Swearing during WWII

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to the Genres: Historical board and you'll get answers galore!

First a question.
Which soldiers? British? Oz? NZ? US? They all had distinctive ways of swearing and cursing.

I watched Leave It To Beaver and the best list I can muster is:

jeepers
golly
knucklehead
gee
gosh
swell
nifty
keen

In moments extreme angst, they augmented with combo cussing:

golly gee
nifty keen
gee, swell

hope this helps

rt

Sailors have always sworn.

I suspect that there was a stronger, much much stronger, taboo about swearing in front of ladies/women, children, officers and clergy.

Did't SOL and FUBAR both appear during WW II?

But seriously,

I think the message I got from watching Patton and Saving Private Ryan is that pretty much the cuss words are exactly the same as today, except for new bundle of words describing genitals and promiscuous women.

The only thing really changed is the slang prior to and after. Same for all generations I think.

And SNAFU

Medievalist said:

Sailors have always sworn.

I suspect that there was a stronger, much much stronger, taboo about swearing in front of ladies/women, children, officers and clergy.

Did't SOL and FUBAR both appear during WW II?

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My guess is that there was a lot of Deadwood-level swearing.

SNAFU enshrines some of it.

My dad was born in 1904. He swore. He blasphemed, to be more exact - took the name of the Lord in vain, swore by Jesus Christ, Hell and damnation, damned people to hell.
He used 'son of a b*tch', sometime abbreviated to 'ess oh bee', 'b*stard', and 'bloody' (sometimes 'bloody-*ss'), and 'Christly' - these were often strung together in various combinations. He even used 'son of a sea-cook' (he'd been a cabin-boy in his early years, so I believe this may have had some particular relevance), an epithet I've otherwise only seen in books.
What he did NOT use were the sexual swear words that I learned in the schoolyard and from reading graffiti. He told me that those were 'baby words' for children who didn't know the real words for the body parts and activities. I haven't watched Deadwood, but I've heard they mostly swear with what my dad called baby words.
I'm pretty sure he would never have used any variant of mo-fo, because in the milieu where he grew up, I think if someone said that to you, you pretty much had to kill them, or at least beat them into insensibility. That's the impression I have.
-Barbara

Constant streams of obscenities in conversations are relatively new. Yes, soldiers have sworn since time began, but they reflected the culture. When I enlisted in 1959, there were people who cursed a lot, but not a lot of people who cursed. I knew many who didn't curse at all. My commanding officer held a very dim view of anyone who couldn't communicate without vulgarities, and he was an enlisted man during WWII.

If you are writing a story about the military from that era and want accuracy, keep the cursing to a bare minimum and be advised that "mother" did not preceed any foul word. The words you were likely to hear took the Lord's name in vain, or referred to defecation, not sexual acts.

My dad was also a WWII vet. The worst word I ever heard him say was "crap". I feel sure it was a little different when the guys were alone with other guys, but in the presence of women and children, swearing was not allowed with many people during that time. If a man forgot and swore in front of women or kids, he immediately apologized or may very well be asked to curb his tongue by any other man present, which would prompt an apology.

Women that swore were pretty much thought of as "loose".

If the "F" word was used, I think batgirl was right; someone would have to throw down on you.

Words I remember my Dad using were: Gee, Drat,
"The Devil" (as in "The Devil You Say", but he usually just said "Oh, The Devil!)

Confound was another word they used a lot during that era. I found it funny that in the dictionary, Damn is listed under definitions of confound.

Seems like I remember hearing "son of a gun" from others of Dad's age group quite a bit.

Didn't "Private Ryan" catch flak from vets about the language? I seem to remember them saying that soldiers didn't typically swear like that back in the 40s. Patton was a notable exception, and that was one of the things that made him such a maverick.

Funny, I was just reading an essay about the word "f_ck" as used by WWII soldiers. An American POW in Stalag IV B put together a lexicon of the word and all its many and varied uses in various English-speaking parts of the world. It would have been published in the prisoners' newspaper, but the camp was liberated before it could be. Since the note As civilians, we'll have to get used to saying "No thanks!" in place of "Fxxx you!" is included, the implication is that swearing was indeed pretty common.

