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Oh, Bloody Hell

BackStory's History of Profanity in America

03.08.19

WARNING: THIS EPISODE CONTAINS UNCENSORED USE OF THE STRONGEST PROFANITIES. PLEASE DO NOT LISTEN IF YOU ARE LIKELY TO BE OFFENDED AND PLEASE DO NOT PLAY IF CHILDREN ARE LISTENING.

This week, BackStory looks at the history of profanity in America. We’ll discover how soldiers returning from World War Two brought home more than just tales from the battlefield, explore what it really means to swear like a sailor, and discover how Lenny Bruce challenged and provoked the America of the 1950’s and 60’s. Plus Nathan talks to scholar Elizabeth Pryor, who just happens to be the daughter of comedian Richard Pryor, about the charged and painful history of the “n-word.”

colloquialisms; language; profanity

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Segments

Sick Comedy

In 1959, Time Magazine categorized Lenny Bruce as part of a rising group of “sick comics.” According to scholar Josh Lambert, Lenny Bruce pushed the bounds of what could be said in public and forced Americans to grapple with whether the First Amendment should protect Bruce’s shocking speech.

First Amendment; Lenny Bruce; comedy; freedom of speech; language; satire

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Brian Balogh: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment For The Humanities, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week, along with our colleague, Ed Ayers, we explore a different aspect of American History. This week, BackStory is exploring the history of American profanity, so be warned, there will be profane language. And as historians, we’re also mindful of the history of violence and oppression. So, there will be certain words that even we won’t say.

Josh Lambert: Asshole, tits, ass, cocksucker, schmuck, motherfucker, prick, putz, balling, clap, fag, piss, and son of a bitch.

Joanne Freeman: Those were the words police charged comedian Lenny Bruce with saying during a 1962 performance. Josh Lambert actually gets to say those same words without much consequence today.

Josh Lambert: It is pretty fun to do it as dispassionately as I can, as if I do it all the time.

Joanne Freeman: He’s a scholar of obscenity, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, and author of the book Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture. Lambert says Lenny Bruce developed a reputation as a so-called Sick Comic in the 1950’s and 60’s by pushing the bounds of what could be said out loud in the public square.

Josh Lambert: I think we can understand that there would have been people around Lenny Bruce’s time who would have felt genuinely weird and gross when they heard him say a word like shit or tits or fuck. And they wanted to protect other people from feeling as grossed out or as disturbed as they felt.

Joanne Freeman: Police officers started regularly attending Lenny Bruce’s shows, and it wasn’t because they were his fans. Cops started staking out his performances, noting what he said, and then arresting him on obscenity charges. In 1964, Lenny Bruce stood trial in New York and became a kind of cause célèbre.

Josh Lambert: Fascinatingly, Allen Ginsburg organizes a committee to sort of advocate on behalf of Lenny Bruce, and he gets all sorts of different people to sign a petition in support of Lenny Bruce, people like James Baldwin and Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag, and lots and lots of other major cultural figures. Again, this doesn’t mean that they were necessarily friends of Lenny Bruce or even fans of Lenny Bruce, but it was people who felt like the liberalization of obscenity law was an important thing, was an important change in the culture. And it would set that cause back if Lenny Bruce were to be convicted, if people like Lenny Bruce in the future couldn’t perform the kind of material they wanted to.

Joanne Freeman: But then Lenny Bruce decided to do something strange.

Josh Lambert: Lenny Bruce really liked to perform his material to courtrooms, even though it never seemed to work out really well. No judge ever said, “Oh, great. Yeah, you did a few jokes for me. I really appreciate that.”

Josh Lambert: So, why does he try to perform his act in court? Josh Lambert has one theory.

Joanne Freeman: Anyone who has a small child understands this. It’s one thing if a kid says a word and you say, “Don’t use that word ever again.” But if you say to them, “Well, there’s a whole bunch of words you should never say,” their first question is gonna be, “Which ones?” And then you have to tell them all the words, which they’re of course gonna say. So, I think Bruce understood this, that in calling them out for using a word like motherfucker, the court had to say the word motherfucker over and over again and include it in the trial transcript and publish it.

Joanne Freeman: So, there was that irony of the only way to punish him for this stuff was to reproduce the language, and thus it sort of undermines the whole idea of shutting him up.

Josh Lambert: And Lenny Bruce, like perhaps no one before him, managed to shock the country into facing the First Amendment in the fullness of what it represented. But did Lenny Bruce think of himself as a civil rights icon?

Joanne Freeman: I think with any particular choice that he made or moment that he spoke or thing that he said, it’s pretty hard to figure out, “Was that a deliberate act of civil disobedience? Or was that him just fucking around?”

Now That’s What I Call Salty

Do sailors deserve their reputation for foul mouthed chat in the rigging? Ed talks to Professor Paul Gilje of the University of Oklahoma, who says “hell, yes.”

character; language; reputation; ships

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Brian Balogh: So, today on the show, BackStory explores the social and cultural history of some of the most charged profanities in American life.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll hear about the long and complicated history of the N word.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll find out what it really meant to swear like a sailor.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll go from sailors to soldiers. We’ll discuss how the two world wars gave rise to swearing back on the home front.

Brian Balogh: Okay, team. Which group in American society would you say were historically most associated with cussing?

Joanne Freeman: College professors.

Nathan Connolly: Girl Scouts. It must be Girl Scouts.

Brian Balogh: I didn’t ask who listens to BackStory. I asked who does the most swearing historically, and you guys know the answer. It’s sailors.

