"Every one will find this book an intellectual feast." —The Westminster Review
"A difficult task is accomplished with as much delicacy and taste as could well be expected. 'The History of Swearing' is, indeed, both philosophical and scholarly." —Notes and Queries.
"Uniformly interesting and genial ... a certain dash of kindly Bohemianism ... a curious and a pleasant production." —Bookseller
Julian Sharman's quaintly but appropriately-titled "A Cursory History of Swearing" takes us into a bypath of literary history, and from the early oath-taking, half pagan, half barbaric, down to all the modern varieties of the curse, traces the growth and progress of the habit of using expressions which are so often sacred in their origin, although in modem parlance they have reached a secular if not a vicious platform.
The writer deals with swear words, we see, in a scientific spirit. They exhibit one of the strangest vagaries of the human mind. It is as such that he has collected them, and studied with such diligent care the manifold sources of this curious history.
The author has lightly sketched the annals of swearing, whether legal or irreverent, from the dawn of civilization to the present day. He has traced back many English oaths that by natives are commonly thought to be original contributions to the English vocabulary of imprecation and malediction, to French, Roman, and even Greek sources.
It at times may seem a man of refinement cannot walk the streets of any city, or the lanes of any country village, without having his sense of decency shocked by senseless oaths and imprecations. But, as has been stated, a man so cursing is nothing else but weakness and nakedness setting itself in battle array against Omnipotence; a handful of dust and ashes sending a challenge to all the host of heaven. For what else are words and talk against thunderbolts; and the weak, empty noise of a querulous rage against him who can speak worlds, who could word heaven and earth out of nothing, and can when he pleases word them into nothing again?
So far the practice of swearing has been condemned on what the reader might call religious or sentimental objections. Still, even those that ignore or deny the existence of God, or have only a faint traditional sense of religious obligation, are impelled by their common sense and regard for common decency to stigmatize profanity as at least vulgar. The conventional gentleman, though 180 or 200 years ago he might consider an oath as an occasional or frequent adornment of his conversation in all societies, now reserves it for "gentlemen" alone, and is inclined to deem it slightly improper in the society of ladies. The improvement has been gradual, but it is still growing, and in ordinary society blasphemy is banished from the polite tattle and prattle of good company, on the ground that it indicates a coarse nature, or a very limited command of the resources of the English language to express sterility of mind and vacuity of heart.
As the author makes clear, the sum of the matter is that an expletive is a form of words which the foolish and vulgar will always consider forcible, while the more cultured few will regard them as the sure signs of a weakness of mind and a poverty of expression.
To any one who cares to go into the matter, Mr. Sharman's book promises some reward, as he has there brought forward some very curious and interesting information.
