Horrible Oaths

THE LOST ART OF PROFANITY (223 pp.)--Burges Johnson--Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50).

Burges Johnson is dissatisfied with American profanity and hopes for an enrichment of all its forms: the oath denunciatory, the oath asseverative, the oath interjectional, the malediction. His argument is a little too mechanically playful, but it is well illustrated and has some grains of sense. Henry L. Mencken (The American Language) contributes an approving foreword, remarking, among other things, that:

"We have lately seen the heroes of a great moral war march home with a repertory of invective almost tragically thin and banal. Like any other Christian soldiers, they used a great deal of foul language in field and camp, but very little of it got beyond a few four-letter words . . ." This complaint, in which Burges Johnson concurs, would be perfectly sound if cursing were entirely a verbal matter, but it is not. Its effect is proportionate to the kidney of the curser. The four-letter banalities that bore Mr. Mencken might suffice to turn him pale when uttered in foulness of spirit. Likewise, the most horrible oaths in the language can sound like pink tea if pronounced in a sterile tone. Professor Johnson does not go into the profundities of profanity. Treating it as a branch of literature and as an anthropological study, he has dug up some engaging data on its origin, its flowering and its decline. He prints James Stephens' poem, A Glass of Beer:*

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there

Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer

May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,

And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

That parboiled ape, with the toughest jaw you will see

On virtue's path, and a voice that would rasp the dead,

Came roaring and raging the minute she looked at me,

And threw me out of the house on the back of my head!

If I asked her master he'd give me a cask a day;

But she, with the beer at hand, not a

gill would arrange!

May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may

The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange./-

Other curiosities:

P: General George Washington issued many general orders against profanity in the Continental Army, but, according to another officer, on one bad day at Monmouth he himself swore "until the leaves shook on the trees . . . Sir ... he swore like an angel from heaven."

P: In Elizabethan England there was a recognized underworld profession called "ruffling" or "roaring," whose practitioners could be hired to turn the air blue against an enemy.

P: There exist in English 1,300 ways of calling a man a fool and 1,050 for calling a woman a slut.

*From James Stephens: Collected Poems; Macmillan, 1926.

/- But does not use J. M. Synge's more savage curse on one who disliked The Playboy of the Western World:

Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister,

Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver,

In her guts a galling give her.

Let her live to earn her dinners

In Mount joy with seedy sinners;

Lord, this judgment quickly bring,

And I'm your servant, J. M. Synge.

--from The Complete Works of John M. Synge, courtesy of Random House, Inc.

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