Nathan Connolly: Oh, yes.

Brian Balogh: Those crusty sea dogs had a reputation for having the saltiest tongues in town. Back in 2016, Ed talked to historian Paul Gilje about this. He explained that sailor’s language consisted mostly of curses.

Paul Gilje: Anybody could swear like a sailor, but sailors had a very special relationship to swearing.

Brian Balogh: Gilje says American sailors coined some of the most offensive words and phrases in the English language. In fact, as the embodiment of manhood, they had a sort of special license to swear. And their language wasn’t just offensive, it was loaded with political meaning. So, what did swearing like a sailor sound like? What was the absolute worst thing you could call somebody in the 18th Century?

Paul Gilje: I was surprised. I was reading in the archives, I was going through all these old logbooks and journals. And one day I was kind of reading this logbook and it said, “Then the captain swore worse than I ever heard anybody swear before.” I’m in the archives, sitting at the edge of my seat, waiting for this. And then the captain said, “You damn son of a bitch.”

Ed Ayers: Oh, come on, man. That was it?

Paul Gilje: Is that all? That was it. And so, here’s a pirate, about ready to go kill somebody and take over his ship, and he says, “Let’s go get those sons of bitches.” And I’m going, “What does this mean?”

Ed Ayers: So tell me, why were these the worst kinds of swearing that people could imagine at the time? Can you kind of unpack that, as they say? What did each word really mean?

Paul Gilje: Well, let’s start with damn. In the 18th and 19th Century, damn was directly connected to a sense of Christianity. You were essentially damning someone to hell. And when you did that, you were putting yourself on the same level as God. And if you put yourself on the same level as God, you were essentially sinning. And this is a pretty strong thing, especially in the period I’m talking about, when even hard nosed, earthy, bad word preps talk about sailors-

Ed Ayers: Profane.

Paul Gilje: Profane sailors still often grew up with the Bible, and that’s how they learned how to read and they were aware of certain religious teaching, so that they took this stuff very seriously. But the word damn would often be then placed in relationship to other terms, damn son of a bitch.

Ed Ayers: Why son? I mean, why is that the word that would set people off?

Paul Gilje: I think by using the word son, you were attacking the individual and you were attacking the individual’s mother.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Paul Gilje: Sailors were actually very sentimental and very sentimental about home and very sentimental about their mothers. I mean, many of these young men were indeed relatively young when they went to sea. Not as young as we might imagine. Often they were 15, 16.

Ed Ayers: That’s young enough, right?

Paul Gilje: It’s young enough.

Ed Ayers: To be out on the tossing ocean with mom very far away.

Paul Gilje: And their main female attachment at that age would probably be with their mother and they thought about their mother, they dreamt about their mother, they talked about their mother. So, when you start saying, “You damn son of a bitch,” when you say son of a bitch, you’re talking about a person’s mother. But also, it’s a loaded term. The word bitch is a loaded term in ways that we ordinarily don’t comprehend.

Ed Ayers: So Paul, bitch being the keyword in all of this, why is that the word that is so charged by these sailors at this time?

Paul Gilje: Well, the technical definition of bitch is a female dog.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Paul Gilje: And it’s charged because I think in the history of dogs, such as it is, there’s an emergence in the 18th and 19th Century of kind of a domesticated version of a dog and kind of a mongrel version of a dog.

Ed Ayers: Right, right.

Paul Gilje: And the people who domesticated dogs in the United States, the middle class, wanted to control all those dogs in those street. And by using the word bitch, then sailors were kind of saying, “Look, middle class, we’re not buying your bill of goods and your attempt to domesticate this world.”

Ed Ayers: But there’s also another meaning about the reason that bitch is so charged.

Paul Gilje: And this is much more important, and it has to do with gender, it has to do with sexuality. Ideas about sexuality were changing in this time period. In the 17th and 18th Century, a woman’s sexuality was much more openly accepted. By the time you move into the 19th Century and the height … We think of Victorianism. Women’s sexuality is being denied. To call somebody a son of a bitch was emphasizing the sexuality of the mother, but not just the sexuality of the mother, but also an open sexuality. Almost like a bestial sexuality.

Ed Ayers: Like those dogs out on the streets, right?

Paul Gilje: Like those dogs out on the street. So to call somebody a damn son of a bitch, you were saying your mother is willing to do it with anybody and everybody she runs across. She’s like a dog in heat and you haven’t got a clue as to who your father is.

Ed Ayers: Ouch. So, that’s pretty potent stuff there, Paul. What other words might people have tried to use that would have been almost as strong?

Paul Gilje: Calling somebody a puppy.

Ed Ayers: Oh, yeah.

Paul Gilje: Duals had been fought between Southerners, right?

Ed Ayers: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Paul Gilje: And often they referred to each other, “Oh, you puppy.”

Ed Ayers: Yeah.

Paul Gilje: And you kind of go, “Well, that seems sweet.”

Ed Ayers: So, what? Why would somebody call somebody a puppy and think that that was a terrible thing to say?

Paul Gilje: Because it conjures up in the back of people’s mind that you are a son of a dog, right? A child-dog, a son of a bitch.

Ed Ayers: I’m seeing a certain theme here.

Paul Gilje: You might even say this conversation is going to the dogs.

Ed Ayers: We might. So, did damn son of a bitch have what we would recognize as overt political meaning at this time?

