BackStory; Oh, Bloody Hell: BackStory's History of Profanity in America

which event for backstory survive about anonymous donor that ashram down for the humanities and the joseph a robber cornell memorial foundation kennedy welcome to back story the show that explains the history behind today's headlines i'm jo ann freedman i made him calmly and i'm brian balogh if you go to the pod casts were all historians and each week along with her colleague airs with four different aspect of american history this week backstory is exploring the history of american profanity so be warned there will be profane language and as historians russell mindful of the history of violence and oppression so the bee's certain words that even we won't say hassell to its past cocksucker schmuck motherfucker prick putts ball and clapped fag pearson son of a bitch those were the words police charged comedian lenny bruce with saying during a nineteen sixty two performance josh lambert actually

gets to save us a word so much consequence today it is pretty fun to do it as dispassionately as i can as if you know i do it all the time he's a scholar of obscenity academic director of the yiddish book center and author of the book i'm clean lips obscenity jews and american culture lambert says lenny bruce developed a reputation as a so called six comic in the nineteen fifties and sixties by pushing the bounds of what could be said out loud in the public square i think we can understand that there would've been people around lenny bruce's time who would have felt genuinely you weird and gross when they heard him say a word like shit or tents or fog and they want to protect other people from feeling is grossed out or as disturbed as they felt police officers started regularly attending lenny bruce's shows and it wasn't because they were his fans cop started staking out his performances knowing what he said and then arresting him

on obscenity charges in nineteen sixty four lenny bruce to trial in new york he became a kind of cause celeb fascinatingly and ginsburg organizes the committee to sort of advocate on behalf of lenny bruce and get all sorts of different people to sign a petition in support of labor is people like james baldwin and lionel trilling and susan sontag and lots and lots of other you know major cultural figures and again this doesn't mean that they were necessarily friends of lenny bruce or even fans of the neighbors but it was people who felt like the liberalization of obscenity law was an important thing was an important change in the culture and you would say that cause back if lenny bruce were to be convicted if people like lenny bruce in the future couldn't perform a time until they wanted to decide to do something strange lenny bruce really liked to perform his material to courtrooms even though it never seemed to work out really well now a judge and i

said oh great yet you did a few jokes for me i really appreciate that so why does he try to perform his record josh lambert has one theory anyone who has like a small child understands this one thing if a kid says worries they don't use that word ever again but if you say to them all as a whole what words you should never say their first crushes can be which one and then you have to tell them all the words which they're of course can say so i think bruce understood this that in calling him out for using a word like motherfucker the court had to say the word motherfucker over and over again and included in the trial transcript and publish it so there is that irony of the only way to punish him for this stuff was to reproduce the language and thus it sort of undermines the whole idea of shutting him out and lenny bruce like perhaps no one before him managed to shock the country into facing the first amendment and the fullness of what it represented that did lenny bruce think of himself as a civil rights icon

thing with any particular choice that he made or moment that he spoke or thing he said it's pretty hard to figure out like was that deliberate act of civil disobedience or that is just fucking around so today on the show backstory explores the social and cultural history of some of the most charred bowl haircut a long complicated history of the emirates or find out what it's really meant to swear like the same thing got the sailor's assault will discuss how to swear in fact ok team which group in american society which you say where historically most associated with kasich college professor girl scouts was the girls gather

ye who listens to back story i gather a hoot where is starkly and you guys know the answer it's sailors those crusty see jobs had a reputation for having a salty as tongues in town back in two thousand sixteen ed talk to historian paul curious about this explain that sailors language consisted mostly of curses anybody could swear like seller but sailors had a very special relationship to swearing gillies says american sailors corps and some of the most offensive words and phrases in the english language in fact as the embodiment of manhood they had a sort of special license to swear and their language was unjust offensive it wasn't loaded with political meaning so what is swearing like a sailor sound like what was the absolute worst thing you can call somebody in the eighteenth century i was surprised i

was reading in the archives is going through all these old log books and journals and one day it was reading this logbook inside and the captain's swore worse than i ever heard anybody swear before i'm in the archives sing it and i see we do this and then the captain said you damn son of a bitch a command then as it is i don't know is it and so there's a part about ready to go kill somebody and take over shippy says let's go get those sons of bitches i'm going what is this new so tell me why were these the worst kinds of swearing that people couldn't imagine at the time they get kind of unpack that as they say oh what'd each were really me well let's start with the dam in the eighteenth nineteenth century dan was directly connected to a sense of christianity you're sitting damning someone to hell and that when you did that you are putting yourself on the same level

