THE ART OF SWEARING-, Tau style of this book is
curiously different from what one would expect from the title; and one is tempted to think that the latter emanated from some would-be funny friend, and not from the writer himself. A punning title leads the reader to expect a laboriously funny book, and probably a dull one. But this book does not, happily, attempt to be funny; and if it drags a little at times, its dulness is due to an excessive laboriousness in literary effort, rather than to a straining after burlesque cleverness. The first chapter gives an account of the &tam'
Club, where the writer first heard swearing raised to the level of a fine art and a constitutional practice—the evening cal. minating in a song the burden of every verse in which is "Damn their eyes," a refrain that sets the author thinking on the subject of swearing in general, and of "damn" in particular. The chapter is perhaps too strongly flavoured with reminis- cences of the style of De Quincey's Murder as a Fine Art, and Mr. R. L. Stevenson's " Suicide Club," but is not badly de- signed as a preface to a subject which perhaps required some sort of " personal introduction."
Mr. Sharman traces the origin of swearing, rightly enough, to the quasi-judicial or quasi-religious oath. Men swear by Minerva or Jupiter "for the express purpose of being believed," and be- cause "when not swearing they ran a strong chance of being disbelieved." " The origin of all swearing was the same—the one intense dread of falsehood, against which as yet no laws were sufficient to guard The prevalency of deliberate swearing will always be found in inverse ratio to the prevalency of truth." The author does not seem to be aware how strongly his theory is borne out by the practices of our old English fore- fathers, and draws his illustrations from Athens and Rome, from Dagobert and Clothaire, when he might have referred to the everyday procedure of Anglo-Saxon law, and the codes of Eli and Edgar. This ignorance or ignoring of things native shows itself throughout the book, and disposes the author to refuse us all originality in swearing. Even the British shibbo- leth which, following Byron, he calls the " Goddam," though it has earned us a national nickname, is denied a native origin, and imputed to a French source, though no evidence is adduced in support of the imputation. Indeed, the evidence is all the other way. The author tells us how, even in 1429, Joan of Arc, being about to " direct the memorable assault upon the Tournelles, a soldier of her command ventured to produce a repast of fish, and prayed her to break her fast. Joan, let us eat this shad-fish before we set out.' The Maid indignantly put
aside the proffered gift. In the name of God,' she said, it shall not be eaten till supper, by which time we will return by way of the bridge, and I will bring you a Goddam to eat it with. " And again, when visited in prison by the Earls of War- wick and Stafford,. she told her visitors : " You think when you have slain me you will conquer France; but that you would never bring about. No ! although there were one hundred thousand Goddams in this land more than there are." Yet Mr. Sharman would have us believe that the expression " Goddam " originated in Henry V.'s wars, and was due to a combination of God and the French "Dame," or " By'r Lady." There is no doubt that the " Dame" of the French gamin has a curiously home- like sound to English ears in a French town ; but to impute the origin of one to the other is something of a piece with the famous derivation of the Latin " apis," a bee, from the Greek du-ovr, footless,—not because the Latins thought that the bee * A Cursory History of Swearing. By Julian Sharma:. London : J. C. Nimrae and Bain. 1884. had no feet, but that from the fact of its flying it was thought they might have thought it had no feet. " God-dame" has no meaning, and could have had no meaning, in English months. The original French "Dame-Dien " was a well- known oath in England, as Mother of God ; and to sup- pose that "by one of those combinations so often to be found where there is a confusion or admixture of tongues the English soldiers 'rendered their Dame, or Dame Dien, in the way we have seen " is to suppose that the English soldiers carefully put the cart before the horse, and exchanged their native tongue for a foreign one in those very moments of anger or excitement when language is apt to be most racy and natural. The " laughter-loving Frenchman " who is supposed to have " twitted the invader in that he was unable to pronounce the irrepressible Dien, and was forced to anglicise it to fit it to the re- mainder of the oath," would have had much more reason to laugh if he had thought that the English were such fools as to exchange "Mother of God" for the feeble interjection of " God-mother." The expression God-dam, as applied to the English soldier from Agincourt to Waterloo, would be as natural a nickname as the term Bigot applied to the German trooper in the seventeenth century, and, without more satisfactory evidence to the contrary, must be imputed to a similar origin. Whether " Don't care a damn" is really derived from the Wellingtonian source to which it is traced is less problematical ; but if the " great Duke" did select the "dam," "a piece of Indian money of the minutest value," as his standard of carelessness, it is highly probable that the selection was due to its re- calling his favourite military imprecation. The writer treads on more assured ground when he traces " Deuce " to " Deus," and when he gives us the history of such expres- sions as "Zounds," Bodikins," and so forth, which, as is well known, are traceable to the invocation of the wounds and body and members of Christ,—a subject which, however, scarcely lends itself to wit. He is more amusing on the gentility of oaths, and really musters a most convincing body of evidence that until quite recently hard swearing was a sign of good- breeding in men, and no further back than