Explicitly Speaking

Warning: expletives ahead

The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping, Being a Genuine Account of All the Women’s Clubs in and about the City and Suburbs of London, c.1760 (public domain - British Library)

“A sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with constant use.” — Washington Irving, 1820

One of the things that’s constant about language is there are always certain words that are considered vulgar or offensive.

Which words those are, though — that’s ever-changing. Rude words are constant, but their ability to offend is in flux.

And you should know your flim-flam from your fiddle-faddle.

Just this week, a couple of cases of presidential profanities caused a stir. In one case, observers shared this about President Biden:

“The president has described Trump to longtime friends and close aides as a “sick fuck” who delights in others’ misfortunes.”

And Roberta Kaplan, E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer, described former President Trump’s not-so-subtle dig at her following his deposition:

 “And he looks at me from across the table and he says, ‘See you next Tuesday.’”

It shouldn’t be a shock that presidents swear; they’re only human. In fact, there’s a history of expletives coming from the executive branch.

But as we go further back, our modern sensibilities might find earlier offensiveness just plain silly.

According to Suzannah Lipscomb, author of The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Languedoc,

“In the Middle Ages, the worst words had been about what was holy; by the 18th century they were about bodily functions. The 16th century was a period when what was considered obscene was in flux.”

We enjoy a great deal of flexibility with some of our profanities today that English speakers in the 1500s did not have.

Here’s how some of our modern profanities sounded back then:

In describing a difficult situation that we have no way out of, we say “we’re fucked.” According to the Historical Thesaurus of English, those alive in the Tudor era would have claimed to be “in hot water” (first use 1537), “in a pickle” (1562), “in straits” (1565) or, the in the most extreme: at their “utter shift” (c.1604).

To “fuck up” or spoil something, they’d have used “to bodge” or “to botch.” To say something was codswallop, baloney, or bullshit, they’d have gone with trumpery, baggage, rubbish or the wonderful alliterative terms that appeared in the 1570s and 80s: flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, or fible-fable.

But if you really wanted to offend someone in the 16th century, you’d call them a whore, knave, thief, harlot, cuckold, or false. They still cared more about a reputation for behaving badly than how to describe the behavior itself.

If only that were still the case today.

There’s so much to learn,