@#%&*!

The Wall Street Journal Wednesday had an interesting piece on the history of swearing. I don't have an on-line subscription, so I will have to transcribe by hand.

Linguists have traced some of Americans favorite four-letter words to the 11th century. [....] By 1785, an English scholar, Capt Francis Gross, had enough material to assemble a Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. According to Gross, "fusty luggs" referred to a "sluttish woman," and a man's sexual organ was known as a "plug tail." Women's breasts were variously referred to as "apple dumplin' shop" and "Cupid's kettle drums."

The piece goes on to describe words coined as substitutes for taking the Lord's name in vain: "golly," and "gosh," arrived in the 1740s, "jiminy" in the 1830s, followed by "Jiminy Crickets," "gee wilikins," and "jeez."

A curse described as the "oedipal polysyllable" originated in the west in the 1800s. Equally impressive are the substitutes society used for words we today would not consider objectional

Acceptable expletives included "drat," "dern," or "dash!" Yet sexual terms remained out of bounds in polite society. Pantaloons were called "unexpressibles," and syphillis was referred to as "blood poison." Such words as "stallion," "sow," and "bull" were banned - "bull" sometimes replaced with "gentleman cow."

The article kind of drifts away for a couple paragraphs before finishing with these quotes from Mark Twain:

"Under certain circumstances profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."

"If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there."

With the understanding that our communications are re-presentations of our thought processes, I don't swear much. It reflects poorly on thinking. That said, I will throw a choice word in at certain times with emphasis, to express that I have thought about something and it outrages me to the point of profanity.