Victorian Era swearing?

Are they British?

Maybe "Blast!" if you want something mild. Maybe "Christ!" if you don't mind blasphemy.

But "damn" wouldn't be out of place. Victorians used real, live curse words; it's just that well-bred ladies did not curse, and men avoided cursing in the presence of women. Doesn't mean that ladies never ever let one slip and men never ever forgot themselves in the presence of a woman. It seems like a life and death situation might be just the kind of situation to make a man forget himself. He can always apologize later.

I have a few curses in my current Antebellum WIP--a Jesus, a Christ, a few damns, a few hells . . .

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Hmmm

Hellfire and Damnation. (Used together.)

Damn and Blast. (No, not just British. Ditto.)

Grandma used to say, "We had the dickens of a time," a lot.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

Over the course of researching WWI slang, I was intrigued to read that the upper classes typically used blasphemous curses (e.g. G-d), while the lower classes used bodily function curses (e.g. shite, f-word,etc). I have a book of WWI letters written by an earl's daughter to her parents and she used damn and bloody.

Swearing

I have noticed in the collections of Victorian era correspondence I have that the word "oath" is used more commonly than the word "swear". I also have a letter from 1876 written in the northeastern US that says "Kiss my ass". So I think you are safe with most things.

Sorry, but I'm cracking up at the idea that Victorian Brits didn't swear any worse than 'damn' or 'blast.'

If you do some research into etymology, you'll see that profanity is a lot older than you think. 'Fuck' is Anglo-Saxon, with its roots in Classical Latin ( its earliest appearance in literarture being 1503.) 'Shit' dates from the 1580s, and 'cunt' from 1230 (again it has Latin roots from the word 'crest' which the Romans thought a vagina looked like a centurion's crest.)

Of course, the language depends on the class of the speaker. The language of a miner is going to be very different from an aristocratic MP.

gothicangel said:

Sorry, but I'm cracking up at the idea that Victorian Brits didn't swear any worse than 'damn' or 'blast.'

If you do some research into etymology, you'll see that profanity is a lot older than you think. 'Fuck' is Anglo-Saxon, with its roots in Classical Latin ( its earliest appearance in literarture being 1503.) 'Shit' dates from the 1580s, and 'cunt' from 1230 (again it has Latin roots from the word 'crest' which the Romans thought a vagina looked like a centurion's crest.)

Of course, the language depends on the class of the speaker. The language of a miner is going to be very different from an aristocratic MP.

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*Nods* I've never been shy about the curse words. There were some social conventions against cursing in the Victorian era that the writer needs to be cognizant of. But people still f-ing cursed. (See what I did there? )

A gentleman is going to be somewhat constrained by the fact that he is with a woman. The fact that she is of a lower class will not change this. Something like "Damnation" or "Hellfire and Damnation" is most likely, and he may feel obliged to apologize for that. He will know and use a lot more curses in the company of men, but not in front of a woman. It won't even matter that she knows all those curses and may even use them. It will be too ingrained in him that a gentleman does not curse in the presence of a woman.

My great-grandmother, born in 1898 in Middle Tennessee, had no problem saying hell, damn, or even sh!t.

But she thought "Fart" was a bad word!

Psychotic.Pink said:

Mmkay, I'm writing a steampunk story, and the main characters were just shot at by an unknown assassin and fled in a steam powered car (those actually existed in the victorian era, surprisingly enough, but were only used by the very wealthy)

One of the guys--the MC's intended love interest--just noticed she was hurt from being knocked to the floor earlier in the avoidance of a bullet--and looked at her wound. I want him to say some swear word, and so far I've been avoiding this by using 'he swore'. But I can't really avoid it here, and I don't really want to use any modern swear words at all.

Anyway, she's from a less than desirable part of town (she's very important, which is why they were down there) and he's from a very wealthy family.

The best I've been able to find is 'Blazes' but it doesn't sound quite right and I'm not sure I'm using it correctly.

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There are a lot of exclamatory oaths that are more expressive than simple "obscene" terms.

I'm playing Battle of Britain (supposedly 1940) game where the squadron leader (squadron of airplanes) occasionally punctuates his observations with "God's Teeth!" (ie the oath "by God's teeth!"

