The recently, lamentably deceased Allen Walker Read–etymologist, lexicographer, and author of an unexpurgated compendium of 1920s bathroom graffiti–once said: “That anyone should pass up the well-established colloquial words of the language and have recourse to the Latin ‘defecate,’ ‘urinate,’ and ‘have sexual intercourse,’ is indicative of grave mental health.”
Listening to .wav files of the calls on the Lucky Pierre Web site (www.luckypierre.org) it’s apparent that some callers have stumbled onto the Swearline blind–“I don’t know what the fuck all this fuckin’ swear shit is,” said one, “but I just lost my job and I’m feeling shitty so I thought I’d give just give you a fuckin’ thing or two. Fuckin’ fuck.” Many others, however, are clearly in on the game. One contributor offered the following ode:
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Historical research has been performed on swearing, but not very thoroughly. While plenty of scholars have preserved the works of Virgil and Cicero, only a few bothered to jot down the vulgar graffiti of Pompeii’s brothels and bathhouses (“Cacator cave malum, aut si contempseris, habeas Iovem iratum.” Translation: “Watch it, you who shit in this place! May you have Jove’s anger if you ignore this.”) Even H.L. Mencken, in his wonderful 1919 book The American Language, refers only to the “unutterable four-letter words,” and makes mention of nothing stronger than “son of a bitch.” Contemporary dirty-word researchers like Geoffrey Hughes and Jesse Sheidlower–authors of Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths, and Profanity in English and The F-Word, respectively–are largely dependent on literary records rather than spoken-word transcripts when discussing cussing styles of days gone by. Fortunately, all three could rely on less shy researchers like Read and Vance Randolph, who reported on swearing during the 20s and 30s.
Oh, cunt, oh, cunt, thou slimy Slit
In the art world, taboos were actively preserved by the more famous obscenity trials, although obscenity is generally a misnomer when applied to art utilizing profanity, especially in the case of works not designed to appeal to prurient interest. These are the pieces that can, in the words of Lenny Bruce, “tear off a piece of ass with class.” According to critics of such stuff, the problem is not with the art, only the “bad” words contained therein. Yet in literature the best-known battles seem oddly overwrought. The naughtiest word shows up in Ulysses only twice, and not for nearly 800 pages. Holden Caulfield rants about the fuck yous scrawled everywhere in the world, but Salinger is able to plaster Catcher in the Rye with only six.
“I never had a wench so handsome in my life,
Folklorist John Avery Lomax encountered the same sort of resistance as he commended miles of southern songs and stories to acetate. Among innumerable tame versions of “John Henry” and “Midnight Special,” Lomax attempted to preserve earthier folk songs, no matter how “crude or vulgar.” He said so in a letter mailed out to the nation’s prisons and was met with chilly silence or exclamations of outrage from wardens who frowned at the thought of using the U.S. mail to transport such verbiage. But one song made the cut, and was recorded in 1936: Jimmie Strothers’s “Poontang Little, Poontang Small.” Though bereft of excessive profanity, with lyrics like “Put my dress above my knees / Gonna give my poontang to who I please / Oh my babe took my salty thing,” it strangely garnered a Delta signification in the Library of Congress Folk Archive card catalog, identifying it as erotica.
