God Awful Things

From the NYT:

Expletive began as padding; a word or phrase to fill up a line, often an inoffensive oath like “by gum,” but has added the sense of an exclamation or outcry interjected for emphasis. It gained popularity during the Watergate unpleasantness as words were primly excised from transcripts of the Nixon tapes and the space filled with a bracketed “expletive deleted.”

“Vulgarism in language,” wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son in 1749, “is the . . . distinguishing characteristic of bad company and a bad education.” From vulgus, Latin for “the common people,” it meant “manners and language below the aristocratic standards of the well bred,” but in the decline of snootiness, the meaning changed to a harsher “crude; indecent; tasteless.” Examples are familiar one-syllable words in the field of scatology (Greek root skat, “dung”) describing disposal of bodily wastes, now most often expressed in a shout after stubbing your toe in the dark.

An epithet is a derogation or slur not as “dirty” as a vulgarism or as explosive as an expletive, with which it is often confused. Tagging an intellectual as an “egghead” or labeling a passionate partisan as a “nut case” is using an epithet, or mildly disparaging word. In “show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser,” sometimes used in the locker room, the last “loser” is an epithet.

Imprecation brings us full circle to religion. Based on the Latin precare, “to pray,” the noun imprecation— along with its synonym execration, which shares a root with “sacred” and has nothing to do with excrement — are curses, usually married to the verb “mutter,” calling down punishment from on high. These bookish terms of excessive condemnation are out of critical fashion, merely evoking the exclamation by Snoopy, the cartoon character from Peanuts, “Curse you, Red Baron!”

A bleep is a “squeak” — the echoic word for a high-pitched sound, especially one made by electronic equipment, lately embraced as a self-censoring word by Chicago prosecutors to avoid reading obscenities aloud in publicizing arrests. Our oral and instant messages are now heralded by the sound of the bleeper. Earliest use in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The New York Herald Tribune in 1953: “The bleepsof Geiger counters make ‘penny stocks’ on the country’s exchanges palpitate into investors’ bonanzas.” More sophisticated plays today have made investors bleeping furious.