Swearing in English

Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present

Tony McEnery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134514250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Do men use bad language more than women? How do social class and the use of bad language interact? Do young speakers use bad language more frequently than older speakers? Using the spoken section of the British National Corpus, Swearing in English explores questions such as these and considers at length the historical origins of modern attitudes to bad language.

Drawing on a variety of methodologies including historical research and corpus linguistics, and a range of data such as corpora, dramatic texts, early modern newsbooks and television, Tony McEnery takes a socio-historical approach to discourses about bad language in English. Arguing that purity of speech and power have come to be connected via a series of moral panics about bad language, the book contends that these moral panics, over time, have generated the differences observable in bad language usage in present day English.

A fascinating, comprehensive insight into an increasingly popular area, this book provides an explanation, and not simply a description, of how modern attitudes to bad language have come about.

1
Bad language, bad manners

Bad language

Consider the word shit. Simply being asked to do this may have shocked you. Even if it did not, most speakers of British English would agree that this is a word to be used with caution. Because of prevailing attitudes amongst speakers of the English language, using the word may lead any hearer to make a number of inferences about you. They may infer something about your emotional state, your social class or your religious beliefs, for example. They may even infer something about your educational achievements. All of these inferences flow from a fairly innocuous four-letter word.

Shit, and all other words that we may label as bad ‘language’, are innocuous in the sense that nothing particularly distinguishes them as words. They are not peculiarly lengthy. They are not peculiarly short. The phonology of the words is unremarkable. While it might be tempting to assume that swear words are linked to ‘guttural’ or some other set of sounds we may in some way impressionistically label as ‘unpleasant’, the fact of the matter is that the sounds in a word such as shit seem no more unusual, and combine together in ways no more interesting, than those in shot, ship or sit.¹ A study of bad language would be relatively straightforward if this were not the case.

So how is it that such an innocuous word is generally anything but innocuous when used in everyday conversation? How is it that such words have powerful effects on hearers and readers such as those you may have experienced when you read the word shit in the first sentence of this book? The use of bad language is a complex social phenomenon. As such, any investigation of it must draw on a very wide range of evidence in order to begin to explain both the source of the undoubted power of bad language and the processes whereby inferences are drawn about speakers using it. The potent effects of words such as shit can only be explained by an exploration of the forces brought to bear on bad language in English through the ages. It is in the process of the development of these attitudes that we see taboo language begin to gain its power through a process of stigmatisation. This process leads a society to a point where inferences about the users of bad language are commonplace. The following chapters will aim to add weight to this observation. For the moment, the reader must take this hypothesis on trust, as before we can begin the process of outlining evidence to support this hypothesis, a refinement of the goals of this book, and some basic matters relating to the sources of evidence I will use, need to be dealt with.

The focus of this book is bad language in English, with a specific emphasis on the study of swearing. Bad language, for the purposes of this book, means any word or phrase which, when used in what one might call polite conversation, is likely to cause offence. Swearing is one example of bad language, yet blasphemous, homophobic, racist and sexist language may also cause offence in modern England. However, this book will not study changes in what has constituted bad language over the centuries. Books such as Montagu’s (1973) Anatomy of Swearing and Hughes’ (1998) Swearing have explored these changes already. Nor will this book work through a history of the changing pattern of usage of swear words as Hughes and Montagu have. Rather, this book has three distinct goals. First, it will study the effect of centuries of censorious attitudes to bad language. Following from this, this book will explore how bad language came to be viewed as being associated with a range of factors such as age, education, sex and social class. The passing parade of words that constitute bad language seems to have had little or no effect on what is associated with the users of bad language over the past three centuries or so. This book aims to look beyond the words that have caused offence to look for the social processes that have brought about the associations between bad language and a number of sociolinguistic variables. Finally, this book will seek to demonstrate that the roots of modern English attitudes towards bad language lie in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is in this period that we can find a social and moral revolution occurring which defined attitudes to bad language for centuries to come and established a discourse of purity as a discourse of power.