as god if you push cell phone the same of those kind you're essentially singing and this is a pretty strong thing especially the parrot i'm talking about when even hard news to proceed that were packed talk about sailors with profane and profane the sellers still often grew up but the bible and that's how they learned how to read and know we're both of us are religious teachings so that they took this stuff very seriously but the word damn would often beaten and placed in relationship to other terms and son of a bitch why son mean was that the word that you would say people i think are using the word song you were talking you were attacking the individual and to attacking the individual's mother right eye sellers were actually very sentimental and very sentimental about home and a very sentimental about their mothers in many of these young men were indeed relatively young when i went to see not as young as

we might imagine often it was fifteen sixteen that young enough right far away and their main female attachment that he would be with their mother and i thought about the mother the trends about the mother they talked about their mother so wait when you start saying new dams son of a bitch we see son of a bitch you are talking about a person's mother but also it's a loaded term the word bit as a loaded term in ways that we ordinarily don't comprehend so paul bitch they hit a keyword and all this why is that the word that is so charged by the sailors at this time well the technical definition of pitch is a female dog right on and it's charged because i think because in the history of dogs such as is there's an emergency in the nineteenth century of kind of a domesticated version of a dog and kind of a mongrel version of a dog right and the people just to k dollars when

it states the middle class want to control those dogs in the street and by using the word bitch then sailors were kind of saying look middle class without buying your bill of goods in your intent to domesticate this world but there's also another me about the reason this is so charged and this is much more important has to do with gender has to do with sexuality ideas about sexuality were changing in this time period in the seventeen the eighteenth century women's sexuality was much more openly accepted by the time you move into the nineteenth century and i think the victorian ism when his sexuality is being denied to call somebody a son of a bitch was emphasizing the sexuality of the mother but not just the sexuality of her mother but also an open sexuality almost become used your sexuality what those dogs out on the streets like those dogs out on the street so to call somebody and son of a

bitch you're saying your mother is going to do with anybody and everybody she runs across she's like a dog in heat and you haven't got a clue as to who your father is out so has pretty potent stuff they're paul at all what other words might people have tried to use their been almost a strong calling somebody a puppy jules had been fought and southerners frightening and often it was retweeted all you poppy yeah you can go out stossel we why would survive coupled to somebody a puppy years ago was a terrible things because it conjures up in the back of people's mind that you are a son of a doctor it son of a bitch and sing a certain thing here realizes conversations going to the dogs we might so did them some of the bitch have what we would recognize as

overt political meaning this time yes i'll give you very specific example the boston massacre of march fifth seventeen seventy thousand the lead up to the mit the massacre a series of confrontations between the british soldiers and the common people coming in mainly and in these fights that often turn to inadvertently you damn son of a bitch or some person could show me say that flesh somebody to knock me down and that helps create electricity that leads up to the evening of march fifth seventeen seventy when the british soldiers are stanek confronted by a crowd of a couple hundred people for an ice and stones at them and then someone shouts damn you fired their new soldiers fire and we begin to comprehend that when you understand fully what the meaning dam and freeze dance on a bridge means its larger context paul kealy a

professor of history at the university of oklahoma and author of to swear like a sailor maritime culture seventeen fifteen it all right joanna nathan we heard earlier in the show about comedian lenny bruce so how about some more comedy yes i n ok here's writer melissa moore with a joke it's about a man who is overseas and here he comes back to his family and his family asks yeah well how why was it i was your tour and he's you know he's been fighting or where to know when it's just it's it's been terrible you know honestly he's seeing all these people die etc and starvation he's seeing you know just the most horrible things that you know it's his graham asking and he does one of is when a taylor about this and he says well you know the the boys' sure we're funny

grandma baby just told a lot of crude jokes and his family says contests won tons one and he says well i can tell you when there's a boys also use a lot of that language and then they say ok well just to say you if you come to a bad word to say blank you know just just scared it's a blank in and tell us the joke is okay okay i'll do that so he starts telling his job can he says blank blank blank blank blank blank blank think blank in blank blank blank blank blank blank here is more again and washed it's a lesson for i just love the idea that there are you know worse where is the you know what are all these words that he's got in there that have more power the joint they want to take a guess is with the other words might be able to go to go to catholic schools that is good i guess as abby so