Shakespeare's time was equally a sign of gentle breeding in women. Of Thurlow, the most notorious swearer (next to, or perhaps even beyond, Henri IV. of France) who ever lived, we hear, of course, the ordinary stories ; and certainly no story the point of which is an oath will ever beat that of Thurlow and the Bishop. The Bishop claimed the right of presentation to a certain ancient benefice against the Crown, and sent his secretary to argue the case with the Chancellor, who cut short all arguments thus, " Give my compliments to his lordship, and tell him I will see him damned before he presents." " That," remonstrated the secretary, "is a very unpleasant message to deliver to a Bishop." " You're right," replied Thurlow, " it is. Tell him I'll see myself damned before he presents." Almost as pointed was the rejoinder of King William's Attorney- General to the American clergyman who, " having undertaken a voyage across the Atlantic to solicit alms for a pious founda- tion in Virginia, and urging that the people of that State had souls to be saved as well as their brethren in England, was met with,—" Souls ! damn your souls ! Make tobacco." Swearing of this jocose sort has given rise to a good deal of wit on the stage, from the days when Socrates is asked, in the Clouds, whether, as he would not swear by the gods, he swore "by the iron money, as they do at Byzantium," and his hearer, Strepsiades, swears " by the mist," to the days when Harry Percy invokes his wife. when she says,—" In good sooth," "Heart, you swear like a comfit-maker's wife As if thou never walkst farther than Fhisbury. Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,—a good mouth-filling oath ;" and so to the days of Sheridan's Bob Acres, with his " 'ods pistols and daggers," and Goldsmith's young lover, with his ".Damn your pigs and prune sauce," in She Stoops to Conquer. Nor, in- deed, is the relish of the joke yet gone. A good, hearty swear on the stage by the testy heavy father, or the languid " Damn " of the Bancroftian lover, is apt to produce more inex- tinguishable laughter than the wittiest repartee or the most comic situation. Not the least interesting chapter in the book is the last, which describes the decline and fall of that now most odious formula of strong language, the word "bloody." Accord- ing to Mr. Sharman, its declension is due to " Low-Country soldiering," when Ben Jonson, and others of his countrymen, were shouldering their pikes in Holland. " With the winds and tides that brought home the shouts of broken utterances there was
wafted to this country the flavour of foreign oaths, and among them the renown in speech of the German blutig.' Now, blutig ' was an inconsequent sort of particle that was employed in all the dialects of Germany to denote a sense of the emphatic
and to have become recognised as a convenient make- weight with which a reprobate soldiery were accustomed to balance their assertions." The only objection to putting this use of the word so far back is that neither Ben Jonson nor Shakespeare uses the word, except seriously and in its proper meaning, though they " ransacked the language " for oaths and terms of opprobrium. It was not till the days of Dryden and Swift that it appears in literature or on the stage. Swift, the author reminds us,writes to state that "it grows bloody cold, and I have no waistcoat;" and, if we mistake not, on another occa- sion, having walked from London to Chelsea in his gown, he com- plains, with an impartiality that would do justice to Ratcliffe Highway, that "it was bloody hot." The word was, in fact, a " swagger " one is those days, before it penetrated to the lowest stratum of society and ousted from the streets almost every other adjective. Its use was never particularly amusing. The only instances given of a jocose use of it are in the title of Admiral Gambier as " Old Bloody Politefnl," and the quite modern story of a certain well-known Serjeant, who, on being informed that a trump-holding adversary at whist was a baronet, answered that " he might have known it from his bloody hand." The "streets," when in a playful mood, sometimes use it not with- out humour, as in the celebrated story of the bargee running with the boats at Oxford, and shouting " hooray, hooray, hoo- bloody-ray." It strikes the author of John Bull et Son Ile as only "ridicule," and he saw nothing but comedy in—" J'ai dit mon bloody patron, qu'il ne me donnait qu'un bloody souve- rain tontes les bloody semaines, qu'il me fallait tinq bloody schillings de plus. 11 m'a r4pondu qu'il n'avait pas le bloody temps d'6conter mes bloody plaintes," and he attributes its origin only to a corruption of "By'r Lady." But perhaps he had not heard the word used in savage earnest, as was the case with the French master of a great public school whom we will remember, when we translated " glaive sanglant " as "bloody sword," exclaiming with horror, "Mon Dieu! you must not say ' bloody sword;' it is horrible ! His 'bleeding sword—his bleeding sword!" The horror at the word "bloody," and the use of the far stronger though less vulgar expression, "My God!" recalls to us the fact that, after all, the wickedness of swearing is mainly a matter of fashion. The servantgalism " My " represents only a truncated form of invocation of the Supreme Being. The fashion of swearing is undoubtedly due to the practice of taking oaths. Those who reprobate the practice of swearing as an ornament of language, if they want to put it down will most contribute to that result by eliminating the use of oaths in Parliament and Public Offices and Courts of Justice. If the " lower classes " are -educated to believe that a man's word is nothing unless strengthened by an oath, it is not wonderful that they carry that belief into daily life, and make the streets hideous with the forms of speech which are inculcated on them in the witness-box and imitated from the practice of the High Court of Parliament.
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