Colin Burrow reviews Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing:
Mohr ends by welcoming swearing as a good thing. We need to exercise the palaeomammalian brain from time to time, and we should ‘appreciate that our language has so many such useful words that can be employed in such a wide variety of ways’. She also speculates that future swear words will probably come from some of the milder taboo areas in modern life, such as death and disability.
Should we be quite so cheery about swearing or its future? Swear words and oaths often gain their expletive force from the circumstances in which they are uttered. The badness of saying ‘whore’ or ‘God’s wounds’ or ‘bastard’ depends on who you say it to and why – as Queen Elizabeth I’s lord deputy in Ireland Sir John Perrot discovered when his secretary told on him for saying ‘God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base bastard pissing kitchen woman.’ Oaths can carry their potential to hurt or shock into normal conversation, which is why they can be used simply as intensifiers. Maybe we should just say ‘what the hell’ (or the expletive of our choice) and let this happen, because it does happen and will happen.
The Dish 