in reality this joke features a soldier coming back from world war two with a foul mouth and i'm guessing this is a pretty common thing for soldiers to bring back the colorful language heard in their barracks you got a joint a few years ago more published a book about the history of swearing in she says that during the twentieth century the two world wars punctuated by rising profanity the language of soldiers when they came back home after world war one and weller to be really brought swearing into the public discourse in a way that it hadn't been before so in the victorian period there were lots of people saying are invoking and but it really was not at all prison in public discourse it was extremely extremely taboo ends when you get people coming or when it would rain and wires and they'd use some of this language that they you know were using on the battlefield in their in their memoirs especially after world war two is well you get you know

reporters were trying to really give people a flavor of what it was like and what it was like was a lot a lot of that language to any sense of what the response on the home front was when the soldiers started coming back karen cursing like soldiers first word is a little bigger denial about wanting to accept that this is what the the language was and so the very first memoir is have all the curse words we doubt or they have kind of commentary as saying how well this language over this is the laying off they're using oh my goodness this is a says horrible how could this be but then going on in and printing sale i'm norman mailer wrote a memoir in nineteen forty eight he's got his number of thugs and they're hugely how we were treated to different people but to the bank and she and she was famous secret you know when she met him oh yeah man you

can spell fuck up up up up no look jokes memoirs were the only way soldiers expressive local car dealer is a popular song from world war two that expresses a lot of the feelings of helplessness but also regime soldiers would have you know stuck in this bureaucracy seeing all these horrible things because you know all these incredibly difficult things is called truck a mall and it goes from a terrible singer because basically up come all of them all along and the shorthand that tall you'll get no promotion this side of the ocean so cheer up my ads thought the mall as part of the course anything me speechless his dad is worried his seventh grade and images are coming out about it so i will admit that when i first heard the blanket a blank joke from earlier

thought about another twentieth century comedian who is notorious for his language george carlin it had a master hi so i asked more work are one fits into all this when he starts to take the stage in the nineteen sixties and seventies you know that was an interesting time because that this sort of counterculture of the sixties in a way these are finished off what you know that greatest generation started people coming back soldiers coming back brought this language into the public sphere and then in the sixties and seventies it really started becoming more prevalent and so george carlin for example had his seven words can't say on television which are that's ian recount should piss cocksucker motherfucker in sentences for the firm in there it seems to me is like so he got his monologue and he in nineteen seventy three a public radio station was playing a monologue in the afternoon and a

father was listening to it in the car and heard it with this son and he complained to the fcc saying oh my gosh you know i don't wanna be just listening to the radio and hear stuff like this so this became a court case that went to the supreme court you know can the fcc regulate this kind of language has its very clear an american law that the fcc can regulate obscenity but this was something different this was called indecent see and really indecency is seen a language that depicts things in an offensive way space they regulate swearing so could the fcc regulate swearing and at the supreme court in nineteen seventy eight decided that yes the sec couldn't ban these words on tv and on the radio because they're kind of broadcast in your homes and it's it's harder to avoid them which of course gave collins monologue or holden life yes yes and so people still candidates still serve a touchstone because now you can go back and think well what you know what can we still not see these words and he well now now the supreme court came

down differently and eight case are called cones the california can you tell us about that case and we had that there was another interesting one about swearing where i'm paul robert cohen win into a municipal court i believe in california and he had a jacket on and written on the back of his jacket you put forth a draft this was at the height of the vietnam war you were thinking wore this jacket in nineteen sixty eight and then the supreme court ruled in nineteen seventy one that's correct yeah the court case was decided in nineteen seventy one and he it so he went in there and and he was arrested for disturbing the peace with offensive conduct you know people thought oh my gosh he can't do this this is offensive to all of you know people fighting in vietnam and and so he was arrested but in this case also under the supreme court's they had came to a very different conclusion a decided that this was protected speech

that the first amendment of the constitution you know it says that when possible you shouldn't a bridge people's freedom of speech quartz traditionally have been quite lenient about what you should be able to say you know they try not to circumscribe what you can say and in this case they decided that well photographed it is meaningful speech he's communicating how much he hates the draft and what's important is that it wasn't a what the law calls a fighting word so fighting words are words that have by their very utterance inflict harm or they are liable to come immediately inside a breach of the peace and so justice harlan who wrote the opinion has this wonderful line where he says you know one man's world arie de is another man's lyric and he says well if you try to make public discourse so pristine that no one could be offended no one's ever going to say anything because people get offended and thats part of having a robust public sphere it seems like we see