The essay is called"The Ineffable F--r-Letter Word," by Benedict B. Kimmelman, and it's in the book Verbatim, edited by Erin McKean.

While there is only a small bit of info on WW2, this is an interesting essay on swearing in historical context.

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/deadwood.html

Not having been around back then, I can say that I *assume* there were far more "clean" people back then. I'm sure there were plenty of people who swore frequently, but I know that swearing probably couldn't have been as big a thing as it is today. Now, you have TV, movies, music, etc, all pumping swear-words into your vocabulary on a daily basis, whereas the airwaves were strictly clean back then, and you could only pick up the dirt from those you spent time with, and depending on whether swearing was popular in your particular part of the country.

Just speculation though... I wasn't actually there.

What about fubar? (F***ed up beyond all recognition). I'm 99% sure that it is a WW2 word. Like dame, dish, Betty, etc.

threedogpeople said:

What about fubar? (F***ed up beyond all recognition). I'm 99% sure that it is a WW2 word. Like dame, dish, Betty, etc.

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Yeah, the OED gives the first date in print for "fubar" as January 8,1944.

The prison camp lexicon also lists "snafu," "janfu" (joint Army-Navy f*ck up), GFU (general f*ck up), NFG (no f*cking good), and "Fujiyama" (f*ck you, Jack, I'm all right).

The use of profanity is a variant, even today. There are some groups who - for various reasons - do not use profanity, often for religious reasons. Although I was not around during World War II either, my relatives who served during that war were profane even in civilian life. My two sets of grandparents were a generation apart so I had one grandfather who served in the Pacific Theater of the War and two uncles who served as well. My other grandfather was a World War I Navy vet whose language was every bit as colorful as any sailor stereotype.

My personal experience is to say that yes, soldiers were quite profane.

That is not to say, though, that ALL soldiers were profane; I'm sure some were not.

In "Everyday Life From Prohibition To World War II", this is what it says about the F-word:
"one of the most widely used swear words of the war although never seen in print or heard in the war movies of the day. (A bizarre form of censorship; books might readily describe someone's head being blown off but a witness to this horror could only say, "Oh, F---", as if readers might faint if they saw the word spelled out."
Then a quote from "Invasion Diary", Richard Tregaskis, 1943 is used as an example: "The sergaent translated the order into his own lingo, "You f....... eight balls, get the f... off this G..-damn hill before I wrap this rifle barrell around your neck."

If I were in doubt and wanted to know, I would talk with World War II vets or visit a VA hospital. My experience doing so some years ago revealed a high rate of profanity but of course someone else's experience might be rather different.

And as a brief end note - "Leave It To Beaver" is hardly a standard of what real life was like in the 1950's -

johnnysannie said:

And as a brief end note - "Leave It To Beaver" is hardly a standard of what real life was like in the 1950's -

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Speaking as someone who lived the 1950's, I can assure you that family life as portrayed in "Leave it to Beaver" was actually quite accurate.

A family like Ozzie Osborn's would have been committed, or at least kept under observation and studied by science.

Gary said:

Speaking as someone who lived the 1950's, I can assure you that family life as portrayed in "Leave it to Beaver" was actually quite accurate.

A family like Ozzie Osborn's would have been committed, or at least kept under observation and studied by science.

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Ozzy's family is not normal NOW. Leave It To Beaver is and was a fantasy. Mothers didn't wear high heels and frilly dresses to cook; all dads didn't wear suits to the office. Take a reality check and remember that there were blue collar workers then as well as now and that working mothers have been around since before World War II.

Those rose colored glasses are far from flattering.

johnnysannie said:

Ozzy's family is not normal NOW. Leave It To Beaver is and was a fantasy. Mothers didn't wear high heels and frilly dresses to cook; all dads didn't wear suits to the office. Take a reality check and remember that there were blue collar workers then as well as now and that working mothers have been around since before World War II.

Those rose colored glasses are far from flattering.

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Sounds like you are trying to denigrate life in the 50’s, though I can’t imagine why you would want to do that.

No, not many mothers made dinner in high heels, but most mothers made meals for their families. They also wore dresses most of the time. The only time my mother wore slacks was in winter. She had work dresses and dress-up dresses. My grandmother even wore a dress when she milked the cows and worked in the hay field. My mother never wore slacks when she went shopping, even in winter.

