Profanity

All the principal synonyms for swearing, notably profanity, blasphemy , and obscenity , originally had strong religious denotations. This is now generally only true of blasphemy , although profanity in British English still commonly implies language that is irreverent or blasphemous, rather than simply shocking. The roots of profanity and profane lie in Latin fanum , meaning “a temple,” and when the words were taken into Middle English they carried this etymological sense of “to desecrate or violate a temple,” before being applied to more secular objects. Even John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s, could use profanation (coined in The Book of Common Prayer of 1552) in the private context of love, about 1610:

’T were profanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.
(“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” ll. 7-8)

Yet in his Devotion on “The Language of God,” Donne wrote that “all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps” ( Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions , Expostulation, 19).

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 negotiated by the Hollywood producers and their opponents contained among its prohibitions the category of “pointed profanity (this includes the words God, Lord, Jesus, Christ—unless used reverently—Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd).” However, in modern English usage profanity has steadily lost its specifically religious association in favor of the extended meaning of “vulgar or irreverent action, speech, etc.” (from Collins Concise Dictionary , 1999). In British usage profanity is encountered with diminishing frequency, while in American usage the term generally falls under broad category of “swearing.”

The more specific British offense usually termed Profanity on the Stage, which provoked quite stringent policing from Elizabethan times onward, is covered in the entry for censorship. Generally speaking, with the secularization of Western society and as the focus of swearing has shifted from the religious mode to the excretory, genital, and copulatory, so profanity in its strict sense has become regarded as less offensive than previously. However, as the entry for broadcasting shows, responses to profanity vary greatly according to the age and culture of the audience. Furthermore, out of respect for the religious sensibilities of others, a number of the terms listed under “pointed profanity” above are still avoided in scripts or deleted from sound tracks.