Somerville resident Melissa Mohr had many foul expressions to choose from for the title of her history of swearing.
She chose Holy Shit wisely: “Over the centuries these two spheres of the unsayable—the religious and sexual/excremental, the Holy and the Shit, if you will—have given rise to all the other ‘four-letter words’ with which we swear.”
Upon reading this,
I immediately wondered if Mohr had missed the opportunity to give her book a more complete title: Holy Fucking Shit.
After all, Mohr writes in the book that “Roman taboos against defecation were not as strong as those against sexual behavior,” and during the Renaissance, “words for excrement” carried less offense “because they have little chance of arousing any sinful desires.”
Therefore, it seems that ‘fucking’ is worthy of its own category of naughty words.
But Oxford University Press was probably thinking like Woody Allen’s character at the beginning of the movie Manhattan: “I mean, you know, let’s face it, I wanna sell some books here.” (But did OUP really have to replace the “i” with an asterisk?)
Mohr’s first book is a delightful account of how the peoples of western civilization have expressed anger and excitement by way of a select group of words that invariably refer in less-than-scientifically or religiously acceptable ways to the body or to God (or to the body of God).
Holy Shit begins with the Latin-speaking, toga-wearing folks of ancient Rome, who had contemporary English speakers beat by a few major swearwords. In addition to designations for cunt, fuck, cock/dick, ass, and shit, the Romans also had specific terms for “erect or circumcised cock,” “clit,” “to bugger,” “to orally rape,” and “to fellate.”
Interestingly, the word for “clit”—landica—was “one of the worst [words] in the language.” But as Mohr keenly observes, “People swear about what they care about, and the Romans cared about the clitoris.” (They were also, for a kind-of weird reason, a bit overly concerned with it.)
It is also fascinating (wait till you learn the origin of that word) to read about how words that are/are not considered obscene today were/were not considered obscene in previous eras.
For example, Mohr asks (and answers), “If penis was obscene to the Romans, why has it become the most proper English term for the male organ of generation?”
“Furthermore, ‘Cunt’ … seems to have been the standard way to define vulva in the fifteenth century,” and “in the Middle Ages, the word fuck wasn’t any worse than lie with, have to do with, or adulteravit.”
Instead, “blasphemous or vain swearing, words or phrases that take God’s name in vain, mention his body parts, or otherwise detract from his honor” carried with it the greatest danger of offending.
“To medieval English people,” Mohr explains, this “was a major sin, equivalent or almost equivalent to murder.”
As interesting as it was to get a religious history lesson, and to understand why the word “swear” came “to indicate both oaths and obscene words,” I feel that Mohr spent too long discussing the concept of swearing to the almighty.
Holy Shit could have been briefer (not that it is truncated at 250-some pages) had she trimmed some of the excess focus on religious oaths.
However, this minor quibble shouldn’t discourage people from reading such an instructive and entertaining book by a writer as capable and well-qualified as Dr. Mohr. (She has a Ph.D. in Medieval and Renaissance literature from Stanford.)
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As Mohr takes us out of the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, the reader learns of how bigger houses with more private space suddenly alerted people of the desirability of keeping things behind closed doors.
Although a bit more prudish than some previous 100-year blocks, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recorded the first uses of the f-word in novel ways (i.e. “fucked out of his money,” “fucking bitch”).
In the first half of the twentieth century, Mohr concludes, “people were swearing in much the same ways as we do today. By 1945 … people were absofuckinglutely [a word that she dates as first appearing 1921] using the same obscenities, in similar ways, with similar frequency.”
Today, the obscenities that relate to the Holy and the Shit may very well lost their supreme offensive power to a “new” category: racial slurs.
Mohr writes, “When … Allen Walker Read published his groundbreaking article on fuck (“An Obscenity Symbol”) in 1934, he declared that it was ‘the word that has the deepest stigma of any in the language.’ By the 1990s, however, many people were making the same argument for nigger or, in Britain, paki …”
Most people would probably argue that words such as these have not a place in any conversation, even ones in which millennia-old expletives might be perfectly welcome. Then again, some might argue that swearwords never have a place in any conversation. According to Mohr, “Expletives were originally words or phrases that didn’t add anything to the meaning of a sentence or a poem but merely served to fill up space.”
But fear not, potty mouths. Mohr believes that swearwords are valuable and useful.
First of all, “Swearwords can help us deal with physical pain. In a recent experiment, subjects were able to keep their hands immersed in very cold water longer when they repeated a swearword such as shit than when they repeated a neutral word such as shoot.”
More importantly, Mohr asserts, “Swearing is an important safety valve, allowing people to express negative emotions without resorting to physical violence … [T]hey are cathartic, relieving pent-up emotion in ways that other words cannot. Take away swearwords, and we are left with fists and guns.”
Some have criticized the influx of swank restaurants into the area as part of the problem, but Louis DiBiccari, chef and co-owner of 