Paul Gilje: Yes, and I’ll give you a very specific example. The Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. In the lead up to the massacre, there were a series of confrontations between the British soldier and the common people, common men mainly. And in these fights they would often turn to one another and say, “You damn son of a bitch,” or some person would get shoved and they’d say, “That’s the son of a bitch who knocked me down.” And that helps create the electricity of the evening of March 5, 1770, when the British soldiers are standing there, confronted by a crowd of a couple hundred people throwing ice and stones at them. And then someone shouts out, “Damn you, fire. Damn you.” Soldiers fire.

Paul Gilje: And we can only begin to comprehend that when we understand fully what the meaning damn and the phrase damn son of a bitch means in its larger context for that political world.

Brian Balogh: Paul Gilje is a Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of To Swear Like A Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750-1850.

One Man’s Vulgarity, Another Man’s Lyrics

How swear words are used, and what they mean, has evolved over centuries. For example, in the Middle Ages, the phrase “by God’s bones” was right at the top as one of the worst, according to writer Melissa Mohr. In the 20th century, words like “fuck” took on a more colloquial definition, thanks in part to soldiers coming home after the World Wars and sharing vulgar vocabulary from the barracks. Brian talks with Mohr about swearing soldiers, a crass George Carlin, and other cursing of the last century.

Music:

Modest House by Podington Bear

World War I veterans; World War II veterans; lyrics; songwriting

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Brian Balogh: All right, Joanne and Nathan. We heard earlier in the show about comedian Lenny Bruce. So, how about some more comedy?

Nathan Connolly: Yes.

Joanne Freeman: I’m in.

Brian Balogh: Okay. Here’s writer Melissa Moore with a joke.

Melissa Moore: It’s about a man who is overseas and he comes back to his family, and his family asks, “Well, how was it? How was your tour?” And he’s been fighting in World War II and it’s been terrible, honestly. He’s seen all these people die, he’s seen starvation, he’s seen just the most horrible things. But it’s his grandma asking and he doesn’t want to tell her about this, so he says, “Well, the boys sure were funny, Grandma. They just told a lot of good jokes.” And his family says, “Oh, tell us one, tell us one.” And he says, “Well, gosh, I don’t know if I can tell you one, because the boys also used a lot of bad language.” And then they say, “Okay, well, just say … If you come to a bad word, just say blank. Just skip it, say blank, and then tell us the joke.”

Melissa Moore: And he says, “Okay, okay, I’ll do that.” So he starts telling his joke and he says, “Blank, blank, blank, blankety-blank, blank, blanking, blanking, blank, blank, blank, blankety-blank, blank, blank, fuck.”

Brian Balogh: Here’s more again on why she gets a laugh out of that.

Melissa Moore: Oh, I just love the idea that there are worse words than fuck. What are all these words that he’s got in there that have more power than fuck?

Brian Balogh: Joanne, Nathan, wanna take any guesses at what the other words might be?

Joanne Freeman: Gosh darn it.

Nathan Connolly: Doggone, dagnabit.

Brian Balogh: Did you both go to Catholic schools? But look, that’s as good a guess as any.

Joanne Freeman: So, in reality, this joke features a soldier coming back from World War II with a foul mouth. And I’m guessing this was a pretty common thing for soldiers, to bring back the colorful language heard in their barracks.

Brian Balogh: You got it, Joanne. A few years ago, Moore published a book about the history of swearing. And she says that during the 20th Century, the two world wars punctuated a rise in profanity.

Melissa Moore: The language of soldiers when they came back home after World War I and World War II, they really brought swearing into the public discourse in a way that it hadn’t been before. So in the Victorian Period, there were lots of people saying fuck and fucking, but it really was not at all present in public discourse. It was extremely taboo.

Melissa Moore: And when you get people coming back from World War I, they would write memoirs and they’d use some of this language that they were using on the battlefield in their memoirs. Especially after World War II, you’s get reporters who are really trying to give people a flavor of what it was like. And what it was like was a lot of bad language.

Brian Balogh: Do you have any sense of what the response on the home front was when these soldiers started coming back and cursing like soldiers?

Melissa Moore: I think at first, it was a little bit of denial, not wanting to accept that this is what the language was. And so the very first memoirs have all the curse words bleeped out. Or, they have kind of commentary saying, “Oh, well, this language. Although this is the language they were using, oh my goodness, this is horrible. How could this be?” But then going on and printing.

Melissa Moore: So Norman Mailer had wrote a memoir in 1948. He’s got a tremendous number of fucks in there, but he spells it fug, F-U-G. People attribute it to different people, but Tallulah Bankhead, she was famously quipped when she met him, “Oh, you’re the man who can’t spell fuck.”

Brian Balogh: Now look, jokes and memoirs weren’t the only way soldiers expressed their vulgar vocabulary.

Melissa Moore: This is a popular song from World War II, that expresses a lot of the feelings of helplessness, but also rage that soldiers would have, stuck in this bureaucracy, seeing all these horrible things, participating in all these incredibly difficult things. And it’s called Fuck Them All. And it goes, I’m a terrible singer, but it goes basically, “Fuck them all, fuck them all, the long and the short and the tall. You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean, so cheer up my lads, fuck them all.” That’s part of the chorus.

Joanne Freeman: Kind of zingy.

Brian Balogh: Speechless.

Nathan Connolly: He’s worried his 7th grade teacher is coming out from behind the curtain.

Brian Balogh: So I’ll admit that when I first heard the “blankety-blank” joke from earlier, I thought about another 20th Century comedian who is notorious for his language. George Carlin.

Nathan Connolly: Oh, yeah, the master.

Joanne Freeman: Aha.

Brian Balogh: So, I asked Moore where Carlin fits into all of this when he starts to take the stage in the 1960’s and 70’s.

Melissa Moore: Yeah, that was an interesting time, because the sort of counterculture of the 60’s, in a way, he sort of finished off what the greatest generation started. The people coming back, the soldiers coming back, brought this language into the public sphere and then in the 60’s and 70’s, it really started becoming more prevalent. And so, George Carlin for example, had his seven words you can’t say on television, which are, let’s see, let me count. Shit, piss, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. And tits is sort of throw in there, it seems to me, as slightly a little bit of an afterthought.

Melissa Moore: But so, he had this monologue and he in 1973, a public radio station was playing the monologue in the afternoon and a father was listening to it in the car and heard it with his son and he complained to the FCC, saying, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t want to be just listening to the radio and hear stuff like this.”

Brian Balogh: Right.

Melissa Moore: So this became a court case that went to the Supreme Court. Can the FCC regulate this kind of language? Because it’s very clear in American Law that the FCC can regulate obscenity, but this was something different. This was called indecency. And really indecency is language that depicts things in an offensive way, and it basically regulates swearing. So, could the FCC regulate swearing?

Melissa Moore: And the Supreme Court in 1978 decided that, yes, the FCC could ban these words on TV and on the radio, because they’re kind of broadcast into your homes and it’s harder to avoid them.

Brian Balogh: Which of course gave Carlin’s monologue a whole new life.

Melissa Moore: Yes, yes, and so, people still kind of … It’s still sort of a touch stone, because now you can go back and think, “Well, what … Can we still not say these words on TV?” Well, no. Now we can say-

Brian Balogh: Yeah, it became iconic. Now, the Supreme Court came down differently in a case called Cohen v. California. Can you tell us about that case?

Melissa Moore: Oh, yeah. That was another interesting one about swearing, where Paul Robert Cohen went into a Municipal Court, I believe in California, and he had a jacket on. And written on the back of his jacket, he had put, “Fuck the draft.”

Brian Balogh: This was at the height of the Vietnam War. I think he wore this jacket in 1968 and then the Supreme Court ruled in 1971.

Melissa Moore: That’s correct, yeah. The court case was decided in 1971. And yeah, so he went in there and he was arrested for disturbing the peace with offensive conduct. People thought, “Oh, my gosh. He can’t do this. This is offensive to all of the people fighting in Vietnam.” And so, he was arrested. But and this case also went to the Supreme Court. They came to a very different conclusion. They decided that this was protected speech, that the First Amendment of the Constitution says that when possible, you shouldn’t abridge people’s Freedom of Speech.

Melissa Moore: Courts traditionally have been quite lenient about what you should be able to say. They try not to circumscribe what people can say, and in this case, they decided that, “Well, fuck the draft, it is meaningful speech. He’s communicating how much he hates the draft.” And what’s important is that it was a, what the law calls a fighting word. So, fighting words are words that kind of by their very utterance inflict harm or they are liable to kind of immediately incite a breach of the peace.

Melissa Moore: And so, Justice Harlan who wrote the opinion has this wonderful line where he says, “One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.” And he says, “Well, if you try to make public discourse so pristine that no one could be offended, no one’s ever gonna say anything, because people get offended and that’s part of having a robust public sphere.”

Brian Balogh: It seems like we see a lot more First Amendment Constitutional cases around language in the 20th Century. The First Amendment is called the First Amendment because it’s been there for a long time. I mean, what is changing in the 20th Century?

Melissa Moore: I think they are a result partly of the swear words coming into the public discourse and people just hearing them in places they didn’t before. And some people being comfortable with this language and using it and some people going, “Oh, my God. I can’t hear that.” And so, then you get the legal cases.

Brian Balogh: Well, I know why I swear, but I’m curious to know why people more generally swear, and whether that reason has changed over history.

Melissa Moore: I think the reason has been the same, even though the words have changed, in that swear words are kind of the best words we have to express extreme emotion. Because they basically are kind of stored and processed differently in the brain, and they’re more closely connected to our emotions. And so, I think while in the Middle Ages, you might have said, “God’s bones,” when you were really angry or really happy, you were doing it for the same reason that somebody today says, “Fucking,” again for joy or for pain or for anger, all these emotions are very well expressed by swear words.

Brian Balogh: Yet, when you characterize swearing among soldiers, you talk about swearing being so common, that actually if you really wanted to get someone’s attention, you didn’t swear. I think the example you use is, “Get your fucking rife, get your fucking rifle.” When someone said, “Get your rifles,” that was serious. Do we risk losing swearing’s special place by it becoming so common?

Melissa Moore: I mean, I think we are seeing the decline of the sort of sexual and certainly the excremental words. So, I think shit now is much less powerful than it was in the Victorian Era. Fuck is getting less powerful. And then eventually, once it gets these very different uses, it gets used more commonly and then the power goes down, because you just hear it so often. But I mean, I’m not worried about swearing in general, because I think we’ll come up with … We’re gonna come up with some new words.

Brian Balogh: The last time you dropped a hammer on your toe, what did you say?

Melissa Moore: Probably motherfucker. Sorry.

Brian Balogh: It’s all right.

Brian Balogh: Melissa Moore is the author of the book Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing.

