Maledicta

Generally speaking, American linguistic scholarship has put considerable focus on oral, as opposed to written, usage. There is thus no real equivalent in Britain of the journal American Speech , founded in 1925. Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression , edited by Reinhold Aman, who founded it in 1965, has followed the example of such pioneering figures as H.L Mencken and Stuart Berg Flexner, but has gone to the true limits of the oral spectrum by printing articles dealing with every conceivable taboo or embarrassing topic, including pieces on other languages, mainly European. While not always strictly scholarly, in that references are often minimal, the journal fearlessly illuminates the vibrant qualities of scatological and bawdy speech, as well as breaking many of the taboos that have grown up around the attitudes broadly assumed under the heading of political correctness. Unlike most publications, the journal does not “draw the line” anywhere, and includes, for example, pieces on AIDS jokes, Ethiopian jokes, and a huge variety of obscene swearing and ethnic humor. From 1977 to 1989 it published annual collections, followed by three between 1995 and 2004. Its appearance is thus contemporary with a growing interest in profanity and obscenity, evidenced in increasing numbers of dictionaries published in this field in the past two decades.

As Aman wrote in the Introduction to the collection The Best of Maledicta (1997), “Thus, 22 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to the collection and analysis of all those words and expressions shunned by academia and to publish the results in our annual journal Maledicta , with the motto: ‘They say it—we print it.’” However, Aman is very aware of the serious side of the topic, writing at the outset: “Every day around the world, tens of thousands of people are humiliated, demoted, fired, fined, jailed, injured, killed or even driven to suicide because of maledicta: insults, slurs, curses, threats, blasphemies, vulgarities and other offensive words and expressions.”

Precisely because of its unconventional stance, the journal has printed many valuable contributions to obscenity and profanity actually in use, such as Stephen O. Murray’s “Ritual and Personal Insults in Stigmatized Subcultures” and Leonard R.N. Ashley’s study of the sexual side of Rhyming Slang, “The Cockney’s Horn Book.” Volume XIII (2004) contains an article on “The Foul-Mouthed and Lying Clintons.”