The Swearin Swearer's Swearin Sweared

Swearing is like jeans. Once, either historically-actually or else (more likely) in some mythic fiction of the past we like collectively to buy into, adults spoke with formal propriety and decency and it was young rebels and tearaways who swore. Now, if anything, it’s the other way around. Similarly, jeans used to be the kind of trousers young rock-n-rollers and noncomformists wore to show that they weren’t Slaves To The Man (who, naturally, Wore ‘Proper’ Trousers), whereas jeans are now worn by middle-aged fogeys like Jeremy Clarkson or Tony Blair or, er, me, and young people sheathe their legs in fancier, better-tailored strides. That’s fine of course. Wear what you like, I’m not the boss of you. My point is the obvious one: an odour of desperation clings to the middle-aged man who thinks it makes him cool to swear, or wear jeans, or play the guitar. The desire to be ‘down with the kids’ is undignified enough; the notion that one can insinuate oneself with those down-there kids by adopting styles, sartorial and linguistic, that they themselves regard as lame, old-people gubbins is just sad.

I’m not saying younger kids don’t swear. Of course they do. My hunch is they don’t swear as much, or with the same particularities, as middle-aged folk, but the coronavirus prevents me from doing the extensive sociolinguistic research needful to evidence such a hypothesis. I'm saying that middle-aged people swearing because they think it makes them appear edgy, sassy, unconventional—because they think it frees them from the shackles of middle-age—are Steve Buscemi in a “MUSIC ‖ BAND” T-shirt saying ‘how do you do fellow kids?’

Or perhaps that’s just me. I swear quite a lot, it’s true. I fear I’ve internalised the idea that swearing is big and clever—although I’ve also, I have to say, internalised some quite significant taboos about swearing: I rarely if ever say ‘cunt’ for instance, although it’s acquired ‘fuck’-like levels of ubiquity with many people I know (it still strikes me as misogynistic, in the same ballpark as ‘bitch’). My eighteen-year-old daughter swears little, certainly around her parents, but I think with her peers too, whose interactions I sometimes (inadvertently of course) overhear, in real-life or via snapchat or otherwise. If I had to guess I’d assume that once swearing becomes something middle-aged-people do openly it becomes, a fortiori, something young people want to avoid doing, so as to keep that vital clear blue water between them and us. Quite right too.

Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford 2013) sketches two main semantic fields where swearing is concerned, one derived (as it were) from above and one from below. The former, linked to serious business of swearing oaths and so on, derives its taboo words, the expression of which releases the pent-up or articulates that our passions exceed proper restraint, from the divine: God’s wounds as they say in hey-nonny-no historical novels. God! Jesus! and so on. The latter relate to what Bakhtin calls the lower bodily stratum: shit, piss, fuck, bollocks and the like. The story about the Deadwood screenwriters is that they wrote their characters using the second kind of swear-words although historical 19th-century Americans largely used the former, because when they tried historically appropriate swears they struck modern audiences as quaint and underpowered. In order for their swearing to register as swearing, the Deadwoodians had to utilise the second type of words. Actually I suspect the crossover from one to the other happened later than we might assume. Lennon caused genuine shock as late as 1969 when, in ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ he sang ‘Christ! you know it ain’t easy.’ It's a line that seems vanilla to 2020 sensibilities, although Mohr’s point is that these two magisteria actually cross-over, both practically (hence the titular ‘holy shit!) and conceptually.

That said, I'd argue there’s a kind-of Nietzschean Genealogy of Morals point about swearing that Mohr doesn't really address. We all swear, but we all also understand that there’s something low about swearing. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s high-born Knight is proud of the fact that he ‘nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde’: ‘villainy’ meaning not law-breaking but pertaining to villeins, commoners, of low-birth. Our public-us, our Sunday-best ps-and-qs-minding selves are our posh selves, and much of the release a good profanity entails comes from our sense of breaking through those restraints, of embracing a temporary lowness and vulgarity as a holiday from the formality of higher social standing.

Actually I think my point, or the argument I’m making, is twofold: that as class flattens (without, of course, going-away) it becomes generational: middle-aged people with houses and salaries are ‘high’ in a material sense, in relation to the new ‘low’: young people lugging-around debt, working zero-hours contracts, for whom a mortgage is a distant dream. But young people are ‘high’ in another sense, being by definition wealthy in that which our world today values most highly of all, youth itself; where the decaying, lined and bald (or more pathetic: the botoxed and surgically taut) elderly are ‘low’ by virtue of lacking that thing. How ‘youth’ became the prime socio-cultural value is an interesting question in its own right—it certainly wasn’t always that way. But here we are. I mean look at me. I’m not old, bald, set-in-my-ways, conventional, Establishment, and I can prove it: ‘fuck!’

You see?

