âBy the first world war, soldiers swore so much that the word âfuckingâ came to function as no more than âa warning that a noun is comingâ. â
Guardian review of Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa MohrÂ
i would like to take this opportunity to present my headcanon about that infamous âlanguage!â line: steve and the howlies had such dirty mouths that they had to be constantly reminded to clean it up for the reporters that followed them around. so steve heard a swear word over the radio and had a kneejerk stop that weâre being filmed for the folks back home reaction.
in other words, he said âlanguageâ not because he never swears, but because if heâs not on guard he swears way too much. :D
âthe word âfuckingâ came to function as no more than âa warning that a noun is comingâ
And the interesting thing about actually dealing with people who do swear to that degree, which I have, is that eventually your brain completely tunes the word fucking out.
You basically donât hear it. It becomes unimportant noise.
I was actually just talking to someone last night about how when I was a kid (the 80s), no one said âfuckâ or âshit,â ever, but people casually tossed slurs around like nobodyâs business. Now people use âfuckâ and âshitâ like punctuation, but slurs are increasingly tabooâand thatâs exactly how it should fucking be.
You can tell we were kids in the 80s in different placesâŠ
OH MY GOD I FOUND THE POST AGAIN!!
When I first saw this post go around, I was traveling, but I had something I wanted to say and I could never find it again.
Okay, so, this post isnât wrong, but what the original gifset doesnât take into account (though some of the commentary touches on it) is how incredibly situational swearing was in the 1940s.
So, yes, men swore a lot â around other guys, in certain contexts. But they were very heavily conditioned not to swear around women and kids.
I think this might be one of the big reasons why a lot of people my age and younger got the idea that people didnât swear during the 1940s. Most of us fell into the âkidâ or âfemaleâ categories, or both, and guys our grandparentsâ age would never, ever say âfuckâ around us. And those words werenât usually used in media of the era for similar reasons, so we got the idea that people that age were very prim and polite, when itâs more that they were prim and polite around us.
I remember as a young woman walking in on groups of old blue-collar guys talking among themselves, with profanity flying freely, and then noticing me in the room and immediately clamming up and apologizing to me for swearing around me.
Thereâs a bit in the Douglas Bader biography I was reading a month or so ago that demonstrates this in a WWII context. According to the book, the squadron pilots swore freely in their radio chatter to each other in the field, to the amusement of the WAAFs (female service personnel) who were listening to the radio in an ops room as they moved counters around on maps (much like we see Peggy doing in TFA) and the embarrassment of their commander:
After awhile, to the regret of the Beauty Chorus [the WAAFs], Woodhall disconnected the loud-speaker in the Ops Room, feeling that some of the battle comments were too ripe even for the most sophisticated WAAFs. (âThey laugh, you know,â he said, âbut dammit I get so embarrassed.â)
⊠so, right, even in the middle of a war, pilots saying âfuckâ over the radio was something the female staff had to be insulated from.
Say what you will about the baby boomers, but they largely demolished that wall between âswearing around menâ and âswearing around womenâ. Most guys my dadâs age donât do it anymore, at least not to that much of an extreme. By the time you get to my generation (Iâm 40), people might swear or they might not, and they usually donât swear around young kids, but swearing around men but not around women is just not a thing anyone does anymore. At least I donât know anyone who does it specifically and consistently whoâs not elderly.
Itâs not really an individual-sexism thing, more of a socialization thing â sexist on a societal level, sure, but I donât think Steve would balk at swearing around women, kids, or in a refined or professional social setting because heâs a sexist or a prude. Itâs just something you didnât do as a polite person. Like blowing your nose on the tablecloth in a fancy restaurant. I think he could and probably would unlearn that, but itâd take time.
So, to me, about half the examples up there work just fine (ânow why the fuck would I do thatâ to Bucky â absolutely! Or âIs everything a fucking joke to you?â to Tony) and several jar horribly, because theyâre not the right context (like the âthereâs only one God ma'amâ bit â noooo, you arenât going to get âfuckâ and âma'amâ in the same sentence! not for a Steve fresh from the 1940s! â or âwe have our fucking ordersâ ⊠in a polite, professional context like that, no). Steve would never. Or, I should say, someone from Steveâs culture â who tries in general to be a polite and respectful person, as Steve does â would never. Maybe after heâs had a few years to acclimatize to the more relaxed social climate surrounding swearing in the 21st century, but I think itâd take him awhile; he would sort of instinctively jerk himself back from doing it in all but the most relaxed sort of âpalling around with your teammatesâ environment.
(Headcanon-wise, I could see Steve very quickly incorporating someone like Natasha into his mental schemata as âone of the guysâ â not consciously, but on a subconscious level: like, he doesnât hold back from swearing around her pretty quickly â but taking a LOT longer with someone like Wanda or Pepper.)
tl;dr disclaimer: not a historian, was not alive in the 1940s, so please correct me if Iâm wrong on things here.
Iâm so glad someone said this, because this is something I think a lot of the Steve meta about swearing misses. Situational profanity, exactly! He wouldnât cuss in anything heâd consider âpolite companyâ, because you didnât do that. Iâm absolutely sure heâs capable of having a very foul mouth in some circumstances (he was a soldier who grew up in working-class Brooklyn, so⊠yeah), but in the cultural context where he grew up, you sure as hell didnât say âfuckâ in front of a lady, not if you had any manners to speak of.
/speaking as someone who cusses like breathing, even.
This is the best explanation of Steveâs âlanguageâ line Iâve ever seen.