a lot more first amendment constitutional cases around language are in the twentieth century is there the first amendment is called a first amendment because it's been there for a long time and what is changing in the twentieth century i think they are a result it of the swear words coming into the public discourse and people just hearing them in places they didn't before and you know some people being comfortable with this language in and using it and some people going oh my god you know i can hear that and so then you get the legal cases well i know why ice i'm curious to know why people more generally sweater and whether that reason it's changed over the history of the reason has been the same even though the words have changed in that's where words are the best words we have to express extreme emotion because they they basically are kind of stored and presses differently in the brain and they

aren't there more closely connected to our emotions and so i think you know we're in the middle ages he might've said you know tax problems when you're really angry you know or really happy you know you were doing it for the same reason that somebody today says you know i didn't for joy or for being our for anger all these emotions there are very well expressed by swear words yet when you characterize swearing among soldiers you talk about swine pig so common that actually if you really wanted to get someone's attention you didn't swear i think example uses saginaw get a fucking ripe old age a fucking rifle when someone said get their rifles that was serious do we risk losing swearing special place by becoming so common i mean i think we we aren't seeing the decline of the this or sexual and certainly experimental words i think she now is much less powerful than it was in the victorian era fuck is getting less powerful and then eventually once it gets these

very different uses it gets used more commonly in the night the power goes down because you just hear it so often that an and not worry about swearing in general because i think will come up with you know we're going to come up with new words the last time you drop the hammer so what'd you sir only motherfucker sorry melissa mohr is the author of the book the polish a brief history of swearing when elizabeth pryor was a first year history professor at smith college in incident occurred in a classroom that shaped the course of her career what she was teaching about the civil war a well meaning white student interrupted her lecture to recite a quote from

blazing saddles a movie that was co written by elizabeth's father famed comedian richard pryor i was making a point in the lecture about citizenship and she repeated a line from the phone that used a disparaging word for people of chinese descent and the n word and she said we don't want to see ages and the m words but we will take the irish but she said all the words and i tried i tried to stop her isaac wait wait wait wait can she said i know it's a joke from blazing saddles and then she repeated and was the end of class and i went home and came back to class the next session and i told everybody when not to use the n word in saving n word the actual n word or not to talk about it and i just felt totally empty because it basically censored the word in my class and i hadn't really taken the opportunity to really teach the students why that moment was so significant like why was important that somebody said the n word in the

class and i didn't tell him i think of him anything i just i just stopped it after the incident prior set out to develop a strategy for navigating racist language in a classroom she began by asking herself what does e n word even mean and while the research center on the simple question she ultimately found something far more complicated i love doing these like digital newspaper searches our mind and so the first thing that struck me was that every time i saw the n word in print the actual and word it was in quotation marks i thought i was gonna come across like to sway people using it in common parlance but in fact the only time they really used it up until the team twenties in the newspapers was when they were quoting fictional black people so like they'd write these fall letters to the editor like you know dear master printer you know like these kind of anti black printed diatribes where they'd imagined a black

person writing these letters to the newspaper and all of those they had figures who called themselves a poorer and we're using of course the actual word and then increasingly like the rise of the minstrel show on the age and twenties and thirties it was titled the show's it was imagined as though words of black people speaking in anti black art it was coming out of the mouse of black people that really struck me i felt like there were some kind of meaning in that and i wanted to find out more city of reading you found it being used by whites imagining how black people were speaking were speaking to each other that's right but i also started thinking about when whites recording black dialect whether or not black people actually spoke that way or not right so i started to wonder could this have been a black word and i started to look and to black sources to try to and there are no time but to try to find if there is evidence like my greatest example of this comes from

the nineteen thirties wpa ex slave interviews with formerly enslaved people and these are people who worked in a sixty years seventy years away from enslavement and they are still using the n word an incredibly nuanced ways to describe themselves and other people does not always mean the same thing sometimes that soaps obsequious in the way that you would expect perhaps it to be but other times it speaks to pride lament spirit on the best example of this comes from a gentleman in the virginia narratives and he's telling this horrible story about what he witnessed as a child the violence against another enslaved grown up and the guy was trying to protect his wife and the overseer was coming after his wife and he's to the whole time he's telling the story he's calling the guy a colored man wright is like the colored man was doing as the colored man was doing as and then finally the color man's dirt up

