Holy Sh*t is a book that tackles a huge subject (profanity) by picking one premise and sticking to it. Author Melissa Mohr believes that you can learn a lot about times in history based on whether their profanity leans more towards the “holy” (i.e., taking the Lord’s name in vain) or the “shit” (i.e., bodily functions and sex). It’s a really fascinating way to look at history, although sadly it doesn’t spend much time on our current time period. Obviously, this review will include a lot of swear words. You’ve been warned.

The book kicks off with a discussion about the Romans and their complicated sex lives. The Romans leaned way towards the “shit” end of the spectrum and they had a lot of “bad” words about sex. The Romans didn’t sort people into “gay” or “straight” categories – they assumed that men would have sex with other men. But they were really concerned with who penetrated whom. A manly man of manliness would always be the penetrator – which is why when the poet Catullus was accused of being effeminate because he hung out with women all the time, his rebuttal wasn’t something along the lines of “I hang out with women and have sex with them, so there,” it was a threat to sexually penetrate his male detractors. Basically the rebuttal to “You are not masculine enough” was (in more cases than that of Catullus) “Hey, I penetrate other dudes ALL THE TIME!”

Then we segue to The Middle Ages in Europe (after an extremely edifying chapter about the Bible that completely defies my powers of summarization). In the Middle Ages, people didn’t have a lot of shame about bodily functions because they had very little privacy. You weren’t even supposed to want to be private because privacy meant the devil might sneak up on you. People defecated and farted and urinated and sexed in front of other people all the time with various levels of discretion. So this culture didn’t have many taboo words about bodily function or sex. If you called someone a whoremonger, you were insulting him or her (it could be used for either gender) but the insult came from the implication of lack of chastity, not an inherent dirtiness in the word itself.

On the other hand, misusing the name of God or Jesus was a huge taboo (not that this prevented Chaucer from having his characters says things like “By God’s Precious Heart!” with every other sentence, much like the way that the TV show Deadwood managed an average 1.73 uses of the word “fuck” per minute in its final season). In the Middle Ages, society could not function unless people took oath taking seriously. Trials could be determined by oath taking, kings depended on the truth of their subjects’ oaths – the concept that “a man’s word was his bond” wasn’t just nice, it was vital. In religious terms, many a sermon promised that swearing on part’s of Jesus’s body actually, literally, physically hurt that part of Jesus’ body.

The book follows the cycles of cursing through the Renaissance, when people discovered privacy and suddenly became more interested in the “Shit,” and the Victorian Age, which Mohr calls “The Age of Euphemism” (Victorian, that is). Her last chapter, “Fuck ‘Em All,” is about swearing in the Twentieth Century. In these later chapters, she talks just a little bit about the difference between swearing in England and in the United States, and a lot about differences in terms of class. She deals with the ‘n’ word, but barely touches on some of the more taboo words today except to point out that even the ‘F’ word has lost a lot of its taboo quality. The taboo words of the future might be words that “essentialize anyone or anything as epithets do, whether that word sums up a person by race, mental acuity, physical disability, or size.”

By the way, those of us who got through high school convinced that ‘fuck’ was an acronym for “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” will be saddened to discover that the word in its current spelling dates from at least 1528, when “an anonymous monk was reading through the monastery copy of De Officiis [by Cicero] when he felt to compelled to express his anger at the abbot.” He did so by scrawling, “O d fuckin Abbot” in the margins.

I have one complaint ( a purely selfish one) about this book, and that is that there’s no discussion of the word ‘bitch’, a word that I, for obvious reason, have great interest in. As someone who started writing for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books late in the game, I have a love/hate relationship with the word. On one hand, I despise the word because it’s used to keep women in their place. On the other hand, I love the word, because it’s a word that women have been reclaiming with great ferocity over the past few years. In general, Holy Sh*t stays away from talking about how “bad words” are connected to sexism.

So for that, I turn to, of all places, Anger Management for Dummies, by W. Doyle Gentry.  As you might expect from the title, Gentry’s book is mostly about calming the heck down, but he has no patience for those who use the word “bitch” to keep women quiet, and advises women:

If being a bitch means you admit it when you’re irritated or even angry, if it means setting limits on the bad behavior of others, if it means saying, “Well, excuse you!” when it’s deserved, then my advice is to be a bitch.  Be a proud bitch, be an articulate (no profanity, please) bitch, be a passionate bitch, be a self-assured bitch, be a charismatic bitch, and be a hold-your-head-up-high-and-look-your-adversary-in-the-eye bitch.  And then let that be the other person’s problem.

Holy Sh*t does a limited thing, but it does it very well. Its treatment of swearing as linked to social inequalities is minimal. It spends a lot of time on a very few words to the exclusion of others. It is focused entirely on English, as spoken in England and America (with the exception of early chapters on Latin). But it does wonderfully well with tracking the cultural changes in England and America through the “holy” versus the “shit”. Looking at culture through the lens of profanity, and comparing times when the worst thing you can do is comment on something religious versus when the most taboo words are about the body, yields fascinating results. It’s an unusual way to look at history with a great payoff.