A nice summary of the history and sociology of swearing in English from the point of view of a lexicographer, with a lovely mix of scholarly precision and dry wit. Mohr is clearly someone who is capable of taking endless pleasure from the bizarre ways in which real humans manage to use words to relieve our feelings, and she manages to convey that pleasure very well here.

As background she starts out with the Romans, who were clearly great enthusiasts for bad language based on sexual activity or body functions, and moves on to what the Bible can tell us about the Judeo-Christian tradition of religious oaths. As we all know, an exchange of promises between the God of the Old Testament and his followers was at the core of Jewish and Christian theology, so that any vain or ill-intentioned use of religious oaths was seriously frowned upon. A false oath had the potential to hurt God’s body.

This transferred into medieval Christian societies: the big taboo words people used to express their feelings in medieval England were all religious. Mohr suggests that the famous “Anglo-Saxon words” — most of which are actually of Middle-English origin — would have been considered relatively harmless by most people, partly because of the strength of emotion involved in breaking religious taboos and partly because of the very different attitudes to personal privacy in medieval times. When sex and excretion mostly happened in the presence of others, they might give rise to ribald jokes, as in Chaucer, but they couldn’t really be seen as big taboos to break.

Mohr charts the rise of “obscene” language after the reformation, from Elizabethan drama to Lady Chatterley and Lenny Bruce, and looks at the way sexual and excretory words are gradually being displaced from top taboo position by racial and other epithets. She speculates briefly about how we might be swearing in the 22nd century, but of course admits that such a thing is impossible to predict.

An endlessly fascinating topic, partly because we all enjoy reading about the quasi-forbidden, and partly because this is an area where language gets pushed to the limits of creativity and words rarely mean the same as what they did even a generation ago. ( )

After a great introduction, the rest of the book basically just looks at swearing in literature. Not a bad book for those interested in philology, but not what I expected. ( )

I love swearing, and this was a truly interesting overview of how certain words and phrases exist in the English language. It’s also a great history lesson on certain time periods as well. I listened to this but will continue to dig deeper into the book itself as there are some things I don’t think I caught on the listen (also not that big a fan of the narrator; considering this was written by a woman, I can’t figure out if it was the subject matter that had them have a man read it…). ( )

Þessi bók kom mér skemmtilega á óvart. Hún reyndist vera fræðileg úttekt og samanburður á blótsyrðum Rómverja til forna, enskumælandi miðaldamanna og að lokum Vesturlandabúa síðustu aldar.
Það er skemmtilegt að sjá hvernig blótsyrði Rómverja eru lík okkar blótsyrðum í dag og hvernig menningarviðhorf höfðu áhrif á það hvernig þau voru með öðrum hætti. Síðar á miðöldum þegar áhrif kirkjunnar og eiðar urðu mikilsráðandi þá tóku blótsyrði mið af þeim og síðar þegar einkalíf og feimni nútímamanna við að hægja sér á almannafæri gerði vart við sig þá birtust sömuleiðis blótsyrði í þá veru.
Að lokum bendir Mohr á að í dag eru dónalegustu blótsyrði á enskri tungu þau sem snerta kynþáttafordóma þar sem f**k, sh*t og álíka orð eru farin að missa vægi sitt m.a. vegna ofnotkunar. ( )

Mohr takes a page from Mary Roach's notebook in this scholarly, yet humorous look at what constitutes "dirty" words, how they got that way, and where they may be going. Informative and amusing. ( )