to the overseer and the overseer shot him dead and at this moment a storyteller says and birds don't get no breaks and it was still seem like a real pointed turn their honorary of using the word and so i kind of and i felt like i can really hear that nuance in that history throughout my reading of people speaking in singapore the case of images being a kind of appropriation from white stereotypes of black speakers but that african americans have a long oral tradition that recognizes multiple meanings and uses of a turn that might appear the same way imprint on its face exactly and i think the reason why it's important to make that distinction is because in one version basically you're saying that you know black people in the late twenties twentieth and early twenty first century are defining themselves against white racism and in another

version if you look you can say there's a long long history of kind of this linguistic this discursive some version of black people employed way back to the seventeen seventies and seventeen eighties to use this word to start identifying themselves as sort of an in group that had they imbued it with meaning so if anybody did the re appropriating i think it's the white people who saw that this was a word that had meaning and texture for black people right and that that threatened that became a big source of the threat and that's when the wartime turns into something violence against women in fact a lot of times my students will say yes i know what the n word means it comes from slavery and part of the argument that i that i make is yes this is a word that is probably a latin roots it was applied to

people who were involuntary laborers they were in service in perpetuity they were black but it was a real labor category people occupied that labor category wasn't something you'd want to be but it wasn't a swear the word really emerges as a swear as black people start to become free this is when the word is used against people who are no longer occupying that actual existing labor category and that's when the lord takes on the meaning that we start to recognize a notice today that it was an example of howl black laborers in these early uses would draw out the n word as a way to convey a shared social identity so there is some of this work that speculative but i still believe and and part of the way part of the sources i used my favorite sources come from black authors writing during that period and they're still writing and paper dialect

but one of my favorite examples comes from harriet wilson who was a free woman is less sensibly a free woman she was really an indentured servant in the north and wrote a book called our n word she wrote this book about being an indentured servant to a white family in the north but at the beginning of it on she's she's in a biracial person and her father was black and her mother was a white woman who had hit really hard times and she imagines a conversation that her father was a craftsman was having in his shop to himself when his body also black walks in on him and so she imagines her father was sitting there you know hoping a barrel and he's talking about wanting to marry max memphis was like you know my hump mumbling to himself about this and his friend pete walks in and says are who you gonna marry max math and the father says back what's up and where do you want to pony like that and he's and then the man says something back

he said next time you walk in without your permission but in n word no way so in that case you know she's imagining what people minority about one is black people the south was by people minority you know talking to each other workers to me linkedin to each other this casual way is not offensive it in one instance is playful and one answer instance it's chastising but using it among each other freely so that's where the evidence comes from and i'm guessing you also have moments where you see the spike in negative uses largely from white intellectuals are groups and how you track when you have to struggle over the meaning of this word where whites are involved right well i mean basically as soon as black people start becoming free the word changes in tone and tenor and what's interesting about it is that this becomes a really tricky

moment for black abolitionist by people who are rising out of this working class they don't wanna be associated with the word on the first run of freedoms journal which is their first african american newspaper from eighteen twenty seven to eighteen twenty nine does not use the word they complain about racism a ton right and they talk about being called terrible thing but they don't use the word to say it it does appear in colored american which is the next black newspaper which runs from like eighteen thirty seven to eighteen thirty nine or so and eight they talk about being called an accused and have blamed through this language but it really becomes like the international black abolitionist like frederick douglass who really start to give though white use crawford toss i think just like its whites in black face who are the first to use the n word against a black people its black people in a kind of a white face and i didn't come up with this term

but a kind of white face didn't they're also only quoting these abolitionists are only quoting the n word as white speech so their sanctions so their sanctuaries hears these examples this is how white people talk to us and frederick douglass writes a letter to william lloyd garrison the abolitionist editor of deliberate or from ireland when he's abroad and he uses the phrase we don't allow and words in here nine times to describe the kinds of experiences he had trying to cross the threshold of public space in public transportation in the annabel north we don't allow inward to hear and that from all kinds of white people he's hearing that so i think in some ways it's the black abolitionists who make everybody aware that this that the n word is being used in this environment kind of way and they also for the most part pushed down the black units so this notion that i've

