Loss of Intensity, Weakening, or Verbicide - Agglomeration

This formulation describes a semantic trend, widely apparent in the history of swearing, whereby words that originally had great emotive force and impact have their power eroded through constant repetition and indiscriminate use. As Samuel Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot , “The air is full of our cries, but habit is a great deadener” (1959, 91). H.L. Mencken put it characteristically: “All expletives tend to be dephlogisticated by over-use” (1963, 399). Verbicide was coined by the Boston Brahmin Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1858, though C.S. Lewis gave the word a later currency in his work on semantic change, Studies in Words (1960, 7). The trend applies to virtually all categories of swearing, religious, genital, copulatory, and excretory. Examples abound, not just in swearing, but in words which previously had some powerful religious sense, such as awful, ghastly, hellish , or dismal , as well as positives such as divine, heavenly, paradise , and miracle . George Santayana’s succinct observation “Oaths are the fossils of piety” (1900, 148) sums up the history of this semantic area.

Religious oaths and ejaculations provide clear cases of both generalization and weakening or loss of intensity. In the medieval period they had obvious potency and wide currency, but from the Renaissance onward this power was steadily eroded to the point that they became simply fashionable. As the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote in The Rivals (1775): “Damns have had their day.” Although in the Victorian era invoking the names of God, Christ, the Devil, and topics like damnation in oaths became taboo, their power has since eroded once again in general discourse. A century ago expletives like damn and for God’s sake were unmentionable in polite society, while cunt, fuck , and shit were completely taboo. In essence the great range of euphemistic variants of the sacred names and obscene terms (such as Jove, golly, Jiminy, Cripes, Lor! , and effing ) are tributes to the power that the core original words had in the past. Today these euphemisms seem very dated and precious, mainly because the originals have again become so common.

Over the centuries animal terms like pig, swine, sow, shrew , and bitch have become words of powerful insult, but then generalized and weakened. In more recent decades terms derived from genital and excretory functions have become toned down to mean nothing more offensive than “a worthless person” or “a fool.” This trend can also be seen in the terms arse, arsehole, asshole, fart, shit, cunt , and prick . Weakening is apparent both in the more specifically British English swearwords twat, berk , and prat , as well as those of a more American provenance, such as cocksucker, motherfucker , and plain fuck used as a noun. The trend also incorporates general terms like British English bastard, sod , and git , as well as American English punk and son of a bitch . It is also apparent in the grammatical extensions to the verbal formulas fuck off and piss off , as well as the adjectives fucking and sodding . Obviously context, the directness of the insult, and social and personal factors are important determiners of the force of a term. In an amusing comment in Class , the British author Jilly Cooper, recalls “I once heard my son regaling his friends: ‘Mummy says that pardon is a much worse word than fuck ’” (1981, 39). This is an essentially upper-class attitude.

An alternative method of assessing the diminishing impact of abusive terms is to consider them in the categories of the following format of usages, namely “taboo,” “offensive,” “slang,” and “jocular/familiar.” Fifty years ago all the words cited below were taboo, with the exception of bastard and nigger . Today the situation is less clear-cut. In the table an asterisk (*) means that the term belongs in the category, while an “x” indicates that it generally cannot be used, except in certain contexts within the speech community shown in parentheses:

The general point, that previously powerful and taboo terms can now be used in less emotive and even jocular modes, is valid but has to be modified to allow for particular contexts. Thus cunt can be used in the jocular/familiar mode only in certain contexts and idioms, such as “You silly cunt!,” while motherfucker and nigger can be used in this mode, but only among blacks in the United States. Similarly, bastard can be used in these modes in British and Australian English, but not in other varieties.

The principal exceptions to the general trend are the areas of race and disability. Up to half a century ago terms like nigger, wog, coolie, spastic , and cripple were in fairly common currency: Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Nigger of the Narcissus , published in 1897, would certainly have had its title changed a century later. Likewise, Victor Hugo’s famous work, translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1832). With the rise of political correctness, ethnic insults and demeaning terms for disability have become genuinely taboo, requiring new euphemisms. With these exceptions in mind, verbicide, weakening or loss of intensity, remains the dominant trend in the history of swearing.

Agglomeration

Agglomeration is a major consequence of loss of intensity. Since swearing consists of language used in its most emotive mode, that is, with the most concentrated personal feeling, words are often used not in a literal fashion but as mere counters of insult without logical organization, as agglomerations thrown together. Thus the plain insult “You bastard!” can become elaborated emotively into “You bloody bastard!” then “You bloody little bastard!” and even “You bloody fucking little bastard!” Similarly, the exclamation “Jesus!” is often developed, first and logically to “Jesus Christ!” and then bizarrely into “Jesus fucking Christ!,” which was actually uttered by a horrified woman watching the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

There would seem to be a limit of tolerance on the number of semantically unrelated adjectives that can be strung together. However, an extreme and remarkable example from Australia is cited by Bill Hornadge: “You rotten, bloody, poofter, commo, mongrel bastard!” (1980, 136). Although apparently random, this “shotgun” range concentrates in an astonishing fashion many of the prime categories of insult: personal dishonesty, illegitimacy, and aspects of the sexual, the political, and the animal. It should be noted that in the context of Australian speech, bloody and bastard carry little weight. While conceding that semantic impact may seem to be reduced by verbicide, it is important to realize that swearing has a function, not simply of logical condemnation but of emotional release. The entry for impact discusses these aspects further. Although it might appear that this is a modern trend, powerful instances of agglomeration from several centuries ago can be found in the entry for William Shakespeare, notably in the passages in King Lear (II ii 12-22) and Hamlet (II ii 568-70) and in the entry for François Rabelais.