Sad Decline of Swearing Lamented
Swearing was becoming less frequent, according to a September 1924 New York Times Magazine article by H.I. Brock. He pinned the likely culprits on new technologies like the telephone and radio, mechanization, and... the end of slavery six decades prior?
Block wrote:
If, as an art, swearing has declined, like other forms of eloquence and conversation, it is very likely mostly owing to modern improvements. Oaths are wasted on the telephone and are officially discouraged on the wire and over the radio.
That rings 50% true to me. Radio was a public medium, where profanity was strongly discouraged for decades after its inception. But the telephone was a one-to-one form of communication, so why should that have made a difference?
The rest of Brock's thesis seems even more dubious:
American proficiency in profanity has been charged (or credited) in large part to the negro and the mule, joint machinery of agriculture, commerce, and the building trades throughout the South and the Southwest. Perhaps the emancipation of the colored collaborator marked the first stage of the decline of cussing. The substitution of the Ford for the mule undoubtedly contributed to finish the job.
But who among us hasn't cursed when their car failed to start or when they got a flat tire? Besides, at the time the article was written, the abolition of slavery had occurred nearly 60 years earlier, so that seems an unlikely cause for a 1920s-era development.
It seems impossible to imagine a similar article about the supposed "decline of cursing" being written today. Not in an era where Netflix releases the documentary series History of Swear Words narrated by Nicolas Cage, both major-party presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have sworn publicly in speeches and interviews, and Cee-Lo Green had a Billboard #2 chart hit with a song titledĀ F*ck You.
Sad Decline of Swearing Lamented: From the Surprising Expressions of General Dawes to the Great and Tremendous Oath of William the Conqueror
Published: Sunday, September 14, 1924