Nine Nasty Words Quotes

“To wit, profanity first involved the holy, and only later the holes.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“Okay, but even if my ass is fired, the rest of me will still be coming back to work, and I hope you won’t mind me working assless.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“The truth is that shit is a defective verb.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“What the deuce? emerged because in cards, number two—deuce—comes from the early French deus, which was associated with bad luck and, pertinently, the devil because it was the lowest score.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“The modern asshole is presumptuous, entitled—the key element is that he knows that he could do differently.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“Hence when Donald Trump, during his first campaign for president, was revealed to have recounted of women that he had been given leave to “grab ’em by the pussy,” it was widely thought that his campaign was finished. This”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“darn”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“Because faggots of wood kept a fire going, the word was extended metaphorically to being burnt at the stake.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“meanwhile, with cock, in America the basic penile meaning has reigned on through the centuries, such that as late as 1965, Kurt Vonnegut, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, wrote a father yelling “Drop your cocks and grab your socks”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“It all starts with the name Richard. Richard became Rick, which then became Dick because of something medieval English speakers found jocular that only proves that humor dates badly.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“Where we have the space to carefully assemble and burnish our sentences, something like already or grocery store comes out; meanwhile, we spit out fuck when it’s time to run away from a lion.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“then–Vice President Joe Biden made national news by not saying but whispering, “This is a big fucking deal!” to President Barack Obama after the passage of the Affordable Care Act,”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“Spanish’s usted, the polite pronoun for “you,” started as vuestra merced—“your mercy”—said quickly for centuries.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“Grammar turns up in the strangest places, and so often in profanity, as we have seen. Did you ever notice that when son of a bitch is used as a slur, the accent is on the bitch, but that when it is used in joy, the accent can be on the son? Son of a bitch, that was my lucky day! Here, too, the original meaning is obscured, and beyond the degree in “sum-bitch” where bitch remains vibrant.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“Doggone, dang—as in, damn masked by hang as in hang it all—and the Black American Dag! all disguise damn while leaving it recognizable, via coy sound changes. Drat seems like it should belong to this family, too, but emerged via a separate transformation, from God rot.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“The paces that English puts damn through are rather astounding. Darn, for example, is not a random fudging but a downright game-of-telephone mangling of what began as By the eternal! as a euphemism for by the eternal God. There were those who were given to pronouncing the word etarnal, for the same reason that they might say “larn” for learn—or, for that matter, pronounce concern as “consarn” in Consarn it!, yet another euphemism for goddamnit. That etarnal shortened, naturally, to tarnal. Because this was a substitute for damn, it was equally natural to assume subconsciously that if there is a word damnation there is a word tarnation—and soon, there was. From here, it was a short step to imagining that if damnation had its damn, then tarnation had its tarn, or, since what we really have in mind is a way of saying damn without saying it and damn begins with d, darn. Few etymologies rival this one in the contrast between the beginning and the end, such as the origins of bye in God be with you.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“In the 500s CE, Pope Gregory commanded his subjects to say “God bless you” when someone sneezed because it was often the first sign of being infected with plague.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“The British Cor blimey! started as Gor blimey, which was a disguised “God blind me,” as in “May God blind me if . . . ,” a “swear,” as it were.”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever

“I’m not sure anyone still says gadzooks, but it was from God’s hooks—the nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. We can see Odds bodkins emerging from “God’s body” in Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part II has a line “God’s body! The turkeys in my pannier are quite starved.” (It’s not one of Shakespeare’s more iconic lines.) The Bard added the “cutesifying” suffix -kin later when Hamlet says, “God’s bodykins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Leaving off the g and y, then, yields the queer little locution Odds bodkins! we now vaguely associate with men in stockings fencing on staircases (or at least I do).”
― John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever