We all know what the big swear words are, but where did they come from, what do they really mean and what do they say about the things we hold sacred.
Linguist Randall Eggert studies swear words. In this episode of Profoundly Pointless we look at the history and hidden meaning of swear words. We talk where swear words come from, normal words that used to be swear words and the worst swear words of all time.
00:00 Introducing Professor Randall Eggert
01:11 How Words Become Swear Words
3:00 What All Swear Words Have in Common
07:00 The Worst Swear Words
11:18 The Best Swear Word
15:41 Historical Swear Words
17:16 When Swear Words Become Normal Words
19:57 New Swear Words
Interview with Swear Word Linguist Professor Randall Eggert
Nick VinZant 0:11
Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode: the history, meaning, and impact of cuss words.
Randall Eggert 0:22
There's something attached to that string of words that we've arbitrarily decided is bad. There's a really old map of London that had a street called Grope Kuntalana, which basically means you know Groppunt Lane. The temptation to break taboos is too high. We all have that impulse in us to to break taboos.
Nick VinZant 0:47
I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it. Really helps out the show. So I want to get right to our first guest because he studies swear words, where they come from, what they really mean, and what they say about our society. This is linguist Professor Randall Eggert. What makes a swear word a swear word?
Randall Eggert 1:15
It's like any other aspect of meaning. There's nothing special about uck that makes it taboo. There's something attached to that string of words that we've arbitrarily decided is bad.
Nick VinZant 1:28
Since we're kind of already talking about fuck, how does something become a swear word?
Randall Eggert 1:33
So the the genesis is is really hard to figure out sometimes. Fuck is an interesting one. It's really, really old. We can date it back to Proto Indo-European, so the the you know language that goes way, way back to you know prehistory. There's speculation about what it would have meant. My favorite is that it meant something along the lines of of prick, right? Like pricking your needle with a or pricking your finger with a needle. There's others who say that it meant something like strike, and it doesn't really matter. What what that tells me is that it was a euphemism, that there was probably a word for sex at the time, that was tabooed enough that they used a metaphoric way of talking about it, and then there's what we call the euphemism treadmill, where you invent a euphemism. Eventually, it becomes too attached to that taboo thing that you're talking about, and at that point, it becomes taboo. So you replace you replace the taboo with this word, and then eventually it becomes taboo itself.
Nick VinZant 2:48
So that's usually how they come about: is that we invent these words kind of as a way to talk about something we shouldn't be talking about. Then the word itself becomes the thing that we shouldn't say.
Randall Eggert 2:59
Yeah. Is
Nick VinZant 3:00
there something that you would say when we look at like the big cuss words, the big cuss words to me my mind or fuck, shit, bitch, etc. Do they seem to have things in common
Randall Eggert 3:12
in general? We can pick out about seven fields of of meaning bad words, taboo words come from obscenity. That's that's one that we see cropping up in language after language. So anything having to do with sex, scatology is another one. So anything having to do with stuff coming out of our bodies, we tend to taboo. the The one exception to that is tears. There's nobody's been able to find a word in any language that's taboo word for tears, profanity. So anything having to do with religion-that's a very common place to draw taboo words from. There's some that may be less common for English, like death. We can point to a few 1980s. people didn't like saying the word AIDS. It was a taboo thing to even say the word, and there was a big campaign where they put on billboards in big letters AIDS, and that was you know a political statement, and that taboo gradually went away. Go back to Shakespeare's time, and words like pox and plague were somewhat taboo. But if some years before that, they would have been highly taboo because they had to do with death. You know, so you see in Shakespeare's time, you know, he would use plaguy sort of in the same way that we would use shitty. There's also going to be words relating to animals, not so common in in more sort of civilized times because we're not as scared of animals as we used to. But if you imagine back when you know we were right on the. A cusp of wilderness, something like a wolf would be terrifying, and so you didn't say the name because it might invite it to come into your your village, and so you can see, you know, historically we have euphemisms that we've inherited. So in Hungarian, the word for wolf is farkash, which just means you know the one with a tail. In English, if you look, you know historically and in most Germanic languages, the word for bear derives from brown. So it's the brown one. In Slavic languages, the word for bear derives from honey eater, so we had all these ways to avoid saying the name of this animal because we, you know, through you know sort of a word magic, we didn't want to invite them into our lives.
Nick VinZant 5:54
So would somebody 1000s of years ago say along the lines of like where I would say oh shit they would be like, "Oh tiger.
Randall Eggert 6:03
Probably. It's hard. It's it's hard for me to to to figure out exactly how it was done at that time. There's not many languages today that seem to have that same taboo, so I found very little research explaining it. You you will find sometimes examples where somebody will say the word and then kind of do some sort of ritual practice to ward off the evil, like they might spit or something like that. We see naming will also be taboo. So certain names we don't say. That's one of the things I like about Harry Potter books is that you've got that character Voldemort that nobody's supposed to say his name. There's something right about that. We find that in language after language that you're not. There are certain names that you're not supposed to say.
