Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult 77
26: 74 ‘Then began he [St Peter] to curse and to swear’. 46 Interestingly, the
colloquial form of curse, cuss, is often used in cussing and swearing. The
term cuss word is found from the nineteenth century as synonymous with
swear word.
He didn’t give a continental for anybody. Beg your pardon, friend, for coming so near
to saying a cuss-word. (Twain 1981: 341)
Mark Twain’s ‘continental’ is end-clipped from continental damn, itself
based on the worthlessness of continental money – American currency of
around 1775. The phrase continental dam is modelled on phrases going back
to Langland’s nouzt worth a carse, and more recently, not give a tinker’s
cuss. Tobecussing someone out is to swear at and insult him/her. Also, from
the late eighteenth century, the noun cuss is used as a mild insult, as in He’s
an awkward cuss. It is a euphemistic dysphemism, a milder version of He’s an
awkward bastard. Many languages invoke disfiguring, deadly diseases in
maledictions. Current English no longer does so, though A pox on/of you!
(principally smallpox) was used in early modern English; cf. Shakespeare’s
Falstaff exclaims:
A pox of this gout! or, a gout of this pox! for the one or the other plays the rogue with
my great toe. (Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, I.ii.246)
With his usual aplomb, Shakespeare puns: the first ‘pox’ is ‘smallpox’, the
latter ‘venereal disease’. There is also his a plague o’ both your houses 47 –
invoking bubonic plague, with its blotchy red sores, pneumonic problems and
death. In other languages we find cholera invoked, e.g. in the Polish expletive
Cholera! which is roughly comparable in function to English Shit!
Swearing can act as an in-group solidarity marker within a shared colloquial
style. Used when a higher style is expected, it is likely to cause offence
and may be specifically used to offend, but in both cases it reflects discredit
on the speaker. It is not only the style expected, but also the relative status of
the interlocutors that affects the perceptions of profane swearing. Relative
status derives from two sources: the relative power of the interlocutors and the
social distance between them. The relative power is defined by social factors
which obtain in the situation of utterance. The relative power of a physician
and a highway patrolman is not given for every occasion, it depends on where
they encounter one another: imagine how it will differ, depending on whether
the highway patrolman is requiring a medical consultation at the doctor’s
office, or the doctor has been stopped on the highway for alleged dangerous
driving. Social distance between interlocutors is determined by such parameters
as their mutual (un)familiarity, comparative ages, genders and sociocultural
backgrounds. The management of social status (power and social
distance relations) involves the management of face, and consequently the