Other exclamations:

"Good Heavens!"
Hotdog
dagnabit
zounds! (ie by Gods Wounds!)
sblood! (ie by God's Blood!)
Mother of God!
Good Lord!
Lordy!
Blast (ie "God Blast me if...")
Crykey! (I've forgotten what that was a shorting of...)

You could do worse than read one or two of the Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser. They cover the period you are interested in.

gothicangel said:

and 'cunt' from 1230 (again it has Latin roots from the word 'crest' which the Romans thought a vagina looked like a centurion's crest.)

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That's brilliant!

It's true that most of the "four letter words" are very, very old -- but it's difficult to document they were used for cussing the way we use them today prior to the 20c.

Partly this is because cussing/taboo/"improper" language is inherently hard to document before the 20c -- literary sources tend to clean it up or obfuscate, people tended not to include that kind of language in their personal writings (letters, diaries, account books, etc.), and there's not much of a pre-20c tradition of verbatim dialog transcription outside of court records, which seldom include the cussing.

And partly it's because what we do know about pre-20c cussing in English suggests that it concentrated heavily on religious taboos, very secondarily on bodily filth & much much less on sexual transgression. As Anglophone culture grew less religious & religious swearing lost its verbal power, the proportions have shifted. The late 19c-early 20c seems to have been a transitional period for that.

One Victorian era oath that sticks out is from Gone With the Wind--American, not British--but it was "God's nightgown!"

There's a long and fascinating article in Salon today that is directly relevant to this discussion:"The Modern History of Swearing.".

Short version: the most offensive word for Victorians was probably "bloody," but not because it had any religious implications (it didn't). "Bugger" was a unisex multi-functional swear word in the 19c. And fuck, cock-sucker and their kin were used in their modern way at least as far back as the 1860s.

The article is an excerpt from a book: “Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing” by Melissa Mohr. Published by Oxford University Press.

Great article, thank you! "Eat your greens", he he he.

Here is a resource no Steampunk author should be without. A dictionary of Victorian-Era slang, written in 1909.

It's also completely free.

What I did was read through it and take notes whenever I found a term I liked. It'll take you a few days like that, but it's a fantastic resource and very entertaining to read.

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7190510M/Passing_English_of_the_Victorian_era

Cursing itself was sometimes called "Swearing blue oaths". For most decent people that meant saying hell, damn, mentioning the devil, or taking the lord's name in vain. Anything cruder than that could get you arrested in some circles.

One popular substitute for "damn" was "hang". As in "Hang it all!" or "Hang the luck!" or "I don't give a hang!" "Dash" was another "damn" substitute (although it also meant courage). As was "Blank" and "Blessed".

Some substitutes for "hell" were jesse, tarnation, blazes, hangnation, and ballyhack.

One of the odder outbursts I came across was "Dumskittles!" Also "Blank my blinkers!" (Damn my eyes!).

"Gee" started as a substitute for "god". "Holy Gee" was a popular way to say "Oh my god" (It was also the Yellow Kid's catchphrase, "Hully Gee!")

Some general exclamations (along the lines of "holy cow!) are "By thunder!", "Great Scott!", "Great Sun!", "Sakes alive!", "Begobs!" and "Sin to Moses!".

Of course a lot of expressions and slang terms varied based on geography, social status, and other factors. There really is no one master list you can turn to.

I would recommend reading old newspapers and magazines. There's a ton of archaic language buried in them. Go directly to Victorian sources as much as possible rather than relying on second hand info and cliches.

I know they used the word "deuced" a lot for "damned." See The Way We Live Now.

"Deuce" was a euphemism for "devil."

benbenberi said:

"Deuce" was a euphemism for "devil."

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True, but I've seen it used in place of "damned" or a similar word as well -- aka "I'll be deuced." "Deuced shame."

The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang might be useful.

"Fuck" and "shit" are certainly historically correct, but are not exactly upper crust. "Damn" is also possible, but I think is not quite as common then as now.

As you no doubt are aware, "bloody" is a very dire word during this period, so an ejaculation like "bloody hell!" would be an extreme reaction to shock or pain. Euphemisms for "bloody" might be used from time to time like "blessed", or "bl-- blessed" to show the character just managed to avoid saying it.