Now That’s What I Call Salty

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.