Religion & Beliefs
Holy *&$^#&! Religious Swearing
By Tamar Fox / March 5, 2007
On Friday I got a beat down from our friendly Annie Anonymous because I dared to use the words shit and pussy. Apparently, using bad words makes it difficult to distinguish between me and “illiterates collecting cardboard from dumpsters.” 
I think Ms. (or Mr.) Anonymous needs to take a serious chill pill, but this gives me an opportunity to discuss something I’ve thought about a lot, actually. When is it okay to swear? Where can you drop the f-bomb, and when is a simple “damn” going to get you in trouble?*
First let’s take note of the word “swear” itself. There is, of course, a prohibition against swearing, that is, taking an oath, when doing so is unnecessary. The idea here is that you don’t want to take a vow in the name of God and then later forget about it or be unable to fulfill the vow, thus desecrating God’s name. Jews often get around this by saying “bli neder,” meaning, “but I’m not swearing to it,” when pledging to do something. This is also the reason we have Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur; it absolves us from any oaths we may have made and not fulfilled in relation to God. That’s all well and good, but when I say shit I’m not invoking God, I’m just expressing something. Even when I say “Holy shit!” I’m generally using the holy part to add emphasis, not because I think there’s anything particularly holy about what just happened. Maybe, like Annie (or Andrew) Anonymous, you’re thinking that someone who claims to be an observant Jew and a struggling writer should come up with a more artistic and oblique way of emphasizing my point. If that’s how you feel, then gosh darnit, you go girl! But me, I like “profanities” and I adore all kinds of colorful language. I’m not offended by the sex or poo they tend to refer to because sex and poo are a normal part of my life. Of course I wouldn’t bring “fuck” to a job interview, but Jewcy isn’t a job interview, it’s a forum for progressive Jewish thinking and debate. If you’re looking for more discussion of when and where and why it’s okay to swear, check out the insightful post on badchristian.com. If, like me, you have a genuine interest in linguistics and how languages and linguists treat swear words, check out this list of posts on Language Log. If you’ve got a beef with hearing bad words on the radio, head to this brilliant (oh, hell, it’s fucking brilliant) article by Sarah Vowell, which points out, “You can't say "tits" on the radio, but you can say "Pamela Anderson Lee," and what's the difference? A film commentator can't say "shit," so she'll replace it with "Air Force One" instead. Rush Limbaugh can't say "cunt," so he uses "Hillary Rodham Clinton" as a substitute.” It seems to me that’s the jist of the problem. We can substitute inoffensive words for the four-letter variety, but if I still mean poo when I say shit, what’s the point? * In high school I once got in trouble for saying something was “screwed up,” a term that I chose simply because it seemed less offensive to me than “fucked up.” It never really occurred to me that screwing something and fucking something are essentially the same thing. My ultra-Orthodox teacher, however, made the connection very quickly, and actually had me wash my mouth out with soap. I can’t imagine what she would have thought if she’d heard me talking dirty to my boyfriend at the time…
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This is a great post. When I was in a religious sleep-away camp I had a counselor who would exclaim "oh shrek!" whenever she was upset (this was way before the movie), which even to my ten-year-old self seemed ridiculous. If everyone knows what you mean, and it sounds very much like the word you're actually referring to, why not just say "Shit!" Or say nothing at all.
On a different note, I love your analysis of the word "swear" but I wonder about the origin of "cursing" (which is what we call it in New York), and how that came to mean using a bad word rather than actually putting the evil eye on someone.
Two observations:
1. I actually howled with laughter over Vowell's "Pamela Anderson Lee" comment. Will have to remember that.
2. You're bang-on (huh huh, I said "bang") about the problem with substituting inoffensive words for swearwords. To take a personal example, the one swearword I avoid using, especially in others' hearing, and even in writing, is the four-letter word for vagina. Perhaps that's because when I was growing up that's the one word my mother would never allow anyone to say, not even my profanity-loving father (before he mellowed with age). And, of course, most people today, regardless of age or values, still find that word offensive and inappropriate at any time. But in, for instance, writing informally online, I'll occasionally use this phrase: "the c-word." Although using that euphemism makes my "inner parent" happy, I admit that it's hypocritical, because in writing "the c-word" I'm still making the reader think of the actual word, however fleetingly. And yet, as you'll notice, I still don't type the word itself. Go figure.
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