime instances of the marked correlation between explicit sexuality and “filth,” both in the American judgment and the original hostile critical dismissals of the work as “the fetid masterpiece of this sex-sodden genius,” “the abysm of filth,” and “the foulest book in English literature.” Many of the problems in defining obscenity and pornography derive from the vagueness of the terms themselves and the breadth of foul and dirty.