The Nuance of the N-Word

Nathan sits down with historian Elizabeth Pryor to trace the emergence of the n-word in black vocabulary and learn how African Americans shaped its meaning to connote a sense of shared social identity. Pryor argues that African American laborers and intellectuals used the n-word long before it was weaponized by whites to limit black freedom. And later, we hear a powerful story about how her father, famed comedian Richard Pryor, had an epiphany on the n-word while overseas in Kenya.

Music:

Got Spark by Podington Bear

African American culture; Ebonics (African American vernacular); Richard Pryor; identity politics

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan Connolly: When Elizabeth Pryor was a first year History Professor at Smith College, an incident occurred in her classroom that shaped the course of her career. While she was teaching about The Civil War, a well meaning White student interrupted her lecture to recite a quote from Blazing Saddles, a movie that was co-written by Elizabeth’s father, famed comedian, Richard Pryor.

Elizabeth Pryor: I was making a point in the lecture about citizenship, and she repeated a line from the film that used a disparaging word for people of Chinese descent and the N word. And she said, “We don’t want the CH’s and the N words, but we will take the Irish,” but she said all the words. And I tried to stop her. I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.” And she said, “Oh, no, it’s a joke from Blazing Saddles.” And then she repeated it.

Elizabeth Pryor: And it was the end of class and I went home and I came back to class the next session and I told everybody, “We’re not gonna use the N word. We’re not gonna say the N word. The actual N word. We’re not gonna talk about it.” And I just felt totally empty because I’d basically censored the word in my class and I hadn’t taken the opportunity to really teach the students why that moment was so significant. Why was it important that somebody said the N word in the class? And I didn’t give them anything. I just stopped it.

Nathan Connolly: After the incident, Pryor set out to develop a strategy for navigating racist language in her classroom. She began by asking herself, “What does the N word even mean?” And while her research centered on this simple question, she ultimately found something far more complicated.

Elizabeth Pryor: I love doing these digital newspaper searches online. And so, the first thing that struck me was that every time I saw the N word in print, the actual N word, it was in quotation marks. I thought it was gonna come across like just White people using it in common parlance. But in fact, the only time they really used it up until the 1820’s in the newspapers, was when they were quoting fictional Black people.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, they’d write these faux letters to the editor, like, “Dear Massa Printer,” like these kind of anti-Black kind of diatribes, where they’d imagine the Black person writing these letters to the newspaper. And in all of those, they had figures who called themselves a poor N word, using of course the actual word.

Elizabeth Pryor: And then increasingly, like at the rise of the Minstrel Show in the 1820’s and 30’s, it was in the title of the shows, it was imagined as the words of Black people speaking, in anti-Black art. It was coming out of the mouths of Black people. That really struck me. I felt like there was some kind of meaning in that, and I wanted to find out more.

Nathan Connolly: So, to your reading, you found it being used by White imagining how Black people were speaking or speaking to each other?

Elizabeth Pryor: That’s right, but I also started thinking about when Whites were quoting Black dialect, whether to not Black people actually spoke that way or not, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, I started to wonder, “Could this have been a Black word?” And I started to look into Black sources, to try to … And there aren’t a ton. But to try to find if there was evidence. My greatest example of this comes from the 1930’s WPA ex-slave interviews, with formerly enslaved people. And these are people who are 60 years, 70 years away from enslavement.

Elizabeth Pryor: And they are still using the N word in incredibly nuanced ways to describe themselves and other people. It does not always mean the same thing. Sometimes it’s obsequious in the way that you would expect, perhaps, it to be. But other times, it speaks to pride, lament, spirit. The best example of this comes from a gentleman in the Virginia Narratives, and he’s telling this horrible story about what he witnessed as a child, the violence against another enslaved grown up. And the guy was trying to protect his wife and the overseer was coming after his wife. And the whole time he’s telling the story, he’s calling the guy a colored man, right? He’s like, “The colored man was doing this, the colored man was doing this,” and then finally the colored man stood up to the overseer and the overseer shot him dead. And at this moment, the storyteller says, “N words don’t get no breaks.” And it seemed like a real pointed turn there of using the word.

Elizabeth Pryor: And so, I kind of … And I felt like I could really hear that nuance and that history throughout my reading of people speaking and saying the N word.

Nathan Connolly: So, this is a case of they’re not just being a kind of appropriation from White stereotypes of Black speakers, but that African Americans have a long oral tradition that recognizes multiple meanings and uses of a term that might appear the same way in print on its face?

Elizabeth Pryor: Exactly. And I think the reason why it’s important to make that distinction is because in one version, basically you’re saying that Black people in the late 20th and early 21st Century are defining themselves against White racism. And in another version, if you look, you can say there’s a long, long history of kind of this linguistic, this discursive subversion that Black people employed way back to the 1770’s and 1780’s, to use this word, to start identifying themselves as sort of an ingroup that it had … They imbued it with meaning.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, if anybody did the re-appropriating, I think it’s the White people who saw that this was a word that had meaning and texture for Black people, right? And that threatened, that became a big source of the threat. And that’s when the word kind of turns into something violent against them.

Elizabeth Pryor: And in fact, a lot of times my students will say, “Yes, I know what the N word means. It comes from slavery.” And part of the argument that I make is yes, this is a word that was probably Latin roots, it was applied to people who were involuntary laborers, they were in service in perpetuity, they were Black. But it was a real labor category. People occupied that labor category. It wasn’t something you would want to be, but it wasn’t a slur.

Elizabeth Pryor: The word really emerges as a slur as Black people start to become free. This is when the word is used against people who are no longer occupying that actual existing labor category. And that’s when the word takes on the meaning that we start to recognize and know it as today.

