What curse words were around in America in the late 1700s?

by BatmansMom

When colonists were rebelling against the British and America was first becoming a country, what were the "bad words" that people weren't supposed to say? Did they have words like shit and fuck? Were they used in similar context as today? Did they ever talk about censorship of profane words in newspapers and books?

Capt_Blackadder

Well with swearing most of them were the same if used in a different context. The two that have somewhat fallen out of favour in the US were Bloody and Bugger. Both of these were considered foul words and were not for the ears of polite company. Fuck was also popular if not printed. It is hard to determine exactly how popular these words were since they were mostly censored. Our only real sources are court records which do not censor for example in New York in the early 1800s there is a record of a woman charged with obscenity and she is quoted as following a group of women and calling them bloody whores who should go fuck themselves.

If you would like to read all the vulgar words used a dictionary was published in 1811 that is on Gutenberg. If you want more information on the topic then I would recommend

Holy Shit a brief history of swearing.

http://www.amazon.com/Holy-Sh-Brief-History-Swearing/dp/0199742677

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5402

Edit I misquoted the trial

edit2 Sorry about the referel link I thought I had deleted it

Little_Noodles

Up until standards regarding bodily privacy began to change (this happened gradually, starting a few decades into the 19th century), most American swear words were religious in nature.

In an era where pretty much everyone had a day-to-day familiarity with chamberpots, and most people slept in the same room as the rest of their family members (and, when it got really cold, sometimes livestock), bodily functions weren't polite topics, but they weren't taboo, either. Certainly not in the way that blasphemy was still taboo.

Which isn't to say that those words weren't in circulation. Shit and fuck both predated the 18th century, and would have been understood. They just weren't the go-to swear words, and they were generally only used to refer to the specific thing that they referred to, rather than just as a thing to yell when you're angry. To give you an idea how limited these words were in their use, 'motherfucker' didn't show up until the late 19th century.

Jesse Sheidlower's The F-Word is a good reference for this. David Milch, the show runner for 'Deadwood' also did some research into the topic, for reasons that should be obvious for anyone who watched the show, and others followed suit (here's some sources on that).

From my own experience as a researcher, this checks out. I see very few scatalogical swear words when doing research in sources before 1840 or so. But when people do swear, I see a fair share of 'go to hell' and variations on 'goddamn'.