What the F Read online

  Looking just at English, you’ll find that nearly all the most profane words in Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States fall into one of these four categories: praying, fornicating, excreting, and slurring. This is an important point, important enough to name a principle for it. I hereby propose we call it the Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle.

  Many of the most offensive words on the four surveys fall into the Fucking group. A wanker is one who masturbates. Cunt refers to a Fucking-related body part. And, of course, many of the words actually have the word fuck in them. The tops of the lists are also populated by nigger and other slurs. Lower on the lists are Shit-category words, words related to bodily effluvia, like shit itself, asshole, piss, puke, and so on. They’re not as vulgar, but they’re still on the list. Holy-category words, at least in English, seem relatively tame.

  How generalizable is this pattern? If it captures something about human nature or about the inevitable evolution of cultural systems, then you’d expect it to apply broadly. Across the world, the vast majority of taboo language should be drawn from one of these four domains, perhaps even in similar proportions. Alternatively, English speakers might be a breed apart, uniquely obsessed with religion, copulation, bodily functions, and social groups. If you pick your favorite language other than English, how does profanity work? What’s profane in Cantonese? How about Finnish? Does the Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle stand up?

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  Systematic research on profanity in English may be sparse, but there’s enough of it to go on. Other languages have basically zilch—no large-scale surveys and no small ones either. So if you want to know what profanity looks like in, say, French or Japanese, you have to dig around through language guides for foreigners with a particularly saucy bent, the occasional academic paper, interviews with native speakers of the various languages, or the rare regulatory document describing what words are banned where and by whom. These kinds of sources are limited in that they all encode the opinions of one or a few people—they’re not the product of systematically collecting data from native speakers of the language. But that’s what we have to go on, and that’s what I’ve relied on to produce the following assessment of how well the Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle does around the world: pretty well.

  Cantonese has five words widely agreed upon as the most vulgar in the language—these are the words censored on broadcast television in Hong Kong.10 They are diu (“fuck”), gau (“cock”), lan (“dick”), tsat (“boner”), and hai (“cunt”). If you’re keeping score at home, that’s five for Fucking.

  Or consider Russian. Ripped from the censor’s press sheet is the official list of the most profane Russian words, currently banned from movies, plays, and other forms of art.11 The strongest profanity in the language, known as mat’, has two tiers. The top tier houses the four most profane Russian words: two words for genitalia, a word equivalent to fuck, and a word that translates as whore. Including the second tier of somewhat outdated and weaker profanities, mat’ totals eleven words: seven for genitalia, plus two for sexual acts and two for categories of people who engage in stigmatized sexual acts (prostitutes and homosexuals). In sum, two slurs and the rest are related to sex.

  Finnish, which is unrelated to Russian and Cantonese (or to English for that matter) paints a similar picture, at least based on accounts provided by linguists. The top Finnish profanities are words roughly equivalent to hell, God, cunt, piss, shit, ass, fuck, and a number of words roughly translated as cunt or cock.12

  And so it goes in language after language. Most of the profane vocabulary in most languages that have accessible documentation is drawn from one of these four categories. That’s not to say there aren’t local exceptions. One is language about animals—calling someone a dog in Korea is deeply offensive, for example. Disease often creeps into profanity, and a salient example is Dutch, which counts among its strong profanities words for cancer, typhoid, and tuberculosis.13 Ostensibly, in Dutch, the severity of the illness communicates the strength of the profanity. Another rare but attested source is words derived from maledictions—literal curses, like Damn you to hell! Or A plague on both your houses! And there are taboos about death and death-related words. For example, across many cultures, there’s a taboo against naming the dead. Once a person dies, his or her name cannot be uttered, sometimes for a year or longer, as in some Australian Aboriginal cultures,14 and sometimes under penalty as severe as death, as among the Goajiro of Columbia.15 But these are fluid. For the most part, when a language and culture designate a stable set of words as profane—where the words themselves are deemed inappropriate and offensive—these largely follow the Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle.

  Curiously, not all languages hew to the principle in the same proportions. Languages almost always have a mixed portfolio of swearing drawn from the four pillars, but they also invest unevenly in them. Some languages draw so disproportionately from religious terms to populate their profane lexicons that you might want to call them Holy languages. By the same reasoning, there could also be Fucking, Shit, and even Nigger languages.

  By this measure, Quebecois French is a Holy language. It makes heavy use of what it calls sacres (“consecrations”)—strong profanities related to Catholicism and Catholic liturgical concepts. Far stronger than merde (“shit”) or foutre (“fuck”) in Quebec are tabarnack (“tabernacle”), calisse (“chalice”), and calvaire (“Calvary”). This is despite—or due to—the fact that Quebeckers have largely lost their religion. The “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s left most of them Roman Catholic in name only. And yet the holy curses persist, even in the face of a populace that has lost touch with the sacred origins of the words.