Nathan Connolly: So, give us an example of how Black laborers, in these earlier uses, would draw out the N word as a way to convey a shared social identity.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, there is some of this work that’s speculative, but I still believe it. And part of the sources I use, my favorite sources come from Black authors writing during the period. And they’re still writing in a type of dialect.

Elizabeth Pryor: But one of my favorite examples comes from Harriet Wilson, who was a free woman, sensibly a free woman. She was really an indentured servant in the North and wrote a book called Our N Word. She wrote this book about being an indentured servant to a White family in the North. But at the beginning of it, she’s a biracial person, and her father was Black and her mother was a White woman who had hit really hard times. And she imagines a conversation that her father, who was a craftsman, was having in his shop to himself, when his buddy, also Black, walks in on him.

Elizabeth Pryor: And so, she imagines her father, who’s sitting here hopping a barrel, and he’s talking about wanting to marry Mag Smith. So, he’s mumbling to himself about this. And his friend Pete walks in and he says, “Who you gonna marry? Mag Smith?” And the father says back, “What’s up, N word? Why you walking up on me like that?” And then the friend said something back and he said, “Next time you walk in without permission, let an N word know it.”

Elizabeth Pryor: So, in that case, she’s imagining Black people in the North. One is Black people in the South, one is Black people in the North, talking to each other, workers, communicating to each other in this casual way. It’s not offensive. In one instance it’s playful, in one instance it’s chastising, but using it among each other freely. So, that’s where the evidence comes from.

Nathan Connolly: Right. And I’m guessing you also have moments where you see then a spike in negative uses, largely from White intellectuals or groups. I mean, how would you track when you have a struggle over the meaning of this word when Whites are involved?

Elizabeth Pryor: Right. Well, I mean, basically as soon as Black people start becoming free, the word changes in tone and tenor. And what’s interesting about it is that this becomes a really tricky moment for Black abolitionists, Black people who are rising out of this working class. They don’t want to be associated with the word.

Elizabeth Pryor: The first run of Freedom’s Journal, which is the first African American newspaper from 1827 to 1829, does not use the word. They complain about racism a ton, right? And they talk about being called terrible things, but they don’t use the word to say it.

Elizabeth Pryor: It does appear in Colored American, which is the next Black newspaper, which runs from like 1837 to 1839 or so. And they talk about being called and accused and kind of blamed through this language. But it really becomes the international Black abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass, who really start to give the White use gravitas. And I think just like it’s Whites in blackface, who are the first to use the N word against Black people. It’s Black people in a kind of white face. And I didn’t come up with this term, but a kind of white face, that they are also only quoting these abolitionists, or only quoting the N word as White speech.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, they’re saying, “Here’s these examples. This is how White people talk to us.” And Frederick Douglass writes a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor of The Liberator, from Ireland when he’s abroad. And he uses the phrase, “We don’t allow N words in here,” nine times to describe the kinds of experiences he had trying to cross the thresholds of public space and public transportation in the Antebellum North. We don’t allow N words in here. And from all kinds of White people he’s hearing that.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, I think in some ways, it’s the Black abolitionists who make everybody aware that the N word is being used in this violent kind of way. And they also, for the most part, pushed down the Black use.

Nathan Connolly: So, I have this notion that I’ve certainly seen in crowded conversations about the N word or thinking about history, there’s a certain kind of unease. Or when again, you’re reading in a class primary documents where the word kind of jumps of the page and how students respond to it, right? And my sense at least is that the N word is the only word in American English that can so violently and dramatically collapse the past and the present.

Nathan Connolly: And that’s really the principle reason why it is so destabilizing to the ear for so many people, right? That there’s a way in which we’ve comforted ourselves with a certain distance from the 19th Century or the Jim Crow period, and yet that word immediately causes us to conjure images of the water hose and the lynching tree and the dogs. And so, therefore, it best not be uttered, because we can’t handle that kind of violent return the the past. And I’m curious to get your sense of that and of it’s power in that way.

Elizabeth Pryor: Well, you’re 100% right. I mean, it is in the dusty pages of books. It’s in this past space that you’re talking about, but when it finds its way in full, into the classroom, it is in real space, in real time, doing work, real work. Any teacher who thinks that’s not true, any teacher who’s teaching Huck Finn this week to their students, and thinks it is not true that by that word entering their classroom that the tenor of the classroom is changed, is absolutely mistaken.

Elizabeth Pryor: I have a student who wrote a blog post for me. I taught a course last semester, History of the N Word. And one of my students wrote this beautiful, beautiful story about how they had a teacher who taught To Kill A Mockingbird and they did the read aloud. And the teacher insisted that everybody in the class say the word in full. This was a teacher who believed it was part of the fight against its violence, to repeat it in the classroom space, that Harper Lee had wanted it that way and that it was powerful to do it.

Elizabeth Pryor: And the way that the student would respond was that they would count the paragraphs. Everybody read a paragraph, so they would count the number of paragraphs in the book and they would count when it was their turn. And if their turn coincided with a paragraph with the N word, they would get up and go to the bathroom, just walk out of the room.

Elizabeth Pryor: I mean, so and I have heard from students over and over and over again, I mean, this is really why the work became exciting for me, because I thought that what I was gonna do when I started having these conversations with students, that were gonna kind of have this very intellectual freedom of speech debate with me about whether or not you say it or don’t say it or whatever. And some have. But most of them immediately started confessing, “That happened to me. I was in a class when that happened. I didn’t know what to do when it was said in this way. People tell me to shh, but nobody told me what it meant,” on and on and on.