Yes, there were single mothers working to support their children, but they were in a very small minority. Most families were intact, unless a parent died, because divorce was rare and frowned upon. Fathers mostly worked outside the home, and if you worked in an office, you wore a suit. There were no casual Fridays. Some blue-collar workers even wore a suit to work and changed when they got to the job. When I was working my blue-collar job, I even had one older co-worker who wore a white shirt and tie while working as a mechanic.

Families consisted of a mother, a father, children, and often an adult member of the family that needed help. There were no government welfare programs for adults and very few for children, so families took care of their own.

It also had nothing to do with blue-collar, or white-collar. Every segment of society shared the values of the time. My entire family was black-collar, because farm work made your collar that way, no matter what color it was in the morning.

Children were also pretty much like the Beaver and Wally. There were no drugs of any kind. Teachers were treated with respect, or the offending kids were sent home. Using vulgarity in school got you paddled the first time, and expelled the next. There were no schools dedicated to the offenders, so if you were kicked out, you found a job with the education you had. There were no X, or even R-rated movies to affect our culture. Music did not glorify breaking the law or mistreating women, nor did it advocate hostility of any kind.

There was no violence in school, except for an occasional fist-fight on the playground. There were no metal detectors or security patrols in schools. We often carried our .22 rifles to school and kept them in the cloakroom so we could go hunting during our lunch hour and after school. The teacher verified they were unloaded and we couldn’t do anything with them during recess.

There was almost no crime. I don’t know if our house even had a lock on the door, but I do know it was never locked, even when we left it for three months one winter. We also left the keys in all of our vehicles, as did everyone else. I never heard of a car being stolen anywhere near us.

Things weren’t perfect, but the color of my glasses doesn’t alter facts. Things were far different than they are now and in most ways, it was a much better way of life.

Gary,

You are right about things being different - and most of the things you mention mirror the way our family worked, too, except my mom was a nurse and had a part-time nursing job after we kids were in school. She wore a dress every day.

But when I think of how few choices my mother had - a pink collar career or a housewife - and how there was little to nothing in the way of birth control, no serious attention to womens health issues ("hysteria & hysterectomy" being the common diagnoses of the day) it saddens me. I remember career fields and universities closed to me because they didn't let "girls" do them.

I also remember segregated drinking fountains and no 911 system. No where to report child abuse, domestic abuse, or rape. Men who drank and ruled their families like absolute tyrants in closed kingdoms. Segregated schools. Dead end futures for anyone not white. These things hurt us.

I also remember living with the fear of nuclear war every single day - practicing "duck & cover" at school and talking about bomb shelters at home.

It was a different world, and I loved it and I miss much of it, but I think all things considered, I like this one better.

I live in a 1954 Cliff May house with a lot of original furnishings. I like to pretend Sid Ceasar will be on the TV and our old Nash Ambassador will be parked out front. I like to pretend my Mom is cooking dinner from scratch and Dad will be home from work soon and we will eat dinner together tonight.

But I know that they have been gone for 40 years and I'll be watching Jon Stewart on my flat screen and eating some miracle food that didn't even exist back then. Drinking soy milk, for crying out loud! Driving a foreign car.
Using a cell phone, a computer, air conditioning in the home!

You gotta admit, it's more exciting now. But you're right - we did not swear back then.

Maryn said:

For what it's worth, my husband's dad was in WWII, and in the 25 years I knew him, I never once heard him (or his wife) swear. Not even a damn or hell. It wasn't all that unusual for a man to speak that 'clean' in those days, and to silently disapprove of men who swore, even mildly, in everyday conversation.

He wasn't wounded in service, but I truly can't imagine him swearing if he were. That language pattern just wasn't in him.

Maryn, who must have seemed like a longshoreman to her in-laws

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This could also be a reaction to having swore a lot while in the service. I, and everyone I knew, punctuated every other word with a curse. It was almost a competition to see who could still communicate effectively while using colorful metaphors. (Granted I'm not old enough to be a WWII vet or even a Viet Nam vet, but still...)

When I got out, I was so burned out by swearing, I rarely did it.

Well, until I got married and had kids. But prior to that....