"Oh God!" What's the history behind interjecting deity names to express sexual pleasure? Does this phenomenon predate filmed pornography?

by JJVMT
amp1212

This is anthropology, neurology, psychology and linguistics, not history.

Strong emotional states -- anger, pleasure, frustration, pain -- evoke marked verbal eruptions. The people who study this are neuroscientists, not historians.

What people blurt out -- whether its "Oh F---" or "Oh [deity of choice]" reflects words that are learned as and neurologically segregated as "special", which is of course historically and linguistically specific.

Similarly, neurosurgical patients will occasionally have religious visions-- these are invariably _their_ religion; Muslims don't see Jesus and Buddhists don't see Abraham.

A historian or philologist might be able to tell you _which_ words are privileged in this manner at a given place and time, but the folks who have insight into just how it all works are various flavors of neuroscience.

See:

Bergen, Benjamin. "What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves". Basic Books:2016

D. Van Lancker & J.L. Cummings. "Expletives: neurolinguistic and neurobehavioral perspectives on swearing". Brain Research Reviews 31 1999 83–104

Alberto Carmona-Bayonas, Paula Jiménez-Fonseca, Carlos Vázquez Olmos & Juan Vega Villar (2017) "Hyperreligiosity in malignant brain tumors: a case report and accompanying bibliographic review", Neurocase, 23:1, 88-95, DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2016.1265985