Melissa Mohr
Autore di Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing
Opere di Melissa Mohr
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- Sesso
- female
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- Opere
- 2
- Utenti
- 394
- Popolarità
- #61,534
- Voto
- 3.9
- Recensioni
- 19
- ISBN
- 6
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.… (altro)