Authentic Profanity

From The History Quill:

Writing historical fiction presents its own particular challenges, not least when it comes to dialogue. How does an author create a sense of time and place without sounding faux-archaic or having characters proclaim “ye olde clichés”? Worse still, the unwitting author can sometimes use words or phrases of sufficient modernity to rudely jerk the reader out of their pleasant suspension of disbelief. I have done that myself, which is why this has become a topic close to my own heart. The thing that brings it into sharpest focus is swearing.

Swearing is an extremely useful item for any writer to have in their toolbox. The technical term for swearing is ‘using intensifiers’, and indeed that is exactly what it does. A carefully used, well-placed curse can give a character’s emotion more impact on the reader than a whole paragraph of description. It portrays that character’s mood or mental state in the most immediate manner. If you get it wrong, however, it can sound gratuitous, silly, or just plain anachronistic.

Most serious historical fiction authors will go to great lengths to try to be authentic to the events and culture of the time period they are writing in. Unfortunately, when it comes to cursing, a problem arises where what once sounded shocking to our ancestors now seems banal, childish or worse, laughable. In contrast, the everyday language used in the past can now be deemed unacceptable.

Using authentic curses can just seem plain odd to a modern reader. In sixth form, I had to read Sheridan’s School for Scandal and recall the hilarity with which we snotty-nosed 1980s kids regarded each utterance of Egad or Sdeath, 18th Century expletives which would have then been regarded as outrageous. The text’s original readers found the “D” word so terrible it could only be printed as D___ (I am talking about “Damn” by the way, in case you were thinking of another D word). Shakespeare’s use of curses like Swounds or Sblood met similar chortling.

In his Holcroft Blood series, set in the 17th Century, Angus Donald is careful to scatter enough original slang through his dialogue to give a sense of the era without overwhelming the reader with obscure or (to modern eyes) laughable expletives. Despite the name of the main character, Donald avoids using too much authentic swearing like Sblood. This once-shocking curse is a contraction of “By God’s Blood”, which gives us a clue to the origins of swearing. In the past, people first swore by their gods. They made oaths, promises to achieve deeds that they asked their Deities to witness and approve or aid them in their endeavors to fulfill them. It was the solemnity of the religious element that originally brought censure to swearing. These were words that should only be said in the most serious of circumstances. (Read more.)