  And Quebecois isn’t the only Holy language. Italian has a set of words similar to the Quebecois sacres, known as bestemmie. Most involve adding the word porco (“pig”) to words for Catholic figures, like porco Dio (“pig God”) or porca Madonna (“pig Madonna”). Similarly, in some dialects of Spanish, ostia (“host”) is profane, as is naming the virgin (La Virgen) or the “blessed chalice” (Copón bendito). It’s no coincidence that these are languages spoken in places where the Roman Catholic Church has had a significant cultural presence. And while Catholics don’t have the market cornered on Holy-derived profanity, they nevertheless are laudably consistent in populating local profanity with religious terminology.

  Fucking-category languages are more pervasive. A good example is Cantonese, which, as I mentioned earlier, uses words for the act of copulation like diu (“fuck”) or relevant body parts, like tsat (“boner”), as its strongest terms. Same with most varieties of English—as we saw earlier, whether in the United States, New Zealand, or Great Britain, the majority of the words judged most profane or most inappropriate relate to sexual acts, the organs used to perform them, or the people who engage in them. By this measure, Hebrew is probably also a Fucking language, although due to its unique history (the language had largely died out and was reconstructed in its modern form in around 1900, predominantly from religious texts), most of its swearing is borrowed from other languages, like English and Arabic. And Russian is quite clearly a Fucking language, with all of its mat’ referring to sexual organs, acts, or actors. Not a hint of Holy or Shit.

  Shit-category languages are harder to come by. There’s a case to be made for German; although some strong profanity in German is drawn from the Holy and Fucking domains, it’s not as pervasive as in English. The German equivalent of fuck, which is ficken, is not commonly used in swearing. But German has a lot of Shit talk. Some of the most used and likely most familiar expressions make use of or are built from Arsch (“ass”) and Scheisse (“shit”): Arschloch (“asshole”), Arschgeburt (“born from an asshole”), Arschgesicht (“ass face”), Sheisskopf (“shithead”), and so on.

  The similarity of these examples to English might tempt you to say that English is in fact something of a Shit language as well. After all, the Anglophone swearing quiver is full of shit- and
ass-related words. Consider dumb-shit, shit-faced, shit-balls, shit-sticks, shit-sack, shit-canned, shit-fit, shit-house, shit-load, asshole, ass-face, dumb-ass, smart-ass, ass-eyes, assclown, ass-hat, and I could go on. English is full of shit.

  So we’ve seen plausible examples of Holy, Fucking, and Shit languages. Are there Nigger languages? Perhaps English. Among the words that many native speakers consider worst are ones originally drawn from derogatory terms for individuals or groups with certain attributes. Nigger might be the strongest modern example, but in my classroom at the University of California, San Diego, many students feel similarly about chink and beaner. English has profane terms based not only on ethnicity but also on sex (bitch, cunt), sexual orientation (fag, dyke), immigration status (wop, FOB), and health condition (retarded, sperg, lame). (See, for a historical perspective, the delightful book Holy Sh*t.16) But these terms are largely limited in their use. In English, fuck is everywhere. So is shit. You don’t have to be talking about copulation or defecation for these words to find a niche. But that’s not quite as true about nigger and chink. These are strong words, but they haven’t migrated as robustly away from their sources.

  Of course, classifying languages into one bin or the other isn’t particularly important, and it serves to gloss over the subtleties—most languages draw from a variety of sources for profanity, and many profane terms blend together words with diverse pedigrees, like Jesus motherfucking Christ or holy fucking shit. So let’s not get lost in the weeds.

  Ultimately, I want to highlight just two things. First, languages tend to draw from similar domains for their profanity. The Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle isn’t just about English. It’s about language. And that suggests that the forces that make words become profane in English may be present across human experience, regardless of native language. And second, despite similarities across languages, cultural idiosyncrasies play a role in shaping how profanity in a language will work and how it will be distributed. Languages spoken by people with a cultural history of uniform religious practice for instance (read here: Catholicism) can become populated with Holy profanity—words for heaven and hell and saints and demons. You might even say that when it comes to cultural differences in profanity, the devil is in the details. (Or you might think better of saying that.)

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  As far as cultural differences go, tilted distributions of Holy, Fucking, Shit, and Nigger words are only the beginning. We Anglophones have a regulatory bent. Many of us feel that certain words by their very nature are bad and potentially harmful. And our impulse is to regulate language, through rules like laws that limit free speech in order to maintain profanity-free airwaves, movie theaters, and public spaces. But this is not a human universal. Just casting a glance around the society of nations reveals stark cultural differences in the suppression of profanity.

  In France, for instance, even the most profane words of the language, like foutre (“fuck”) and putain (“whore”) are so common that if no one told you they were bad words, or gros mots (“fat words”) as they’re called in French, you could be excused for not figuring it out yourself. There’s no concerted censorship of specific words in the media in France as there is in the United States, which is part of the reason these words are everywhere. These words also have many distinct uses, which vary in terms of their strength and meaning. For example, foutre (“fuck”) is used as a general verb meaning something like “do” or “give.” For instance, Qu’est-ce que tu a foutu? literally translates as “What is it that you fucked?” but its meaning is more like “What the fuck did you do?” To say that someone has an estimable physique, you can say that he or she is bien-foutu, literally “well-fucked” but more equivalent in English to “well-fucking-built.” The same versatility is true of putain (“whore”), which is used a lot like English fuck as a general intensifier. It can go at the beginning of a sentence: Putain, ça coute chère! (“Whore, that’s expensive!”) which means something like “Fuck, that’s expensive.” Or J’en ai marre de cette putain de voiture! (“I’m fed up with this whore of a car!”), which would be used equivalently to “I’m fed up with this fucking car!”