certainly seen in crowded conversations about the n word or thinking about history as a certain kind of uneasy when you get your reading and a classical primary documents were the word can jump off the page and how students respond to it and my censored leases that you know the m word is the only word in american english that can so finally ann dramatically collapse the past and the present and there isn't really the principal reasons why it is so the stabilizing to being here for so many people and write that there there's a way which we've come for ourselves with a certain distance from the nineteenth century or the jim crow period that word immediately you know causes us to conjure images of the water hose remains injury in the dorms and so you were there for best idea because you can't handle that kind of violent returns and has proceeded to get your sense now and that kind of power in that way where you're one hundred percent right i mean it is in the dusty pages and books

it's in it's in this pass base that you're talking about but when it finds its way into fall into the classroom it is in real space in real time doing work real work any any teacher who thinks that's not true any teacher who's teaching huck finn this week for their students and things it is not true that by by that word entering their classroom that the tenor of the classrooms change is absolutely mistaken i have a student who wrote a blog post for me i taught a course last semester history of the n word and one of my students wrote this beautiful beautiful story about how they had a teacher who taught to kill a mockingbird and they did the read aloud and the teacher insisted that everybody in the class say the word and four this was a teacher who believe that was part of the fight against violence to repeat it in the classroom space that harper lee had wanted it that way and it was powerful to do it and the

way that that student would respond was that they would count the paragraphs the everybody read a paragraph so that would count the number of paragraphs in the book and the recount when it was their turn and if they're turned coincided with a paragraph with the n word they would get up and the law firms want to run and you know what i mean so and i've heard from students over and over and over again and this is really why the work became exciting for me because i thought that what i was going to when i started having these conversations with students that they were going to kind of like have this very intellectual freedom a speech debate with me about whether or not you say or don't say or whatever and somehow but most of them like a meat we started confessing that happen to me i was in a class when that happened i didn't know what to do when it was set in this way i people tell me dish but no be taught me what it meant to you on and on and on i was like there's really a story here and it's like the n word is sort of like a map into each of our individual racial histories so i you know i often say that it it

did it signposts and national trauma but it's also a signpost a personal trauma for a lot of people a lot of people remember their first interactions with this word not just black people what keeping with the person running your your father was one who tried to again bring to the public conversation all the ranges in which like fold reasons were to private spaces on street corners in the light and you know quite famously richard pryor also had a conversion experience on the snow returned after taking a trip to kenya yeah i i i love this compact so in nineteen seventy four my my data releases the album that n word's crazy ok it is such a beautiful kind of description of what an n word is in my new nothing like what white people are saying and words were and then four or five years later my father goes on the strip and he has really like an incredible appeal for me

he tells a beautifully on stage and live on the sunset strip and he also does an interview and ebony an ad arm with sharon bennett jr and usually he also pulled me aside when i was you know eleven or twelve when it came back from this trip and tommy he was never gonna see the word again and i love what he said is he says alderson he was sitting in the lobby of the nairobi hilton and he looks around and the little voice says to him look around what you see and he says i see all kinds of black people doing all kinds of things and the voice says do you see any and words and then my dad says no and he said that's because there aren't any and when he talks about those he says i was wrong that i was wrong and i think that's so beautiful i love a couple of things my dad

doesn't this one is unlike a lot of people who get into this polemical debate about who should or shouldn't say the n word my dad's like do what you wanna do but this is what it does is this is my truth i don't want to do this anymore this this is what is true for me and he also says an unknown to the hip white people who want to come up and use this word with me please don't because i don't like it that's what he said and i just i think those are really two very important points mean this is like really this kind of homecoming experience from this perspective this kind of i asked borat experience he's standing in africa when he has this epiphany very powerful elizabeth pryor is a professor of history at smith college she's the author of the etymology of the n word resistance language and the politics of freedom your gestures

so folks which we talked about a lot of different thorny and troubling topic some backstory and some fun stuff and this is something that could potentially be fine and yet we've been pretty tied up in knots about how to handle something like cursing i'm curious given what we used to dealing with what is presented such a challenge for not since our producers told us we were doing a show on the history of fashion have i been so tied up in knots but i just don't it is the people who use language that i would never use in public i would never use in private and i kind of felt like if i'm embarrassed by this i don't want to impose that on our listeners even though we warn them up front yeah so

