Soldiers and Sailors

Sociolinguistic studies consistently show that swearing and foul language are manifestations of “macho” behavior, which becomes intensified in all-male verbal contexts such as the armed forces, the police, the factory floor, locker rooms for athletes, street gangs, and the Mafia. The entries on the dozens and for flyting endorse the point, as do the observations in Lakoff (1975). In 1795, Joseph Moser noted in his tract Reflections on Profane and Judicial Swearing , that there were “two bodies of men … more addicted to a wanton profanation of God’s holy Name; to swearing for amusement, and blaspheming: I mean our Soldiers and Sailors ” (in Montagu 1973, 223). Conscription introduced most males to concentrated swearing, dominance being established from call-up by foul language as much as by drilling and other routines. Swearing seems generated more readily in the format of group combat of the army and navy than in the air force, where pilots operate more on an individual basis and communicate publicly by radio. As Stuart Berg Flexner noted: “There was such a fantastic increase in the use of fuck, screw , and shit during World War II that it almost seemed that no serviceman could complete a sentence without using one of them” (1976, 158). The general consequence was that swearwords were brought back into the wider society by demobilized civilians. This point is often made in relation to the spread of motherfucker from the 1950s onward.

Historically, the first explicit link between swearing and soldiers appears in the fifteenth century when the English soldiers in the Hundred Years’ War were routinely called the goddems by their French opponents, a point developed in the entry for goddam. There are earlier signs of strong soldierly language in the insults traded by the Saxons and the Vikings before they join battle in the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem The Battle of Maldon (11th century), celebrating English defiance at a battle fought in 991. However, these exchanges are dignified in comparison with what was to come later. In the famous speech on “The Seven Ages of Man” in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599), the young man, previously a passionate lover, is now a soldier, “full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard [leopard]” (II vii 139-66). On the Elizabethan stage there emerged the ironic type of the miles gloriosus , derived from the Roman comedian Plautus, full of bluster and often incoherent oaths, typified by Pistol in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) and Bobadill in Ben Jonson’s Everyman in His Humour (1598). Pistol comes out with such contrived vituperation as “thou prick-eared cur of Iceland!,” “O viper vile!,” and “O braggart vile, and damned furious wight!,” the last seeming to be an subconscious self-description. Bobadill is more original and bizarre, with creations like “base cullion [testicle],” “a dungworm, an excrement!” and “by the foot of Pharaoh.”

To some extent these figures also derived from the sixteenth-century social type termed the ruffler , a vagabond, or a parasite of a military or more often pseudo-military kind, who made a living out of verbal aggression. Tobias Smollett’s notable novels Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751) both contain considerable salvos of nautical swearing. The phrase “to swear like a trooper” first emerges in a most ironic context, Samuel Richardson’s epistolatory novel Pamela (1739–1740): “She curses and storms at me like a trooper” (I, 239). It is precisely recorded by Samuel Foote in The Englishman Returned from Paris in 1756, according to Farmer and Henley (1890–1904), although Flexner (1976) gives a later date of 1839, perhaps relating to the American context. The saying has an obvious class gloss, although officers presumably swore as well. George Washington’s General Order to the Continental Army in 1776 gives an American perspective:

The general is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing, a vice hitherto little known in an American army, is growing into fashion. He hopes the officers will, by example as well as influence, endeavor to check it, and that both they and the men will reflect that we can have little hope of the blessing of Heaven on our arms if we insult it by our impiety and folly.

(cited in Rawson 1991, 5-6)

A frequently cited modern source for obscene language is Frederic Manning’s fictional memoir drawn from his experiences in World War I, The Middle Parts of Fortune , originally published anonymously in a limited edition in 1929. An expurgated edition appeared the following year under the title of Her Privates We under the nom de plume of “Private 19022.” (Both titles come from a bawdy exchange between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildernstern in Hamlet II ii 240-43). In the following exchange Martlow is complaining to Bourne, the central character, about a pair of binoculars an officer has taken from him:

“And now the bastard’s wearin’ the bes’ pair slung round ‘is own bloody neck. Wouldn’t you’ve thought the cunt would ‘a’ give me vingt frong [twenty francs] for ’em anyway?”

“Your language is deplorable, Martlow,” said Bourne in ironical reproof; “quite apart from the fact that you’re speaking of your commanding officer. Did you learn all these choice phrases in the army?”

“Not much,” said little Martlow derisively; “all I learnt in the army was drill an’ care o’ bloody arms. I knew all the fuckin’ patter [speech] before I joined.”

(Manning 1977, 37-38).

Manning’s work avoided prosecution for obscenity by being published anonymously in a limited edition. Brophy and Partridge, in their collection, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914–1918 , commented that fuck was

so common indeed in its adjectival form that after a short time the ear refused to acknowledge it and took in only the noun to which it is attached…. By adding – ing and – ing well an adjective and an adverb were formed and thrown into every sentence. Thus if a sergeant said, “Get your?ing rifles!” it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said, “Get your rifles!” there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger. (1931, 17)

In comparison, Robert Graves in his Goodbye to All That (1929) and even Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead (1948) are not as frank in their recording of coarse speech. Both use a fair number of euphemisms, such as Graves’s “double effing c?” (1929, 70) and Mailer’s continual use of “fugging.” Subsequent works, notably Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961) are less coarse.

Swearing has in recent decades become an essential part of the characterization of the military in film. Whereas earlier depictions tended to be unrealistically polite, the more recent have become relentlessly crude. A revealing but simple contrast lies between Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and his Full Metal Jacket (1987). Also in the earlier restrained style are Jean Renoir’s Regles du Jeu (“The Rules of the Game” 1939), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), while typical examples of the later obscenity-laden mode are Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986).