A VERY SHORT FUCKING HISTORY OF PROFANITY
Ancient humans: already fucking swearing.
Profanity is not some unfortunate modern deterioration of language.
Taboo, obscene, insulting, sexual, scatological, and religiously charged language appears across ancient cultures. Scholarship traces “bad language” in surviving written material back at least to Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE, and finds it in Egyptian, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin material too.
Apparently Homo sapiens developed writing and thought:
Excellent. Now we can preserve our inappropriate shit permanently.
Originally, “swearing” was quite literally swearing.
An oath wasn't necessarily a naughty word. It meant invoking a god or sacred power as witness to the truth of what you were saying.
Ancient Greeks and Romans routinely swore oaths involving their gods; formal oaths were used in courts, treaties, contracts, government and military life.
Religion therefore supplied some of the earliest powerful linguistic taboos.
Taking sacred names lightly, invoking God improperly, blaspheming, cursing—those words had power because the sacred thing behind them had power.
Which is where profanity gets especially fun.
Profane ultimately carries the sense of something outside or before the sacred precinct: pro- + fanum, the Latin for temple/sacred place.
So we've been fucking around with the boundary between sacred and ordinary language for a very long time.
Then bodies, sex and shit joined the party.
As societies changed, the things considered linguistically taboo changed too.
- Sex.
- Genitals.
- Excretion.
- Disease.
- Death.
- Religion.
- Social identities.
Whatever a culture considers particularly sensitive tends to produce words humans are instructed not to fucking say. And importantly, linguists don't regard taboo as absolute: what is forbidden depends upon the community, period and context.
In other words:
Humans didn't discover offensive words.
Humans decided which fucking things were offensive.
And then kept changing their minds.
English got particularly weird about it.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, England developed a strong linguistic class division: ruling elites used French while ordinary people continued speaking Germanic English.
That history contributed to an interesting feature of modern English: many of our blunt, bodily, supposedly “vulgar” words have Germanic roots, while more elevated or clinical alternatives often come through French or Latin. Hence English can give you different registers for roughly the same fucking territory:
shit → feces / defecation
fuck → intercourse / copulation
One sounds like somebody dropped a wrench on their foot. The other sounds like somebody is publishing a fucking medical paper.
Same species. Different register.
And humans repeatedly tried to stop other humans from swearing.
Religious authorities, governments, publishers, broadcasters and polite society have spent centuries policing taboo language.
England, for example, had legislation against profane oaths onstage as early as 1606, and by the late seventeenth century organized moral-reform societies were actively trying to suppress public profanity.
It worked spectacularly well, as demonstrated by the complete absence of profanity in the twenty-first fucking century.
Then we monetized the shit out of it.
- Books.
- Theater.
- Comedy.
- Movies.
- Television.
- Music.
- Advertising.
- Podcasts.
- Performers.
- Writers.
Humans discovered that taboo language can create humor, emphasis, intimacy, shock, character, emotional intensity and deliberate norm-breaking. There's an entire academic literature on taboo language in books, film, media and comedy.
And taboo words remain unusually psychologically potent: research reviewed by Oxford notes that forbidden words tend to be more emotionally arousing, memorable and evocative than ordinary language.
Which may help explain why:
“This system contains an unrecognized externalized capacity cost.”
and
“Some poor fucker is paying for this shit.”
do not land quite the same way.
So, no.
Atlas Scribe did not invent profanity.
Atlas arrived several thousand fucking years late to that particular human innovation.
She merely looked at an extraordinarily old piece of Homo sapiens technology for expressing emphasis, emotion, taboo, humor, frustration, intimacy and social boundary-breaking—
—and decided to keep fucking using it.
SOURCES & FURTHER FUCKING READING
Allan, Keith, ed. (2018). The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language. Oxford University Press.
Probably the best single scholarly anchor for the whole section. It covers swearing, taboo, sex, religion, censorship, psychology, language change, comedy, media, and cross-cultural variation.
Oxford Academic — The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language
Azzaro, Gabriele (2018). “Taboo Language in Books, Films, and the Media.” In The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language, pp. 285–310.
This is the particularly useful source for your “humans have been doing this shit forever” claim. Azzaro traces surviving taboo language back to material from Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE, as well as Egyptian, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin sources, before following it through books, film, television and other media.
Oxford Academic — Taboo Language in Books, Films, and the Media
Allan, Keith (2018). “Taboo Words and Language: An Overview.”
Especially useful for the methodological point that taboo isn't absolute. Allan defines taboo in relation to a particular community, time and context and discusses swearing, censorship, social sanctions and language change.
Oxford Academic — Taboo Words and Language: An Overview
Burridge, Kate (2014). “Taboo Words.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Word.
Excellent support for why taboo words don't behave psychologically like boring fucking vocabulary. Burridge summarizes research showing forbidden words can be more arousing, shocking, memorable and evocative than ordinary linguistic stimuli.
Oxford Academic — Taboo Words
Allan, Keith (2018). “Religious and Ideologically Motivated Taboos.”
Useful background for the older religious dimension of swearing, blasphemy and taboo—and for explaining how the subjects humans regard as unspeakable change with cultural and ideological conditions.
Oxford Academic — Religious and Ideologically Motivated Taboos
Benczes, Réka (2018). “Taboo as a Driver of Language Change.”
Useful for the larger linguistic point: taboo doesn't merely restrict language; humans respond by inventing, replacing, borrowing and altering words, meaning taboo itself becomes an engine of language change.
Oxford Academic — Taboo as a Driver of Language Change
Chiaro, Delia (2018). “Taboo Language as Source of Comedy.”
This one is particularly appropriate for Atlas Scribe the fucking business. It examines sexual/excretory taboo, censorship, euphemistic workarounds, shock and taboo language as mechanisms of comedy.
Oxford Academic — Taboo Language as Source of Comedy
Hoeksema, Jack (2018). “Taboo Terms and Their Grammar.”
Useful if anyone reduces profanity to “words people use when they're angry.” Taboo terms perform numerous grammatical and communicative functions—including intensification, emphasis and exclamation—across languages.
Oxford Academic — Taboo Terms and Their Grammar
Mohr, Melissa (2013). Holy Sht: A Brief History of Swearing. Oxford University Press.*
This is probably the most directly readable book-length companion to your cheeky history. It is also included in the Oxford Handbook's scholarly bibliography.