In pursuit of the later two goals, this book explores the ways in which the public perception of bad language over the past 400 years has changed. The review is not comprehensive in the sense that I do not slavishly work through each decade and century. Rather I seek, by a study of three periods (1586–1690, 1690–1745 and 1960–1980), to outline the role that bad language has played in public life and public discourse in England. In doing so, I will investigate how the state has used bad language as an excuse for censorship (1586–1690), how bad language became associated with a number of sociolinguistic variables such as age, sex and social class (1690–1745), and how a discourse of power based on the absence of bad language was reinforced and defended in the debate over bad language in the media (1960–1980). In looking at these three periods, I will also argue that the studies presented are cumulative—in the later period the discourse of purity that was being defended was that established in the period 1690–1745, and in turn that linguistic purity was used as a tool of censorship in a way just as effective as any act of state censorship in the period 1586–1690.

The goals link to the organisation of this book. The book is split into three major parts. In the first part, I pursue the first goal of the book by looking at the way in which modern English reflects historical processes which have formed attitudes to bad language. In the second part of the book, I will explore in detail what these historical processes were and how those processes have linked bad language to the demographic variables studied in Part 1. In exploring these historical processes I will look at both the establishment of these attitudes (1690–1745) and a recent example of the maintenance of these attitudes (1960–1980). In the final part of the book, I will look at the discourses which were used to establish and to maintain these attitudes.

These three sections support a number of claims about bad language in modern British English. I summarise these claims here, though for the moment I will not seek to justify them—that is the work of the rest of this book. My claims are:

1. modern attitudes to bad language were established by the moral reform movements of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries;
2. these attitudes were established to form a discourse of power for the growing middle classes in Britain;
3. the moral and political framework supported by a discourse of power can be threatened by the subversion of that discourse.

In pursuit of my goals, I will need to use a wide range of sources of data if any explanation of modern attitudes to bad language is to be attempted. The sources used in this book are social and political history, sociological theory and corpus linguistics.

Social and political history

The British people and its government through the ages have forged the attitude to bad language current in British society today. Such a statement is clearly uncontroversial. Yet accepting this statement entails a serious examination of bad language in the context of British social and political history. This in turn leads to significant problems. Discerning the processes behind political actions and social attitudes in the twenty-first century is difficult enough. Considering such factors from the sixteenth century onwards ushers in many practical difficulties. A whole range of methodologies which may be used in the present day are clearly inapplicable when considering the sixteenth century. Focus groups, questionnaires and the full panoply of techniques in modern social science are of no use at all to the researcher in such an investigation. The limited range of data available is accessible only via the tools of the historian’s trade—dealing with old texts, government documents and whatever information other sources of documentary evidence may yield.

Sociological theory

It should be clear by now that my approach to bad language views it as being as much a social/historical phenomenon as a linguistic one. In trying to account for how a society develops attitudes and beliefs which problematises language, I will draw on modern sociological theory which seeks to provide an explanatory framework for such events, most notably Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and moral panic theory. Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, as will be shown shortly, is useful in explaining any differences in language use by different social classes. Moral panic theory is the basis of the approach taken in this book to discourses about bad language.

Corpus linguistics

Corpora are used in two distinct ways in this book. In the third part of the book, corpora are mainly used as sources of evidence to explore the development of attitudes to bad language and discourses surrounding bad language use. This contrasts somewhat with the first part of the book where corpora are used as sources of evidence related to swearing in British English. So, in the third part of this book, corpora are not being used in ways which many readers will typically be familiar with. The way corpora are used in Part 3 differs from the way in which they are used in areas more familiar with corpus use, e.g. language pedagogy, lexicography or theory-neutral linguistic description. This difference arises because my aim here is to show that corpus linguistics as a methodology allows one to couple corpus data with theories and supporting data from beyond linguistics. Yet in coupling corpus data with sociological theory and historical data, I believe that we gain a deeper insight into a question which should be of interest to linguists—the source and origin of the attitudes to bad language prevalent in modern British English.