Elizabeth Pryor: And I was like, “There’s really a story here.” And it’s like the N word is sort of like a map into each of our individual racial histories. So, I often say that it signposts a national trauma, but it’s also signpost to personal trauma for a lot of people. A lot of people remember their first interactions with this word, and not just Black people.

Nathan Connolly: Well, keeping with the personal, I mean, your father was one who tried to again, bring to the public conversation all the ranges in which Black folks were using this word in private spaces, on street corners, and the like. And yet, quite famously, Richard Pryor also had a conversion experience on this very term, after taking a trip to Kenya. Tell me about that.

Elizabeth Pryor: Yeah, I love this. So, in 1974 my dad releases the album That N Word’s Crazy. Okay? It is such a beautiful kind of description of what an N word is. Nothing like what White people were saying N words were. And then four or five years later, my father goes on this trip. And he has really an incredible epiphany. He tells it beautifully on stage in Live On The Sunset Strip, and he also does an interview in Ebony in ’80, with Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Elizabeth Pryor: And he also pulled me aside when I was 11 or 12, when he came back from this trip, and he told me he was never gonna say the word again. But I love what he says. He says all of a sudden he was sitting in the lobby of the Nairobi Hilton and he looks around and a little voice says to him, “Look around. What do you see?” And he says, “I see all kinds of Black people doing all kinds of things.” And the voice says, “Do you see any N words?” And then my dad says, “No.” And he said, “That’s because there aren’t any.”

Elizabeth Pryor: And when he talks about this, he says, “I was wrong, I was wrong.” And I think that’s so beautiful. I love a couple of things my dad does in this. One is, unlike a lot of people who get into this polemical debate about who should or shouldn’t say the N word, my dad’s like, “Do what you wanna do, but this my truth. I don’t wanna do this anymore. This is what’s true for me.”

Elizabeth Pryor: And he also says, “And a note to the hip White people who want to come up and use this word with me, please don’t because I don’t like it.” That’s what he said. And I think those are really two very important points. I mean, this is really this kind of homecoming experience from this perspective, this kind of diasporic experience. He’s standing in Africa when he has this epiphany. It’s very powerful.

Nathan Connolly: Elizabeth Pryor is a Professor of History at Smith College. She’s the author of The Etymology Of The N Word: Resistance, Language, And The Politics Of Freedom In The Antebellum North.

End Riff

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View Transcript

Nathan Connolly: So, folks, we’ve talked about a lot of different thorny and troubling topics on BackStory, and some fun stuff. And this is something that could potentially be fun, and yet we’ve been pretty tied up in knots about how to handle something like cursing. And I’m curious, given what we’re used to dealing with, why this presented such a challenge for us.

Brian Balogh: Not since our producers told us we were doing a show on the history of fashion have I been so nervous. And I still am tied up in knots. I just interviewed people who used language that I would never use in public, I would never use in private, and I kind of felt like if I’m embarrassed by this, I don’t want to impose that on our listeners, even though we warned them up front.

Joanne Freeman: What’s so striking about that is, think about the power of those words. The amount of energy that we are no expending, trying to decide if we should say them or not, think about what that says about how powerful those words are.

Brian Balogh: Some of those words have deep historical meanings, and some of them are … What should we say? Kind of disembodied or disconnected from particular historical moments.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah, I mean, there’s going to be certain histories and images and parts of the past that get conjured by certain curse words. And so, certain words are innocuous. I mean, you think about a word like piss or shit that doesn’t really carry the same kind of gravity as the dreaded “N word,” right? Or any number of words associated with gay people or women. There’s a violence that’s behind the language, and there’s a violence that often accompanied the use of particular kinds of terms, that I think at a visceral level, we’re all aware of.

Nathan Connolly: And so, rather than take that lightly, I think we enter the conversation about cursing with a certain amount of caution. Yeah, I think that that’s important. I gotta share with you guys something around this, as well. I had a chance to teach an FBI file of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

Brian Balogh: Wow.

Nathan Connolly: And reading the FBI file is a remarkable window into the politics of cursing, it turns out. So, this is from the 1921 episode, the riot in Tulsa. And the agent is giving what seems like a pretty clinical account, and he’s talking about the local sheriff and the local county marshal and other law enforcement, and he’s using air quotes or quotes around the word, the N word, and as they’re talking about a lynching that they’re trying to execute against an African American who was accused of assaulting a White woman. And eventually, the quotation marks just disappear and the agent himself simply uses the N word as a pronoun for the African Americans he’s describing in Tulsa.

Nathan Connolly: There’s a second aspect to this, which is in order to justify the actions that are taken by the White mob, the field agent describes how many African Americans in response to the threatened lynching were basically muttering and cursing. And that’s a quote, “Then armed Negroes standing off to one side, muttering and cursing.” And this was in the presence of White women. And it was a way of capturing this as a particularly un-respectable group of Black people, who might have in fact been deserving of what happened in the subsequent aftermath of the riot.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, I have to ask, when do the air quotes disappear?

Nathan Connolly: Well, if you can imagine a 14 page document, it’s about on page two.

Brian Balogh: But what is your hypothesis as to why he just drops the pretense?

Nathan Connolly: I actually think it’s because the government and the agents of the government in 1921, law enforcement, by and large are adopting racist ideas. And they can pretend to have a certain objective distance, but this is a word that they’re quite comfortable using.

