"Shit" is one of the oldest words in English. The earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a ninth-century text called Bald's Leechbook, which is so old that it's unreadable by modern speakers: "Wiþ þon þe men mete untela melte & gecirre on yfele wætan & scittan." Of course, the meaning of the word there is literal cow shit. On the other hand, the first documented use of "shit!" an an interjection is much later (1865), but keep in mind that profanity was rarely printed - in fact, the earliest three quotations in the OED are from official Army, congressional, and legal proceedings, which were required to reproduce exactly what was said, even if it was otherwise considered "unprintable." In any case, the word would have likely been in use during the events of The Revenant.
"Fuck" is similarly venerable; its use as a verb dates back at least to the 16th century. It doesn't appear as an interjection in written sources until 1929, but again, the fact that printing swears was a taboo until the 20th century (Joyce's Ulysses, for example, was the subject of a famous obscenity case) means that the word, in its modern sense, was probably already in use for some time before anyone wrote it down.
Commenters:
I can't believe this needs to be said — Using this thread as an excuse to insult people, or just to swear pointlessly, isn't going to be tolerated. If the only thing you have to say is "fuck your mom" or "god damnit" in response to the question, then you're gonna be seeing a ban notice in your inbox. If you can't deal with the question maturely, maybe this is the wrong sub for you.
What's more, civility is literally Rule #1 here. Personal insults, even if they're just a poor attempt at humour, are not going to be tolerated.
Shitposting on this thread is officially instaban material.
I have a long thing about the ancient origins of English swear words here, where I methodically try to go through and answer exactly "when these words entered our lexicon". Many of which have origins as old as English and the others were once not vulgar words that gained increasingly vulgar meanings--if I say to you the words "balls", "cock", "jugs" you might think of merely the obscene meanings rather than round objects, rooster, pitchers. Likewise, words like "crap" and "bitch" had non-obscene origins that became obscene over time (because people in those times, gasp, used them obscenely with such regularity that their obscene meanings over powered their conventional meanings). It's somewhat difficult to know exactly which people swore, and how much, and in front of whom historically because those are exactly the kind of things that are not likely to be written down in noble prose--unfortunately, we don't have a 19th century "urban dictionary" nor 19th century internet forums to gage how often and in which contexts people habitually swore. In novels and the like, there's a tremendous amount of censorship--self-censorship, of course, but also more formalized censorship. This most famous form of 19th century censorship was "bowdlerization", where even Shakespeare was censored to remove the naughty bits. "Banned in Boston" was the watchword.
As for fiction, the four Italian anarchist writers behind the novel Q, an adventure mystery set during the Protestant Reformation, I think put it best in a little essay they wrote in response to complaints about the "anachronistic" language they used in the novel:
In the past ten months, since our first novel was published in English, some reviewers have complained about the allegedly "anachronistic" language we used in the book. As a matter of fact, any novel that's written nowadays but is set in a fairly remote past is to be penned in a more or less "anachronistic" language, at least if the author wants people to read it [...]
However, those reviewers are not talking about that. They're talking about profanity. They're talking about foul language. Although they use the term "anachronisms", obscene utterances is what they really mean. There were complaints about "the wealth of f**k's and 's**t's" in the novel. [...]
Human beings always cursed and swore, they did it in all ages, always by referring to catabolism, rough sex and the genitals. In Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian etc.) we still use the Latin words, e.g. "merda" [shit] and "culum" [ass]. As far as the history of the Italian language goes, one of the earliest written sentences in Vulgar (ancient Italian) is "Fili de le pute traite" [Pull, you sons of whores!], which appears on a Twelfth Century fresco in a Roman church.
The essay has a small image of the fresco (it's in the Basilica of San Clemente), but here's a bigger one--the man on the far right is the one doing the cussing in "Vulgar". For reference, the modern forms of those words in those languages are merda, merde, mierda, merda, [rahat] and culo, cul, culo, cu, cur, respectively.
For more on the actual origins of the English swearwords (plus a few select favorites from other languages), again, check out my little piece linked at the top. It's one of my favorite things I've ever put on Reddit. But, all that said, while it's very clear that people swore in the 19th century, it's very difficult to say how much because it simply wasn't written down. We can guess that probably men swore more than women, probably lower class men more than refined men, probably men among men more than in mixed company, etc. but with the evidence we have, it's very difficult to say who exactly swore and exactly how much and in which circumstances. But we can say they definitely swore, and some of them certainly swore like sailors, and you can tell your mother we have been saying "shit" and "fuck" since before the Angles and the Saxons invaded England and became the Anglo-Saxons--just compare shit to Scheisse and fuck to ficken and you'll see how truly ancient these words are.
I can't believe that no one's yet mentioned the rather wonderful earliest direct evidence for "fuck" in English: a fifteenth-century half-English half-Latin poem known as Flen flyys.
You can read the whole poem here. The crucial line reads:
Non svnt in cœli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk
"gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk" is a simple substitution cipher. When we replace every letter by the previous letter in the alphabet (as it was then), we get:
Non svnt in cœli, quia fvccant vvivys of heli
This translates to:
They [the Carmelite friars of Cambridge] are not in heaven, because they "fuck" wives (or women) of Ely [a nearby city]
The word translated "fuck" here, though presented as if it were a form of a Latin verb fvccare, is not otherwise known in Latin: it's actually a transparent Latinization of the regular English verb "fuck". You can see the same technique in the immediately following line of the poem:
Omnes drencherunt quia sterisman non habuerunt
All [the friars] "drenched" (drowned) because they did not have a "sterisman" (steersman)
The poem used the cipher because of the vulgar nature of the accusation, and perhaps also because of fear of the political power of the friars who were the target of the poem.
Adding on to this question, the characters in the movie say "God damnit". Would this be acceptable for pelt traders near current day North Dakota/Montana, or would their piety discourage such vulgarity? I'd understand if the French would lack the piety to speak it- given their tolerance of Natives and their culture under business, but would Americans/Englishmen?
If it's not too late to add another question...
I was caught off guard by the phrase "Top Knot," which was a phrase used in The Revenant when describing scalping. Wouldn't this be an anachronism in that setting?
To those of you who think it's funny to use this thread as an opportunity to swear at OP's mum, you should know that you're not the first to try and make that exceptionally un-funny 'joke,' given that we've had to remove 10+ comments of this type already. It's immature, useless, and most importantly breaches our key rule: civility.
Anyone who posts a variation of this joke or similarly useless or obnoxious comments following this time-stamp will be met with extreme prejudice, in equal parts for their immature behaviour and their remarkable lack of creativity. And no, that's absolutely not an invite to get creative.
See /u/keyilan's warning here, which I'd sticky instead of making this post, if I could.
^^^^Grumbles ^^^^about ^^^^mod-tools.