The first, and to some extent the second, part of the book covers a more familiar, descriptive, use of corpus data. However, it is in the contrast of the different parts of the book that I hope that the need for a deeper, historical and sociological exploration of bad language becomes apparent. While corpus data allows us to describe swearing in English, for example, it does not begin to provide an explanation for anything that we see within the corpus. Description in tandem with explanation is a powerful combination in linguistics. The separation of one from the other is damaging. An explanation of something which is not described in some credible fashion may be no explanation at all. Description without explanation is at best a first step on the road to a full investigation of some linguistic feature. In this book, corpora have a role to play in both explanation and description. The explanations for the attitudes to bad language which corpora help to flesh out in the third part of this book flow directly from the corpus-based description of bad language in the first part of the book. The explanation helps one to understand the description. The description becomes the key to lending credence to the abstract explanation.

So, in this book, corpora are being used as a medium for an exploration of hypotheses arising from social and political history as well as sociological theory. Having mentioned sociological theory, it seems appropriate to return to the theories drawn on in this book: moral panic theory and Bourdieu’s theory of distinction.

Moral panics

The sociologist Stanley Cohen developed moral panic theory in the late 1960s to account for episodes where the media and society at large fasten on a particular problem and generate an alarmist debate that, in turn, leads to action against the perceived problem. The response to the problem is typically disproportionate to the threat posed. Cohen (2002:1) introduces the idea of a moral panic by saying that:

Societies appear to be prone, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions.

Though moral panics are far from new, moral panic theory is. In spite of the relative recency of moral panic theory, it is somewhat fractured. Goode and Ben-Yahuda (1994) outline three forms of moral panic as part of an attempt to provide a grand unified theory of the topic. The problem with their approach is that it may be that in trying to produce an over-arching theory, they are forcing a separation between what may be intertwined processes, or are forcing fundamentally different processes to sit unhappily together under the umbrella term ‘moral panic theory’. Nonetheless, as the different varieties of moral panic are of minimal relevance to the main goals and claims of this book, I will exemplify moral panic theory here solely with reference to the so-called interest group moral panic theory, both because it was the first model developed and because it links most clearly to the events discussed in Parts 2 and 3 of this book.²

Cohen (1972) put forward an early version of moral panic theory focused on a media scare related to the activities of two rival groups, ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’, who clashed occasionally in England, most famously in British south-coast seaside towns in 1964. ³ The model put forward by Cohen is essentially a cultural account of moral panics. It has four basic elements. First, the moral panic must have an object, i.e. what is the moral panic about? Second, a moral panic needs a scapegoat, also termed a ‘folk devil’— an entity which the public can both project its fears onto and blame for a state of affairs. Scapegoats are typically vulnerable figures in the society within which the moral panic is occurring. Third, the moral panic may be generated by a moral entrepreneur via the media or by the media alone.⁴ Moral entrepreneurs typically represent an interest group, hence this approach to moral panics is called interest group theory. Finally, the debates prompted by moral panics are ‘obsessive, moralistic and alarmist’.⁵

Claims of moral decline leading to moral panics have ‘rung out down the ages’.⁶ In short, they are not solely a twentieth- or twenty-first-century phenomenon. One should be able to see moral panics in earlier periods of history and one should be able to fit Cohen’s model to them. Some further possible inferences that one may draw from Cohen’s work are worthy of note. First, the concept of mass media can be flexible. One need not think simply in terms of newsprint, radio and television. So, in Early Modern England the pulpit was, in effect, the mass media. In extending moral panic theory across the ages, we need to consider the chang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Bad Language, Bad Manners
• Part 1: How Brits Swear
• Part 2: Censors, Zealots and Four-Letter Assaults On Authority
• Part 3: Discourses of Panic
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography