When did we become so proper?

My friend Tony and I disagree on swearing. Granted, neither of us would use foul words in written or formal speech, but he decries such usages even in private conversation.

When I say they can have a useful role to play as intensifiers, he says they don’t intensify. Tony may have a point: such words are now so ubiquitous that they’ve lost much of their power to shock.

But not all of it. A few years ago, I had a book party for my latest contribution to the dustbin of English letters. In my opening remarks, I said: “I desperately wanted to invite my good friend Vlad Putin, so I wrote to him, asking if I could count on his presence. He replied, ‘No, you can’t’. And you know what? He doesn’t even know how to spell ‘can’t’.”

The audience gasped, and Tony wasn’t even there. However, a bad word was only alluded to, not used. Still, that was too much for an audience, some of whose members, I knew, weren’t themselves above turning the air blue at the slightest provocation, or without thereof. Nevertheless they found what I considered an innocent joke unseemly in that semi-formal setting.

Fine, I realise I’m no saint and have little chance of earning that distinction in the time I have left. Yet I recognise, and try to follow as best I can, the post-Victorian conventions of written English style.

Moreover, I welcome some of those conventions, such as eschewing rants, criticising with a rapier and not a battle axe, praising without fluff, avoiding unnecessary superlatives and so forth. And yes, no swearwords in the public domain, unless quoting someone else.

That tradition still largely holds in serious writing and public speaking – even though Kenneth Tynan first used the popular four-letter word on television 60 years ago. People who violate that tradition, such as Donald Trump the other day, are seen as barbarians and with good reason, certainly in his case.

Still, as I say, I’m no saint. I swear quite a bit in conversation, which I put down to my having been raised on the wrong side of the tracks, aka Russia.

In the generation of Russians who grew up in the ’60s, swearing was pandemic at every cultural level, from factory workers to scientists, scholars, writers and musicians. In fact, Muscovites used to quip: “Even though he swore a lot, he wasn’t a man of culture”.

For the Russian intelligentsia, swearing was an expression of protest, as I suppose it also was for their Western counterparts, who took Tynan’s provocation as a call to action.

Young Russians thereby protested against the most oppressive regime in history, whereas young Westerners protested against… well, ask them. I haven’t a clue. Let’s just say that they weren’t saints either.

But what about people who actually were saints, those who lived, say, 500 years ago?

Since I haven’t done a comprehensive study, I can’t generalise. I can, however, observe that the standards of the stylistically allowable used to be much laxer in those days.

By way of illustration, I’d like to cite St Thomas More’s rather colourful response to Martin Luther’s scurrilous attack on King Henry VIII.

A bit of context is in order. In 1521, in the early days of the Protestant heresy, Henry produced a theological treatise The Defence of the Seven Sacraments (Assertio Septem Sacramentorum). That strong and polemical restatement of Catholic doctrine was received differently by the Church and Luther.  

Pope Leo X gave Henry the title Defensor fidei (Defender of the Faith), which all English monarchs have kept since then, somewhat cheekily since they are no longer Catholic. Luther, on the other hand, delivered this diatribe:

“[King Henry] would have to be forgiven if humanly he erred. Now, since he knowingly and consciously fabricates lies against the majesty of my king in heaven, this damnable rottenness and worm, I will have the right, on behalf of my king, to bespatter his English majesty with muck and shit and to trample underfoot that crown of his which blasphemes against Christ.”

Thomas More, still some 400 years removed from his canonisation but already possessing the requisite qualities, felt called upon to defend his king, who in his turn was defending his faith. Reading it, you can see how the standards of rhetoric and polemic have changed since then:

“Come, do not rage so violently, good father; but if you have raved wildly enough, listen now, you pimp… But meanwhile, for as long as your reverend paternity will be determined to tell these shameless lies, others will be permitted, on behalf of his English majesty, to throw back into your paternity’s shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up, and to empty out all the sewers and privies onto your crown divested of the dignity of the priestly crown, against which no less than against the kingly crown you have determined to play the buffoon.

“Since he has written that he already has a prior right to bespatter and besmirch the royal crown with shit, will we not have the posterior right to proclaim the beshitted tongue of this pracitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she-mule until he shall have learned more correctly to infer posterior conclusions from prior premises?”

Quite. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Now tell us what you really think.

Remember that Thomas More was not only a scholar, jurist and statesman, but also a prolific writer. He was no bungling amateur bursting into the world of letters without first bothering to learn its rules. More wrote over 20 books, plus countless articles, pamphlets and treatises. Hence, one has to believe that his style of polemical prose was representative of his time, or at least not alien to it.

On balance, I prefer the way serious people frame their arguments these days. As Margaret Thatcher once said to a heckler, “When you shout, no one will hear you.”

But then a part of me wishes English style had retained some of its erstwhile uninhibited quality. In general, one gets the impression that the traits that are (or at least used to be) associated with Englishness, such as restraint, self-effacement, understated emotions, rationality, lightness of touch, tendency to meiosis, are relatively recent embellishments on the national character.

(An early Victorian cookery book has a quarter-teaspoon of Cayenne pepper in practically every recipe. A few decades after it was published, both English cuisine and English style lost their taste for hot spice.)

Thomas More, who was the most respected scholar in England at the time, certainly didn’t evince those qualities in his defence of the king who went on to kill him 14 years later. I’d even suggest that, had he used stronger arguments couched in less impassioned rhetoric, his defence of Catholic doctrine would have had a better effect.

However, historical hindsight is never 20/20. Mine is informed by the Christian apologetics I was weaned on: those by Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, C.S. Lewis, quite a few others. All of them were either Victorian or post-Victorian, meaning that both the English character and style had already been solidified and codified into a pattern that’s still with us today.

None of those men or their literary descendants would even consider churning out More-like prose full of scatological language and metaphors. Tony approves such probity, unreservedly. So do I, come to think of it. But not quite unreservedly.