Joanne Freeman: Right.

Brian Balogh: It wears off by page two.

Nathan Connolly: Exactly.

Joanne Freeman: Right.

Nathan Connolly: Exactly. And it becomes a simple synonym for people of color, Black people. But this is one of those things that, again, I think it speaks to our own struggles with this, is that sometimes when you get a little bit familiar, when you get deeper into the conversation, you let certain kinds of decorum slip, right? And I wonder if there’s a certain feeling that we have about being on the airwaves, right? About being recorded. It might be different if we were in informal conversation and letting the words kind of fly, fast and loose.

Joanne Freeman: You would think that being on the airwaves, whether that means radio to TV, would mean that you would be hyper conscious. However, I can say that I have the honor for having been bleeped for profanity on PBS.

Nathan Connolly: Joanne.

Joanne Freeman: I know, it’s shocking. It’s shocking. Well, and after I did it, I worried about it for like three months until the show aired because I thought, “Oh, my gosh. What does it mean? Are people going to look down on me for having said the word?” It was a documentary about Alexander Hamilton, and I was asked what people of the time thought about him. And it’s not even that horrible a word. And I said, “Oh, people at the time considered him an arrogant, irritating asshole.” And when I watched the documentary, asshole was bleeped.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Joanne Freeman: And it was fascinating to me that I uttered it. I was trying to capture the strong emotion of people at the time. Then suddenly it caught me up in it and I began to be really worried about what people would think that I used it. And then I became sort of bizarrely proud of myself for having gotten the bucket list accomplishment of being bleeped on PBS. But it was a lot more gauged with saying that word than I would have assumed there would be.

Nathan Connolly: So, is there something about cursing that we can put into perspective? In other words, to say that there are certain words that in some ways, in the case of someone like Hamilton, for the sake of history, we just have to say and be willing to say? That’s something unique about Hamilton’s character that’s captured by the term asshole. And it’s at historians’ discretion basically to say, “Well, I’m being the most accurate when I roll out these particular kinds of words.”

Joanne Freeman: Well, I mean, here’s the thing that strikes me about all of these kinds of words. I kind of hinted at it earlier. I said how powerful they are and how striking that is, but part of the reason they’re powerful is what you suggested before, Nathan, has to do with the historical baggage. Part of it has to do that these are words that inherently have so much emotion attached to them. And whether that’s anger or hatred or passion or fear, they kind of zoom in on something that’s really powerful and direct, which I did without even meaning to and I was trying to capture people’s feelings about Hamilton during that early time period. But that’s part of what gives them their power, is that in and of themselves as words, they’re such powerful emotional statements.

Nathan Connolly: So, I think we’re in a moment now where we’re coming to a crossroads as a society, about what words we’ll consider to be profane. Because infamously I suppose now, the president was heard in what was presumed to be a private conversation, in a very public setting, but not recorded, calling people or calling countries from the Southern part of the world, shit hole countries. And news organizations had to figure out if they were going to bleep or to say the word and what the politics around that were. As a candidate, Trump used foul language and was caught on tape using that, and again news organizations were forced to think about that. And now again with a more recent speech at the Convention for Conservatives in Baltimore, Maryland, he was caught saying bullshit and the news organizations, yet again, had to figure how to carry the words of the leader of the country.

Nathan Connolly: And I guess my question is, in light of all these now serial crises of censorship and language, are those terms going to be considered more acceptable? If you run that on mainstream media, does it lose the taboo of saying a word like shit or bitch or bullshit?

Joanne Freeman: It’s interesting. I totally agree with that, that we’ve become familiarized with them and the more we become familiarized, the less bad or banned they seem and the easier it is for us to say them. But at the same time that that is the case, and that might become the case with the word bullshit, the fact that the president said that word suggests something about his character. Which is why I think that it’s important for us to know that he said that word, right? So that at the same time that we’re stating here that him saying that might make it not mean something, the fact that he said it does mean something at this current moment, and that both of those things are true at the same time.

Brian Balogh: So you guys are not gonna like this question, but I’ll ask both of you.

Joanne Freeman: Uh-oh.

Brian Balogh: Doesn’t the fact that he said that make him even more authentic to at least 45% of the American public?

Joanne Freeman: Yeah.

Nathan Connolly: The data on this is clear, right? You’re more trustworthy if you’re caught cursing. And so, yeah, it means somehow that you’re telling the truth, because you’re not using elliptical language or spinning tales.

Joanne Freeman: You’re not censoring yourself.

Brian Balogh: A point to a historical moment that strengthens what you just said, and that’s Richard Nixon cursing like a sailor in the Watergate Tapes, not in public, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Brian Balogh: And so, what Donald Trump is doing in some ways is being authentic by using the same language, ostensibly, although it may be far worse in private, using some of the same language that he uses in private, in front of millions of people. And that adds to this patina for some of “authenticity”.

Joanne Freeman: Because he said it, because it number one will, as you’re suggesting, Brian, will make him seem authentic, but also, because it is still a dirty word, that part of what he accomplished by saying it, and I believe he said it more than once, is that it will stand out to people, because it’s not normally what you expect someone to say.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Joanne Freeman: And when we think about the things he was saying it about, the Mueller Investigation, that’s the word that’s gonna pop into our heads.

Brian Balogh: Yes, it’s a bullshit witch hunt.

Joanne Freeman: Right, exactly. That’s it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Provost Office at The University of Virginia, The Johns Hopkins University, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 9: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at The University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at The University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.