Jackson: Get this: scientists found that you can hold your hand in ice-cold water significantly longer if you're yelling 'shit!' instead of a neutral word like 'table.' Swearing literally makes you stronger. What is going on there? Olivia: It’s absolutely true! It’s called the hypoalgesic effect. It proves that swearing isn't just about poor vocabulary; it's a deeply wired, powerful human tool. This is the central question in Melissa Mohr's fantastic book, Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. Jackson: I love that title. It’s direct. Olivia: It is! And Mohr is the perfect guide for this journey. She has a Ph.D. from Stanford in Medieval and Renaissance literature. She's not just looking at this as a linguist, but as a cultural historian who understands the deep-seated beliefs that give these words their shocking power. Jackson: So it's not just about being vulgar, it's biological and historical. Olivia: Exactly. It’s about tapping into the most ancient, emotional parts of our brain.

Jackson: That makes me wonder, what does that mean, the ‘emotional parts of our brain’? Are you saying swear words live somewhere special? Olivia: They do. Most of our language is housed in the cerebral cortex, the logical, reasoning part of the brain. But swear words? They live down in the limbic system, the primal, emotional core that we share with other mammals. It’s the part that controls fight-or-flight, rage, and excitement. Jackson: Wow. So when you stub your toe and yell a curse word, you’re not really ‘thinking’ of that word, it’s just erupting from this primal place? Olivia: Precisely. And Mohr gives these incredible, poignant examples of this. She tells the story of her own grandmother, who had advanced Alzheimer's and had lost almost all language. She couldn't recognize family, couldn't speak. But one day, while being pushed in her wheelchair, a wheel bumped over a crack in the sidewalk, and her grandmother, clear as a bell, just said: "Shit!" Jackson: Whoa. That’s the only word she had left? Olivia: It was the only one that could break through. It suggests that swearing is so fundamental, it can survive when everything else is gone. There's another famous case with the French poet Charles Baudelaire in the 1860s. After a stroke, he was left with aphasia, unable to say anything except for one single phrase. Jackson: What was it? Olivia: "Cré nom!" It’s short for "Sacré nom de Dieu," or "Holy name of God." He repeated it so often that the nuns caring for him, who found it deeply blasphemous, believed he was possessed by Satan and kicked him out of their hospital. Jackson: That’s heartbreaking! But it’s fascinating that one person’s last word is "Shit" and another's is "Holy name of God." Olivia: And you’ve just landed on Mohr’s central thesis. She argues that for almost all of Western history, swear words have fallen into two main categories. The first is what she calls "the Shit"—words related to the body, to sex, to excretion. The second is "the Holy"—words that invoke sacred names and concepts, like God, Jesus, or the saints. Swearing is about breaking a taboo, and those have always been our two biggest taboos: our bodies and our gods. Jackson: Okay, I can see that. One is profane in a physical sense, the other in a spiritual sense. Olivia: Exactly. And the history of swearing is the story of the balance of power between these two categories. Which one is considered more offensive, more powerful, tells you everything about what a culture truly fears and reveres.

Jackson: Alright, so we have these two categories. Let's talk about 'The Shit.' Where does Mohr start? I'm guessing it's not as simple as people in the past just being crude. Olivia: Not at all. She takes us to ancient Rome, and it completely shatters our modern ideas of obscenity. For the Romans, the most powerful swear words weren't really about sex being dirty or immoral. They were about power. Jackson: What do you mean by that? Olivia: In Rome, the ultimate social and sexual dividing line wasn't heterosexual versus homosexual. It was active versus passive. A powerful Roman man, a 'vir,' was expected to be the active, penetrating partner. Who he penetrated—a woman, a male slave, a boy—was far less important than the fact that he was the one in control. Jackson: Hold on. So in Rome, a powerful man sleeping with another man wasn't a big deal, but being the passive one was social suicide? That's a completely different way of seeing the world. Olivia: A completely different sexual operating system. And their swear words reflected this. The Latin word 'futuo,' the root of our f-word, was a verb only a man could do. It meant 'to penetrate.' Women couldn't 'futuo.' And it was often used as a weapon. Mohr gives this amazing example from 41 BC, during a civil war. The future emperor Augustus was fighting against Fulvia, the wife of his rival Mark Antony. Jackson: A woman leading an army against Augustus? That’s already amazing. Olivia: And she was a force. According to the propaganda, Fulvia demanded that Augustus sleep with her as a political power play. Augustus refused and wrote a nasty little epigram that circulated widely, basically saying she was desperate for his 'mentula'—his penis—and that he would rather go to war than have sex with her. He ends it with a line that translates to "Let the trumpet sound!" Jackson: So he's literally saying, "I'd rather fight a war than sleep with you," and using obscene language to publicly humiliate her. It’s like a political diss track. Olivia: Exactly. It was political propaganda. But the most feared sexual insult was even more specific. It was the threat of 'irrumo,' which means to force someone to perform oral sex. It was the ultimate act of domination and humiliation. The poet Catullus famously threatened two critics who questioned his masculinity by writing, "I will sodomize you and I will 'irrumo' you." He was reasserting his dominance, his 'vir' status, through a threat of sexual violence. Jackson: That’s intense. It’s so far from our modern use of the f-word, which can mean anything from an insult to an intensifier, like Bono saying something was "fucking brilliant." For the Romans, it was a literal threat of power. Olivia: It was a weapon. It was all about who was on top. And for the next thousand years, this entire way of thinking about swearing would get buried under a completely different, and in some ways, much more terrifying, taboo.

