Insults and swear words

If we were not on completely solid ground for the first two pairs of words discussed in the previous essay, we are with damnation and darnation. As with Son of a Bitch, so with damnation--it begins with the Bard. Well, qualify that. The word damnation to express God's act of condemning someone to eternal punishment goes back to the 14th century. Wycliffe's translation of Luke 23:40 is an early usage: "Nethir thou dredist God, that thou are in the same dampnacioun?" Don't you just love creative spelling? But here is what Shakespeare creatively did with the term in Othello (II.iii): "Death, and damnation, Oh!" As the OED says, this is an "exclamation of emphatic objurgation." And so damnation, as an imprecation, entered into our collective bloodstream. It wasn't until 1798 that darnation was first used. "It seems as if the Irish are incorrigible as the darnation Bostonians." We can think of a number of other possible substitutes for the word darnation here, can't we? Inasmuch as the OED states explicitly that darnation is a "perversion" of damnation (why not see it as a mollification?), the case seems cinched.

In fact, we have not simply two words here (damnation, darnation) but a third--tarnation. Tarnation emerges almost at the same time as darnation. From 1790: "Tarnation! That's no laughing matter though." Tarnation, however, has another interesting feature to it. It is derived from "tarnal," which itself is derived from "eternal." When you take away an initial vowel in pronunciation or writing, it is called aphesis. Thus, tarnal is an "aphetic dial. pronunciation of eternal," as the OED says, that is "vulgarly used as an expression of execration." Tarnal and tarnation both appear for the first time in the same work in 1790. The guy really hit the jackpot, didn't he? An interesting quotation showing the "Americanization" of tarnation comes from 1801: "The Americans say, 'Tarnation seize me, or swam me, if I don't do this or that.." Hence, tarnation and darnation have been used to soften the harsher damnation of an earlier time.

Dim Wit and Dim Bulb

Dim wit (or dim-wit) to mean "a stupid or slow-witted person, first appeared in 1922: "She's the worst dim-wit on campus." When the New Yorker quickly picked up the term (1925) by talking about the "archduke" who was a "sort of royal dim wit," we were off to the races. Dim-wit would become a favorite cultural staple for years to come. There is no OED entry for "dim bulb," but the Collegiate has one: "DIMWIT" and the date, 1927. A search of various historical indices didn't reveal much usage of this term in the 1930s, and an story from 1940 shows that the word "dim bulb" could also be used in its literal way--to suggest a lightbulb that wasn't working well. From the Sept. 29, 1940 NY Times we have a story of London in WWII: "Londoners Huddle in Storage Depots; Poor of East End Take Shelter from Bombs in Dingy, Clammy 'Nightmare Arches.' Sanitatin is Primitive. Thousands Spend Night after Night in Havens Lighted only by Dim Bulbs." A quick search of the Internet today reveals that the use of "dim bulb" is divided between web sites of companies which want to raise your lighting quality and those which talk about "slow" people. It is surprising how many of the latter talk about our current President. In any case, the use of "dim bulb" to capture the same concept as "dim wit" is an amelioration or softening, as well as picture-producing, transformation of that concept.

Douche-bag and Dirt-bag

Douche-bag, as a term of derogation, emerged in 1963, while dirt-bag, meaning pretty much the same thing, first arose in 1967 (though dirt-bags, which actually held dirt, are attested in the 19th century). The only difference between the two was that "douche bag" as an insult was first used to describe an unattractive female, while a "dirt bag" as insult only meant an "unkempt person." From 1977: "I looked like such a dirt bag, while every else was all dressed up." I tell the following story about douche-bag:

"The word douche, with this spelling, goes back to the 18th century, but "douche-bag" doesn't occur until the 20th and, at first, in a medical context. For example, in a gynecological handbook for nurses, from 1908, we have the advice to "hang the douche-bag eighteen inches above the level of the patient's hips." By 1967, according to the OED, the term came into its more prominent contemporary usage: "Douche bag, an unattractive co-ed. By extension, any individual whom the speaker desires to deprecate." By the time I made it to the university in 1970, the language of "douche bag" was in the air, but it was almost universally applied to males. Once again, the males take over what properly belongs to women. Isn't that the complaint of the feminists? Well, at least we humanists finally took over a scientific term and used it for our own noble purposes."

I don't know if dirt-bag is less insulting than douche-bag, but I think it is. Anything that removes our attention from the excretory functions is, I think, an improvement in language.

Concluding--on God

God enters into our conversation a lot, and He/She/It is not simply on the lips of theologians. In that connection, we have the imprecations God damn! and Damn it!, which both arose in the 16th or 17th centuries. However these were modified, and mollified by darn (1840s), doggone (1850s) and dang (early 20th century). From 1849: "But, by darn, the captain's cleared out without speaking to one." Or, from 1850: "You may put down all our family..I don't give a darn." An illustration of doggone from the 1850s is: "Dog-gone it, man! make haste then!" (1851). Some have tried to argue that "doggone" is really derived from "Dog on it," meaning something like a "pox on it!" Most wordsmiths, however, seem to accept it as a weakening of "damn." And then dang is attested first in 1906: "He wouldn't give a dang for them."

Dammit is first attested only in 1908. Interesting, however, are the first few attested uses of dammit. From 1908: "Outside as quick as dammit!" he cried. And, from Wodehouse in 1921 we have, "When I'm alone with Barker..for instance..I'm as chatty as dammit." It wasn't until the 1950s that the famous scientist Arthur Compton used "dammit" in our current form: "Dammit, give it stuff to spare." So we have evolution within evolution.

I hope these essays help to make the case that language isn't simply going in a one-way direction, to simplification and decline. We often try to "correct ourselves" when the first appearance of a word appears to harsh. Comments?

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