Nick VinZant 7:00
Looking at the list of swear words, there seems to be hundreds of them. What would you say are the worst ones
Randall Eggert 7:07
today? The N word is is up there at the top, and it has been for the last several decades. The F slur has moved up, so I've been teaching a course on on taboo words since 2006, so it's been two decades. And during that time, the F slur has gotten much much worse. And so my students, I do a survey with my students every semester, and it's gradually climbed the ranks. The C word has, we can say that one, can't we now?
Nick VinZant 7:42
That's one that, like, I think that we can say it's funny. 10 years
Randall Eggert 7:46
ago, people would have been really mad at me for saying it. Cunt has gone down, and so it's it's still bad, but it's not as bad. Let's see, some of the ones my students object to Diener for for Hispanic people, students tell me that one's pretty bad. It's funny from my perspective, being as old as I am, I don't. It doesn't resonate with me the same way. But my students tell me it's you know that if if you're Hispanic, if you're Latino, you can say it, but if you're not, you shouldn't. The whore is is still up there. Cock sucker, motherfucker is fairly bad, not terrible. There's one I'm missing. Fuck is not all that high anymore. It used to be really high, but it's you know for my students it's comes in right in the middle. I would say you know maybe top middle, but it's not anywhere near what some of those others. And the interesting thing to me is all of the ones at the top today are slurs. If you go back, you know, like thinking about mid 20th century, all of the really bad ones were sexual. They were obscenity, and that started probably in the Victorian age, late Victorian age. That obscenity became the worst one. Before that, it would have been blasphemy, or not blasphemy. Sorry, profanity. So words related to religion would have been the top. So hell was used in the 19th century somewhat in the same way that we use you, you know, fuck. But it would have been more powerful than fuck is today.
Nick VinZant 9:39
Yeah, it seems like the religious ones have kind of fallen off
Randall Eggert 9:43
in some some parts of our society, in certain different cultures. Yeah, in different cultures, it's going to be stronger. You know, I would hazard that in in certain parts of of the Middle East, say in. Islam in in Muslim countries, I would think that you're going to find a lot of taboo words related to religion, and those are probably going to be some of the strongest ones.
Nick VinZant 10:10
I don't know how much you might know about this, but when you look at other languages, other countries, do they seem to have the same language taboos that we do in regards to swear words.
Randall Eggert 10:21
So, yeah, going back to like those seven classes of taboo words, that seems to be cross-linguistic. It doesn't mean there aren't exceptions to that, but those seem to be the areas that we draw taboo words from cross-linguistically. But different languages, different cultures are going to draw from different classes as as being their most taboo. I've had Japanese students who tell me that death is one of the biggest taboos in in Japanese. So the word I think it's pronounced shine to die is one of the worst things you can say to somebody. So, yes, you're going to get the same classes, but different cultures will put different emphases on different ones.
Nick VinZant 11:12
Are you ready for some harder slash listeners submitted questions about swear words?
Randall Eggert 11:16
Sure.
Nick VinZant 11:18
What is your personal favorite?
Randall Eggert 11:20
I love that question. The one I always go to is-it's not common today, but I love it-is "shit a bed, which is a slur for it's a 17th century slur that basically means this person is so slovenly or so drunk that they shit their bed when they go to sleep, and there's just something about that image I think is beautiful, and it's it's a it's a good slur because it doesn't demean any particular group of people. It just demeans that person. So that's my favorite.
Nick VinZant 11:58
That was our next question. Is like favorite historical one, or there other historical historical ones that you think like, oh, those are pretty good or unique. Are there other ones that jump out at you, or like those were kind of interesting ones from history?
Randall Eggert 12:12
There's some other ones. I, I, you know, it's not a particular word, but I find the word cunt fascinating because you know, again, this is a really old word, and there's no good explanation that I know of that tells us where it came from. We know that, like in early anatomical drawings from for doctors, they had things labeled with cunt, so it wasn't a terrible word, and there's a really old map of London that had a street called Grope Kuntalana, which basically means you know Groppunt Lane, and that, not surprisingly, is where the prostitutes were. So I I would guess that wasn't a good word, but it wasn't as terrible. You know, it's hard to imagine having a city name today called Grope Kunt Lane.
Nick VinZant 13:10
I can't get myself to say that one because the c word to me is still like, if I'm out in public and I hear somebody say fuck or shit, I don't bat an eye. If I hear somebody say "con, I'm like, "Oh man! Besides the slurs, the racial slurs and the homophobic slurs, that to me is like, "Oh, you don't you you don't say that one.
Randall Eggert 13:31
I I agree. I mean, I'm you know I'm a bit older than you, but yes. But my students, they don't seem that upset about it anymore. In the UK and in Australia for a while, it's not been that bad.
Nick VinZant 13:47
One of the ones you said that was one of the seven big ones that was surprising to me was whore.
Randall Eggert 13:52
Yeah,
Nick VinZant 13:53
that was a word that was when I was growing up. Like that wasn't a big deal at all.
Randall Eggert 13:58
Yeah, I I'm surprised by that one too, you know. I I haven't queried my students on that, but yeah, it's been pretty consistent that that's up there. My guess is that it's you know it's considered somehow judgmental that it's it's it's because it's not what's the word sex positive, that it's judging a woman based on you know her sexual activity in a way that's a double standard, and I think you know that that's my best explanation for why my students find that one objectionable.