So, yes. Colin Burrow argues that ‘many of us now liberally sprinkle our language with swearwords to show we have a liberal attitude to sex and to bodily functions’ and I think that's right. But I wonder if it's also the case that many middle-aged people liberally sprinkle their language with swears to show that they're cool, my doods, which is to say, with-it and uninhibited, untainted by the hideous constraints of old-age. Which is to say:

These thoughts are occasioned, in part, by Jackson Ford’s The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (2018). Not the novel so much—which is fine, if a little over-long, and over-busy, too scared of losing its reader’s attention to ever let any of its runaround settle—as that title. Arresting, no? But: why the asterisk? Whose pudeur are we protecting with such maladroit bowdlerism?

The girl (not, I note, woman) of this book's title is Teagan Frost: a 22-year-old undercover agent working for a US government black ops. That she can move sh*t with her mind speaks to her superpower: telekinesis (she calls it ‘PK’), a talent she alone possesses, or so it seems at the beginning of the novel. The story here is that Frost gets framed for an unusual murder: Steven Case, killed in such a way that only Teagan, and her Magneto-style talents, could be responsible: strangled by ‘a piece of steel reinforcement bar—what house builders call rebar ... twisted tight like it was nothing more than a length of wire [wrapped] around his throat so deep that it's almost decaptitated him’ [93]. Teagan just wants to kick back and enjoy a beer, but instead she has to go on an action-filled LA runaround, trying to clear her name, solve the mystery, and repeatedly getting tasered (try to hit her with a metal bar and she can move that sh*t with her mind to stop you, but luckily for Ford's confection of narrative tension her skills don't work for bullets or tasers: ‘a taser prong launches at around a hundred and eighty feet per second; way too fast for me to stop’ [132]).

This is all fine: fast-paced and eventful, and the pages flap by rapidly enough. That's not to say it's especially good. ‘Jackson Ford’ (a pseudonym for nobody-knows-whom, although we're told s/he has previously published ‘sixteen bestselling novels’) goes all-in for the kinetic, thrusting prose style, so as to communicate the excitement and urgency of everything. So the weather's not hot, ‘the heat grabs me in a fist, beating down from the sky’; and rather than laughing a character ‘clutches her stomach howling with glee, erupting into another guffaw.’ Instead of closing her eyes, a woman ‘slams them shut.’ That kind of thing. But this a diminishing returns sort of strategy for the reader, and leaves the writer liable to active badness as s/he scrabbles for yet another over-forceful piece of phrasing. Exhibit A: ‘Annie accelerates, long legs exploding out of her willowy body’ [17]. Sounds painful.

This, though, is not my main point. The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind is fine; not Proust but fine. What it definitely is, though, is sweary. Given its title this shouldn't surprise us, although it seems to have caught at least one reader on the hop.

One person found this helpful. And why not? It's true: ‘Yo take that shit out. I said, fucking quit it’ [3]; ‘[She's] the bouncer no one fucks with’ [4]; ‘“Shit,” Annie says ... I find her staring at a clusterfuck of tangled cables’ [9]—and we're not even into double figures, page-count-wise. The whole of this novel is ‘what in the almighty storm of fuck is going on?’ [144] and ‘fuck you, man’ [260] and ‘motherfucker come on!’ [405], all the way through. I don't doubt that there are 22-year-olds who talk like this, but if ‘Jackson Ford’ has really published sixteen best-selling novels I'm guessing s/he is closer to middle-age than his/her protagonist and I start to wonder if the effing and jeffing isn't his/her way of in some sense evoking youth. Story-wise The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind is YA; but the book's swear-word quotient rather excludes it from that bookshop classification. It's not Scarface level swearing, where the swear-words are so continuous that monotony starts to erase them from perception (I can't remember who it was described British squaddies' use of fucking as merely a warning that a noun is coming). In Ford's novel there are just enough fucks and shits to mean that we keep registering them as fucks and shits. Which leads me to the question: why? Because swearing is edgy, and cool, and young perhaps. Because it is believed to add spice. Because it connotes rebellious hipness of youth. Fuck you grandad. Music. Lightning sigil. Band.

It's perfectly possible, and I suppose even likely, that the asterisked ‘sh*t’ on the cover was a publisher's, rather than an author's, call. But it's also what's on the inside title page, and on Bookscan, and so is, I suppose, actually what the book is called. And I'm going to suggest it's, well, lame. It's not as if there's any doubt the word with this photoshopped starburst over its nipple is shit, after all, They're not fooling anyone. More, we understand that shit, here, means stuff. No reader will pick this book up assuming that Teagan's powers are a peculiarly specialised mode of laxative. Why call a spade a sp*de? What makes it especially evasive is that the whole premise of the story concerns a character who lives a life without the reality-principle inhibitions on thought that constrain the rest of us: her thought becomes, magically, action.

You recognise the blog title's allusion. In one of his books about language, Anthony Burgess celebrates the syntactical versatility of fuck, and recalls how during his wartime service he overheard a mechanic tell the driver of a broken-down army lorry: ‘the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.’ A glorious sentence, I think we can agree. And if I prefer fucker as a generic non-specific noun, over shit and certainly over sh*t, it's probably because fucking is a doing, a joy and sometimes a making, not a signifier of waste and decay. Of course, your fucking mileage may fucking vary.