Olivia: Because after Rome fell and Christianity rose, that whole category of 'Shit' words took a backseat. For centuries, the most powerful, dangerous, and offensive words you could utter were the 'Holy' ones. Jackson: You mean blasphemy. Like what Baudelaire was saying. Olivia: Yes, but it was more than just disrespect. In the Middle Ages, people believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist—that the communion wafer was literally God's physical body. And they extended this belief to language. When someone swore an oath "by God's bones" or "by Christ's nails," theologians and preachers argued they were literally, physically, tearing Christ's body apart. Jackson: Wait, not metaphorically? They thought the words themselves caused physical harm to God in heaven? Olivia: They did. There are medieval sermons that describe swearers as worse than the soldiers who crucified Jesus, because they only tortured him once. A swearer, with his oaths, dismembers Christ again and again, every single day. There are poems where a bloody, mangled Christ appears to a man and pleads, "See me, be kind, tear me no more." Jackson: That is a wild concept. The idea that language has a direct, physical impact on the divine. It completely explains why blasphemy was a capital crime. Saying 'fuck' was nothing compared to that. Olivia: Nothing at all. Words for bodily functions were considered low-class or rude, but they didn't carry that soul-threatening, cosmic power. But then, starting in the Renaissance, a great shift happened. Oaths started to lose their power, and obscenities started to gain it. Jackson: What caused that flip? Olivia: A few big things. First, the Protestant Reformation. Protestants rejected the idea that the communion wafer was the physical body of Christ; for them, it was a spiritual connection. Suddenly, God didn't have physical bones or nails for your oaths to tear apart. The power of those words began to drain away. Jackson: So the theology changed, and the swear words lost their magic. Olivia: Exactly. And at the same time, something else was happening on the 'Shit' side of the equation. As Mohr explains, society was 'inventing' privacy. Houses started having separate bedrooms and dining rooms. Bodily functions that were once semi-public, like bathing or going to the toilet, were moved behind closed doors. And as these things became more private and hidden, the words for them became more shameful and taboo. Jackson: That makes so much sense. The less you see something, the more shocking the word for it becomes. So religious oaths got weaker while bodily obscenities got stronger, until we end up in the modern world where the f-word is the king of all swear words. Olivia: That's the great swear word shift in a nutshell.

Jackson: This 'Holy' versus 'Shit' framework is a brilliant way to understand history. But it makes me wonder, does Mohr address how modern slurs, especially racial ones, fit in? They don't seem to be about God or bodily functions, but they're arguably the most powerful and taboo words today. Olivia: That's a fantastic and crucial question. And it’s a point some critics have raised about the book—that its primary focus is on this historical Holy/Shit dichotomy in English, and it spends less time on the evolution of slurs based on race, gender, or sexuality, which are arguably our most potent modern taboos. Jackson: Right, because the power in those words comes from a history of oppression and dehumanization. Olivia: Exactly. And I think that's the book's ultimate, profound insight, even if it doesn't spell this part out as much. Mohr shows us that swear words are a cultural fingerprint. They are a perfect diagnostic tool that reveals what a society holds most sacred and most private. In the Middle Ages, the most sacred thing was God's physical body. In Rome, it was the concept of male dominance. Jackson: And today? Olivia: Perhaps today our most deeply held value, our most sacred concept, is the inherent dignity and humanity of the individual. And so the words that do the most damage, the words that are the most taboo, are the ones that try to strip that dignity away. The power of swearing just shifted to a new source of sacredness. Jackson: Wow. That really reframes the whole thing. It makes you think... what will be the swear words of the future? What are our deepest taboos now that we might not even see? Olivia: A great question. And we'd love to hear what our listeners think. Find us on our socials and let us know what you believe is the most powerful word in English today and why. The answers might be surprising. Jackson: It’s a conversation worth having. This was fascinating, Olivia. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.