Goddam/Goddamn

Although goddam is now regarded as generally, if not exclusively, American in usage, its origins lie in English history. From its imprecatory origins in serious curses like “God damn you!” or, stranger, “God damn me!,” it has developed many semantic nuances and grammatical functions, undergoing semantic loss of intensity as its functions have proliferated.

Curiously, it is first found in medieval times as a hostile term used to designate the English. This was in the form goddem , applied to them by the French during the Hundred Years’ War on account of their copious profanity and use of the word goddam . According to Joan of Arc, as quoted in D.A. Barante, The Kings of Burgundy (1431), the English used it “a hundred thousand times.” The name did not long outlive that period of hostilities, although it had a brief ironic revival in the nineteenth century: J.P. Corbett wrote in A Tour of Italy (1830), “It seems the ‘Goddems’ are having some fun” (8).

In the period of the English Civil War (1642–1649), swearing became a significant discriminator of the opposing sides: the Puritans were severely opposed to taking the Lord’s name in vain, while the Cavaliers were very free in their oaths. “The courtiers garnished their mouths with God-dammes, as if they desired Damnation rather than Salvation,” wrote Sir Edward Peyton in his history, The Catastrophe of the House of Stuarts , in 1652. The fashion thus attracted the nickname of the God-damn-me s, used by the noted controversialist William Prynne, who referred directly to “The God-dam-me Cavaliers” in The Sovereign Power of Parliament (1643, 17).

This fashion proved to be very resilient. Daniel Defoe criticized in “A Tilt at Profanity” (1712) the “senseless stuff” spoken by beaux or dandies in fashionable coffee houses: “at play it is G?d damn the cards; a-hunting it is G?d damn the hounds” (1951, 260). In The Marriage of Figaro (1784) the French dramatist Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais observed ironically, “The English, in truth, do add here and there some other words when speaking; but it is obvious that ‘God-damn’ is the foundation of their language” (III v). Lord Byron agreed:

‘G-d damn!’—those syllables intense,—
Nucleus of England’s native eloquence
( The Island , 1823, Canto 3, section 5)

There is a revealing and curious anecdote recorded by Captain Basil Hall when he visited the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific. An islander greeted him with this series of salutations: “Very glad to see you! Damn your eyes! Me like English very much. Devilish hot, sir! Goddam!” (1831, 89). The man was simply repeating the more colorful points of communication left by Captain James Cook’s expedition in 1778.

During the nineteenth century, as goddam tended to peter out in British English, it started to expand into its modern range of uses in the United States. The linking sense of “accursed” is found in a powerful quotation from 1816: “A villain overtook me and said you God dambd Brasington and … gave me blow … on my left cheek” (J.K. Williams, Vogues in Villainy , 15). By the 1840s there were instances like “that’s a God damned lie,” “I’m God damned if I care,” and “I was so God damned drunk,” showing loss of intensity. Consequently, the superlative form became necessary: “This is the G-d damnedest shot of work I ever saw,” wrote J.M. McCaffrey in Manifest Destiny (1847, 80). The use as a mere intensive dates from the period of the World War I, well illustrated in Hemingway’s comment about Ulysses in 1922: “Joyce has a most god-damn wonderful book.” (All citations are from the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang .) Although such usages were originally confined to American English, they are now generally current and banalized.

As the entries for damn and flexibility show, the use of the word as a mere intensive, infixed into another word, is recorded from the mid-nineteenth century. Infixing, whereby the term is integrated into another word, is otherwise recorded from only the 1920s. Since then the process has developed in forms like “ambigodamdexterous” and “indegoddampendent,” showing that the original word is being used simply as a filler without semantic content. Similarly revealing is the emergence of the oxymoron “a good goddam,” also recorded from the 1920s, which continues to flourish. Stuart Berg Flexner has pointed out that “the two-syllable goddamn(ed) is often merely suggested by the other two-syllable words, such as consarned, confounded, doggone(d) , and dad-burn(ed) ” ( dad perhaps coming from Gad or – d , earlier euphemisms for God ) (1976, 171).

In British English, goddam now has generally diminished in currency. The same is true of other global varieties, notably South African and Australian English.