Nick VinZant 14:38
That was the first thing that I went to is like, oh, it's the double standard of it right like there is no word for male whore I mean I'm sure that there is but like it's not impracticality
Randall Eggert 14:48
yeah and I you know and I've had students say that that you know like when we talked about slut for example you know women say you know that they find it quite offensive if if. Especially if a man called them a slut, and I say, okay, well, you know, occasionally gets applied to men, and I go to the men, you know, how would you feel if a woman called you a slut? And their their response across the board is, oh, I'd find that a compliment. Right. So
Randall Eggert 15:16
you know, so you know, even today, as much as we'd like to think that we have progressed beyond it. There's a double standard. There, there absolutely is. When you look at the slurs for women compared to men, there's just more of them for women, and they're more taboo. The slurs for men, the only one that's male specific that's highly taboo, is the F word, the F slur,
Nick VinZant 15:41
swear word that has that has most lost its meaning.
Randall Eggert 15:44
I would say I would have to say fuck. It's you know certainly it's used sexually today, but it's so infrequent compared to how often we use it, just as emphatic. You know we use it so often just to, to you know, in the same way that we might use vary, you know, to add emotion. You know, vary doesn't add much emotion, but it just it's just an emotive today. Most of the time that it gets used, or it's an exclamation. Using it to actually mean sex gets used, but it's not as common. So we've bleached that of a lot of its meaning. Hell would be similar. We we don't use it as often or that frequently to refer to the netherworld, it's mostly just a you know a word that has some emotional power. It's really really low on tabooness today. My students rank it slightly higher than our controls, so I use like a word like green as a control, and hell is only slightly more taboo than green.
Nick VinZant 17:00
Where does where does damn sit in that? Is that still considered to be a a cuss word or not really anymore?
Randall Eggert 17:08
I mean, my students rank it slightly higher than control, so I would say yeah, it's it's very slightly taboo today.
Nick VinZant 17:16
Are there any swear words that have become normal words?
Randall Eggert 17:20
I'll I'll give you one that I I love. There's the word occupy, which we don't think anything of it today, right?
Nick VinZant 17:29
Not at all.
Randall Eggert 17:30
There was a period of about I think it was about 200 years. So occupy was a euphemism originally. You know, it meant what it means today, and then it became a euphemism for sex, and that became really prominent for the word, you know, for the word. So occupy stopped being used for anything but sex, and it became taboo enough that that people stopped using it altogether, and it just kind of fell out of use, and then at some point, some scholar must have seen it written somewhere in an old book and thought, "Oh, that's a cool word. I'm going to start using that word, and it came back into use. And so today we don't think anything of it, but it was bad enough apparently that people stopped using it. So, anyways, I find that one really fascinating that that happened.
Nick VinZant 18:23
So Occupy used to be like fuck,
Randall Eggert 18:26
something like that. I don't know how it was used exactly. All we know is that there was about a 200 year span that it just wasn't used, and we know that it was a euphemism at one point.
Nick VinZant 18:38
Are there any other ones you can think of off the top of your head that are like that, like words that were
Randall Eggert 18:47
I mean, plague. Plague would be a good one. Yeah, because that was a there was a time that was really bad. So, like, if you think about when, and I forget which character says that in Romeo and Juliet, a plague on both your houses. At the time that the play was written, that wouldn't have been too bad. That would have been something like "Damn you. But when the play was supposed to take place, that would have been a really bad thing to say. That would be, you know, basically condemning a person's family to dying, and that would have been pretty taboo because plague was a real worry at the time. You know, there's a few others that we find kind of funny today, like ye gads. You know, that would have been bad at some point, bad enough that it was censored in writing. It was originally a euphemism for "you gods" or "ye gods, and then you put an "a" in it to make it no longer bad. So "ye gads" instead of "ye gods.
Nick VinZant 19:57
Are there new cuss words? Are there new. Swear words that are popping up.
Randall Eggert 20:01
Where we are right now, as we've talked about, slurs are the worst words. My sense is that that's going to change. It's been that way long enough that kids are going to have to find a new way of shocking their parents. And right now, I think it's that saying slur words is going to shock people of our gener. You know, my generation. I don't want to speak for your generation. But I think over time, then that means those words are going to become less taboo.
Nick VinZant 20:37
Has there ever been a word that was so bad that it was nobody would say it.
Randall Eggert 20:44
It's hard to imagine because the temptation to break taboos is too high, right? We we all have that impulse in us to to break taboos. Some of us can perhaps constrain it better than others, but you know I think that impulse is in us, and there's something satisfying about breaking taboos, which again gets to that emotional outlet of them. That you know we need those words because we need a way to verbalize the emotions, and so, you know, there may be words that will fall out of use, but you know, words that we that nobody ever says. I think that's rare that that happens.
Nick VinZant 21:35
I want to thank Professor Eggert so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him, we have linked to him on our social media sites. We're Profoundly Pointless on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and we've also included his information in the episode description. Thanks for joining us. Hope to see you next time.
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