  There are certainly limits in France to how widely these terms can be used. But nearly everyone uses them, from television personalities to the prime minister.17 While you might do well to avoid using them in your first interview with a potential employer, they’re certainly less offensive to French people than lots of other things you could say. It’s not that France is a paradise for linguistic libertarians. Clearly some utterances are inappropriate, such as verbal abuse or solicitation of undesired sexual interactions. But profanity isn’t as taboo in France as it is in, say, the United States.

  Cultural attitudes toward swearing can be even more foreign. In some cases, a language can be totally bereft of profanity. Consider the curious case of the missing Japanese profanity. You might be familiar with the contours of the story from the James Bond book and movie You Only Live Twice. At one point, Bond is in Japan, training with Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service. Bond casually swears, and Tanaka reacts with a short comparative linguistics lesson, explaining that, “There are no swear-words in the Japanese language and the usage of bad language does not exist.” According to Tanaka, in those moments of heightened and transient motion that elicit epithets from an Englishman, a Japanese speaker would only utter things like shimatta, “I have made a mistake” or bakayaro, “fool.”

  Although the Bond oeuvre isn’t necessarily renowned for its anthropological sensitivity and nuance, in this particular case, Tiger Tanaka’s story stands up pretty well to scrutiny. Japanese does have specific ways of speaking that are thought to be stronger than others, and there are many ways to insult people. Beyond uttering potentially insulting words like bakayaro, you can offend someone by using the wrong grammatical form of a verb or noun—similar to how an English speaker might offend his surgeon by addressing her as Carla instead of Dr. Lee. Japanese even has a special way you’re supposed to talk to the emperor, with its own prescribed noun and verb forms, without which you could surely offend.

  But as Tanaka says, Japanese seems to largely lack a core feature of what makes the profanity we’re familiar with in the English-speaking world so complicated and so powerful. Profane English words like fuck aren’t proscribed just because they insult people or because they describe sexual acts. There’s something about the words themselves that we consider bad. And this key element appears not to be a cultural universal. In Japanese, you can insult people directly by calling them names. And Japanese has words for genitalia and for acts of deploying them. But there’s reportedly no real equivalent to the class of English words we consider profanity; nor is there any societal agreement that those words are “bad” and need to be regulated.

  Being curse-less has consequences. It affects the things you can do with the language—the work you can do with words. So Japanese speakers who want to swear have to look elsewhere. Take Ichiro Suzuki, a Japanese baseball player who spent a large part of his career playing in the United States for the Mariners and Yankees. Ichiro is a polyglot—he speaks English when appropriate but also uses Spanish with players from Latin America and the Caribbean. He told the Wall Street Journal in an interview, “We don’t really have curse words in Japanese, so I like the fact that the Western languages allow me to say things that I otherwise can’t.”18 If you want to curse in Japanese, you literally have to do it in English or Spanish.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum from Japan are societies in which some agency is authorized to regulate and restrict public language use. To some extent, the United States is such a place in that there are certain exceptions to the right to freedom of speech, and one of those is profanity. (Much more about that in Chapters 9, 10, and 11!) But there are far more authoritarian language regimes to be found. During the writing of this book, for instance, Russia banned a list of profane words from the arts—books, theater, films, music, everywhere. Violators will
be fined. The particular words targeted are unsurprising—they’re the most profane words that I mentioned earlier, mat’. Those words are khuy (“cock”), pizdá (“cunt”), yebát’ (“to fuck”), and blyad (“whore”). (It now occurs to me that these developments might make this book hard to purchase in Russia.) And it’s not just these four words that are now banned but all words that include them. You see, Russian, like English, likes to build off of its profane words, which makes for a rather lengthy list of banned words. For instance, pizdá (“cunt”) can be augmented in a variety of ways: pizdéts is used as an exclamation, meaning something like “deep shit!” The verb pizdét’ means “to lie,” a close equivalent to English “bullshit.” And so on.

  If you keep looking, you can find more repressive regimes. There are places where use of taboo language, in particular blasphemy, is treated as a capital crime. For instance, countries or parts of countries governed under strict sharia law (from Afghanistan to Yemen) punish blasphemy with death. This is a way of taking prohibitions on taboo language to the most violent extreme—if using words in certain ways is bad, and if it’s the state’s (or the church’s) responsibility to act in the interest of the well-being of individuals, then it follows that the state ought to use its punitive apparatus to impose limitations on speech.

  So although languages tend to draw from similar sources to populate their lexicons of profanity, those commonalities are eclipsed by cultural differences in what people think about words. A culture appears to be able to decide whether or not to buy into the idea that certain words deserve to be called out for special treatment. A language doesn’t have to have profane words. And that’s a point worth remembering when we return later to the question of censorship and the future of profanity.