Jesus

The name of Jesus falls under the basic taboo against “taking the Lord’s name in vain” and has therefore generated a considerable number of euphemistic variants, although they are markedly less numerous than those for the name of God and evolve later. As the accompanying table shows, there are approximately a dozen such forms, starting from the early sixteenth century, while the field for the name of God is nearly three times as large and starts two centuries earlier. Significantly, the name of Jesus is not recorded at all in Anglo-Saxon, the standard mode of reference being se Haeland , meaning “the Healer,” and in Early Middle English the name was rarely written in full, various abbreviations like IHS being preferred. This practice makes the powerful Chaucerian uses below the more striking. Most forms are first recorded in British English, but those with asterisks first appear in American English.

1528 Gis, Jis 1660 Geminy 1694 Jingo 1821 Bejabbers 1830s Jiminy 1830 Jeez* 1848 Jiminy Crickets 1849 Jerusalem cricket* 1851 Gee whillikins* 1866 Jehosophat* 1876 Gee wiz* 1892 Jesus H. Christ* 1905 Gee 1920s Jeepers 1922 Jesus wept 1922 Judas Priest 1934 Jeepers Creepers

Taking the year 597 as the date when Christianity officially came to Britain, this word-field starts very late in the timescale of the language. One can posit a number of reasons for this. Whereas records of the Old English period give little insight into the “street talk,” those of Middle English are far more revealing, showing a remarkable profusion of religious exclamations, curses and blasphemy, unexpected in an age of faith. The volume and range in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland alone are quite astonishing, and include the names of God, Jesus, and Christ, as well as the names of numerous saints, both common and unfamiliar. The irrepressible and much-married Wife of Bath ends her tale with two secular invocations to Jesus, both improper and the second blasphemous:

and Jhesu Christ us sende
Housbondes meeke, yonge and fressh abedde …
[Husbands who are compliant, young and vigorous in bed]
And eek I praye Jhesu shorte hir [their] lyves
That wol nat be governed by hire [their] wyves;
(ll. 1258-62)

This second “death wish” is a specialty of the outrageous Alisoun of Bath, reserved for her old husbands. Showing that blasphemous swearing was by no means a male monopoly in Chaucer, another Alison, the deceiving wife in the Miller’s Tale , roundly rejects a suitor who has interrupted her adulterous love play:

I love another….
Wel bet than thee, by Jhesu, Absolon.
(ll. 3710-11)

It is a typically Chaucerian irony that one of the most seemingly heartfelt uses of the name of Jesus should come from the spiritual charlatan, the Pardoner, in the “sales spiel” for his pardons and relics:

And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,
So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve.
[And may Jesus Christ, our soul’s doctor,
Allow you to receive his pardon.]
(ll. 916-17)

But he receives a forthright rebuttal from the Host:

“Nay, nay!” quod he, “thanne have I Cristes curs!”
[“No way!” he said, “then I would have Christ’s damnation!”]
(l. 946)

Euphemisms were thus not really required in late medieval times, since the name of Jesus was so frequently invoked. However, with the coming of printing and its accompanying restraints, as well as the growth of fundamentalist Christian sects, the previous freedom of swearing started to be curtailed. Furthermore, the censorship against using the name of God on the Elizabethan stage obviously had its effects. Nevertheless, the field shows only two terms, gis and jis , prior to the Elizabethan period, one form, geminy , which coincides with the Restoration, followed by a long hiatus until the mid-nineteenth century, after which there is a fairly steady accumulation of terms up to the 1930s. Thereafter, the taboo clearly was no longer respected, and the name of Jesus started to be used with its medieval frequency. By jingo has a complicated history, but was used by Motteux in his translation of Rabelais (1694) to render par Dieu , and became quite fashionable in the phrase by the living Jingo during the eighteenth century.

American English shows respect for the taboo with some picturesque euphemisms, such as Jerusalem cricket (1849), Gee whillikins (1851), Jehosophat (1866), Gee wiz (1876), and Jesus H. Christ (1892). However, the variety also tends to have more unsympathetic uses of the name in conjunctions like Jesus freak (1966), and the ironic name for sandals, namely Jesus boots . In the 1930s, H.L. Mencken acerbically commented on the use of the name by Hispanics: " Jesus (hay-soos with the accent on the second syllable) often sticks to his name, but is occasionally constrained to change to José or Joe in order to allay the horror or check the ribaldry of 100 percent Americans" (1963, 637).

The potency of the name has not diminished. One of the most powerful instances was the spontaneous exclamation, captured on television, of a woman witnessing the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. She screamed out, “Jesus Fucking Christ!” American lexical authorities generally do not mark the name as taboo, preferring the formula “usually considered offensive.”

The British view is hard to determine in a secularized society. A study carried out by the Broadcasting Standards Council in the United Kingdom, A Matter of Manners?: The Limits of Broadcast Language (1991), showed that assessments of “the strength of swearwords” varied greatly according to gender and age. Older respondents found all religious swearwords far more shocking than sexual terms; young men found virtually all swearwords weak. In an essay on “Blasphemy” in the symposium, the Reverend Dr. Colin Morris, an experienced administrator and advisor on television, observed:

Whereas the casual use of “God” might be regarded as poor taste, the insulting employment of “Jesus” or “Christ” would certainly be viewed by most Christians as an affront to conscience and therefore an attack on something very precious to them.

(1991, 83)

However, the B.B.C. noted that according to a survey carried out in 2005, the majority of young British children thought that “Jesus” was a swearword rather than a person.