The Future of Swearing

The poet Robert Graves wrote a curious little book with the title Lars Porsena, or the future of Swearing and Improper Language when he was teaching English at Cairo University in 1926. At that time things looked gloomy: swearing and foul language had fallen into sad decline (he would hardly have believed the total degeneracy of modern rap) and his essay reminded us of the colorful glory days of oaths and expostulations reaching back to biblical times.

It’s still fun to read and it came to mind recently when viewing Melvyn Bragg’s ITV series The Adventure of English. Bragg admittedly had little to say about the future of swearing, but he did give us a glimpse of the Elizabethan past, gathering together the adjectival variations Shakespeare played on the word “knave”. The list given here is incomplete, but it should feed the imagination of anyone hoping to keep serious cursing alive:

Scurvy railing knave! Base notorious knave! Arrant malmsey-nose knave! Stubborn ancient knave! Counterfeit cowardly knave! Foul-mouthed and calumnious knave! Whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-eared knave!

After which comes the thoughtfully extended compliment, from King Lear, bestowed by Kent on Oswald:

Base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch! Pah!

January 2005