Number of words: 545

The historical root of swearing in English and many other language is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the third commandment, in the popularity of  hell, damn, and God, and in many of the terms for taboo language  itself: profanity (that which is not, sacred), blasphemy (literally “evil speech” but in practice disrespect toward a deity), and swearing, cursing, and oaths. In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises an eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be titillated by a character in a movie saying. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” If a character today is offended by such language, it’s only to depict him as an old-fashioned prude. The defanging of religious taboo words is an obvious consequence of the secularization of Western culture. To understand religious vulgarity, then, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our linguistic ancestors, to whom God and Hell were real presences.

Swearing and oaths, in the literal sense of guarantees of one’s promises, take us into the Strangelovian world of paradoxical tactics, where voluntary self handicapping can work to one’s advantage. Say you need to make a promise. You may want to borrow money, and so must promise to return it. You may want someone to bear or support your child and forsake all others, and so must promise to be faithful in kind. Why should the promised believe you, knowing that it may to be your advantage to renege? The answer is that you can submit to a contingency that would impose a penalty on you if you did renege, ideally one so certain and severe that you would always do better to keep the promise than to back out. That way your partner no longer has to take you at your word; he can rely on your self-interest.

Nowdays we secure our promises with legal contracts that make us liable if we back out. But before we could count on a commercial and legal apparatus to enforce our contracts, we had to do our own self-handicapping. Children still bind their oaths by saying, “I hope to die if I tell I a lie.” Such oaths, of course would have been more credible in an era in which people thought that God listened to their entreaties and had the power to carry them out. At the same time, every time someone reneges on an oath and is not punished by the big guy upstairs, it casts doubt on his existence, his potency, or at the very least how carefully he’s paying attention. The earthly representatives of God would just as soon preserve the belief that he does listen and act in matters of importance, and so are unhappy about people diluting the brand by invoking God as the muscle behind their small-time deals. Hence the proscriptions against taking the name of the Lord in vain. Short of literally asking God to serve as one’s escrow agent, one can sanctify one’s promises in a more tactful way, by bringing God into the discussion obliquely. Even today, witnesses in American court proceedings have to swear on the Bible, as if an act of perjury undetected by the legal system would be punished by an eavesdropping and easily offended God.

Excerpt from’The seven words you can’t say on television by Steven Pinker.’