The Romans, as depicted here, were splendid and vociferous swearers. Holy Sh*t traces the history of swearing from Ancient Rome to the present day. In her epilogue, she considers the stigma only recently – if quite rightly – conferred upon racial epithets in the West, and wonders if those words might, a few centuries hence, have evolved to a point free of their original meaning, and become workaday exclamations along the lines of “fuck”, or “bugger”, or other sexual slang now uttered almost exclusively in non-sexual situations.
She argues, correctly, that few things define a society more starkly than its taboos. Mohr’s treatise is a mix of history and human psychology, and an intriguing meditation on how one influences the other. The title, though bowdlerised, is astutely chosen – indeed, the necessity of that asterisk to placate nervous booksellers is a perfect illustration of the power still wielded by relatively mild curses that would, in this licentious age, scarcely prompt letters to the Daily Mail if deployed during Songs Of Praise.
Melissa Mohr certainly thinks not, which is why she has written this wry history of a form of expression both sacred and profane. It cannot be accidental that we have lit upon the same word for both. We swear when we stand before the judge and promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and we might well swear again on being informed that the jury didn’t buy it. We do it when in the fullest command of our emotions, and when we lose our tempers entirely. Swearing is something we do when we are at our most noble and honourable, and when we are at our angriest and least dignified.
Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr (OUP)
0 kommentar(er)
