Book review: ‘What the F’, by Benjamin K. Bergen

Swear words are powerful things. We use them in anger, in passion, in unguarded moments of strong emotion. But because they’re taboo, we often skate over them and pretend, maybe even to ourselves, that they occurred in a moment of weakness – that they’re not part of who we ‘really’ are. That this is precisely what they are underlies the great appeal of, and need for, the book reviewed here.

Profanity historically has been under-studied, disparaged or ignored by mainstream academia. But some research on it is highly revealing or suggestive, and it is expertly presented in Benjamin Bergen’s What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves (publisher Basic Books kindly sent us a copy for review). Bergen is a professor of cognitive science in San Diego, and he describes his book winningly, and accurately, as ‘a coming-out party for the cognitive science of swearing’.

Book review: ‘In Praise of Profanity’ by Michael Adams

Swearing has long been disreputable and in many ways still is. But it has never gone away, and (at the risk of confirmation bias) it seems more visible than ever. We see and hear it not just among friends, family and neighbours but at work, on the news, and in cultural media from billboard ads to high literature – albeit often euphemised. Are we living in a capital-A, fuckin’-A Age of Profanity?

Michael Adams, in his new book In Praise of Profanity (OUP, 2016) makes a persuasive case that we are. Though not a book about the history or science of profanity, it draws on both in aiming more immediately to examine and celebrate the swearing performance itself – the feeling, the experience, the phenomenon of profanity.

Book review: A Cursory History of Swearing

I stumbled upon this 1884 title in my research for another post and figured I’d be remiss if I didn’t share it here. I don’t know much about the book’s author, Julian Sharman, other than that he’d also edited a collection of poetry by Mary Queen of Scots and a collection of John Heywood’s proverbs. And I’ll admit I’m not so much reviewing this thoroughly British book as I am admiring it as a curious artifact of its time.

Almost half a century into Queen Victoria’s reign, 1884 stands out as the year:

• the first fascicle of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary was published,
• the International Meridian Conference in Washington declared the Greenwich meridian the prime meridian, and
• a kooky rector mailed a stillborn baby to a member of Parliament as a “publicity stunt”

(none of which provide any relevant context for the book, unfortunately, but surely you didn’t expect me to learn about the so-called Home Office Baby and not pass the information along). Those Victorians sure knew how to party.

Book review: ‘Damn! A Cultural History of Swearing in Modern America’, by Rob Chirico

Swearing and the public have an intimate but uneasy relationship. Eric Partridge bowdlerised fuck with an asterisk in his landmark Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, but the book was still censured fiercely for the word’s inclusion. The explosive power of the F-bomb is encoded in that very term, which along with other euphemisms allows it to be discussed in public without tainting one’s hands or mouth.

Rob Chirico’s new book Damn! A Cultural History of Swearing in Modern America casts a wry and probing eye on the colourful status of off-colour language in American culture over the last century or so, with a few forays further back and further afield. The US, he writes, is undergoing ‘a linguistic, and therefore cultural, shift that is passively opening up to an amplified inclusion of profanity’. This provides the backdrop for a lively examination of the terrain and our divergent attitudes towards swearing.

The Elements of Fucking Style: A fucking book review

In order to make this review as useful as possible, I excavated the library for my yellowed copy of Strunk and White, hereafter referred to as S&W for brevity. (I mistyped that “Stunk” and debated leaving it for posterity.)

Baker and Hansen have written a fucking brilliant parody of the well-known (one might even say “hoary”) guide to writing, The Elements of Style. This is seriously important shit, people. It’s not just a parody. It’s a useful guide, perhaps even more useful than the original.

Let’s compare the Tables of Contents first, shall we?

S&W includes an introduction, Elementary Rules of Usage, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, An Approach to Style, and an index.

B&H includes an introduction, Rules That Even Foreigners Should Know, On Writing Like an Adult, Punctuation, Form, and a Few Matters of Etiquette, Goddamn, You’re Good (a Good-Bye), Words Your (sic) Bound to Fuck Up, a Glossary of Terms You Don’t Understand, and a Note. (The Note was, for me, worth the price of purchase.)

A Note of My Own: I’m going to refer to the parody as B&H. The majority of people in my acquaintance refer to The Elements of Style as “Strunk and White,” so I’m carrying that to the logical next step. While I appreciate the parody title, it’s just easier to call it “B&H” in keeping with fucking tradition. Bite me.