striking about that is think about the power of those words the amount of energy that we're now expanding china decided we should say are not you know what that says about how powerful those words are some of those words have deep historical meaning since some of them are what should we say a kind of disembodied are disconnected from particular historical yeah i mean there's going to be a certain age is that an image is and part of the past and it conjured by certain curse words and so certain words are innocuous anything about a word like to associate that doesn't really carry the same kind of gravity as the dreaded quote unquote and we're dragging or any number of words associated with gay people or women you know that there's a there's a violin says behind the language and there's a violence that often accompany the use of a particular kind of times i think at a visceral level what were all aware of and so rather than take that lightly i think we enter the

conversation about cursing with a certain amount of caution yeah i think that's important and i share with us of them around this as well you know i had a chance to teach an fbi file of the tulsa race riot of nineteen twenty one he really fbi file is as a remarkable way window into the politics of cursing and it turns out that from nineteen twenty one episode the riot in tulsa and age of giving up with seemed like a preclinical count and he's talking about the sheriff and local county marshall and other law enforcement and he's using air quotes are quotes around the word the n word and there as are talking about a lynching that they're trying to execute against an african american was accused of assaulting a white woman and eventually the quotation marks just disappear and the agent himself simply uses the n word as a pronoun for the african americans he's describing in tulsa the second aspect of this which is in order to justify the

actions undertaken by the white mob the field agent describes how many african americans in response to the threat and lynching we're basically muttering and cursing and it's quote an army grows standing off to one side muttering and cursing and this was in the presence of white women and it was a way of capturing this as a particularly and respectable group of black people who might in fact been deserving of what happened in the aftermath of the riot the theft has waned to the air quotes disappear won't even imagine a fourteen page documents about age two but what is your hypothesis as to why he just drops the protests are actually think it's because you know the government and the ages of the government in nineteen twenty one that you know law enforcement by and large are you know adopting racist ideas and you know they can pretend to have a certain objective distance but you know this is a war that they're quite comfortable using it wears off

but page to exaggerate exactly the simple synonym for people of color white people with isn't one of those things that again i think it speaks to our all struggles with this is that sometimes when you get a little bit familiar with the deep river the conversation do at certain kinds of decorum slipped right in and i wonder if there's a certain feeling that we have about being on the airwaves write about being recorded that might be different if we were in an informal conversation in another the words gonna fly fast and loose you think i'm getting on the airwaves whether that means regular tv would mean that you would be hyper conscious however i can say that i have the honor of having been bullied for profanity on pbs and then at night after i did it i worried about it for like three months until the show is i thought oh my gosh what does it mean to people to look down on me for having said the word it was a documentary about alexander hamilton and i was asked what people the time thought about him as steve and that horrible word

and i said oh people at the time considered him an arrogant irritating asshole and when i watched the documentary called bully write it was fascinating to me that i was trying to capture this problem of the motion of people at the time then i suddenly it caught me up in it and i began to be really worried about what people would think that i used it and i became so bizarre really proud of myself for having gotten the bucket list accomplishment being believed to have hit the house but it was a hard day for saying that word and then i would assume there would be so is there something about cursing that we can put into perspective another word said that there are certain words that you know in some ways in the cases unlike hamilton you know for the sake of history we just have to say we want a citizen and unique about how health as character that's captured by the term as colin and his story his discretion basically to say well the most accurate when i roll out

these particular well i mean here's the thing that strikes me about all these words i conduct hinted at it earlier in the episode how powerful they are striking that is but part of the reason they're powerful years suggested before me that has to do with the historical baggage are investigated these are words that inherently have so much emotion attached to them and whether that is the anger or hatred or passion or fear and they kind of does you land on something that's really powerful and direct which i didn't even mean to host honey to capture people's feelings about hamilton during that early time period but that gives them there however is that he never themselves as words their they're such powerful emotional statements so that when a moment now we're coming to crossroads as a society about what words will consider to be profane because you know infamously i suppose now the

president was heard in what was presumably a private conversation in a very public setting but not recorded calling people call in countries from the southern part of the world should hold countries and news organizations had to figure out if they were going to bleep or to say the word and what the politics around that word as a candidate trump used foul language it was caught on tape using that and again news organizations were were forced her to think about that and delegated with a more recent speech at a convention for a conservator i'm in baltimore maryland and he was caught saying bullshit and the news organizations yet again at the figure how to carry the words of the leader of the country and i guess my question is in light of all these you know now serial crises of censorship and language of those terms is going to be considered more acceptable he run that on mainstream media it doesn't lose the taboo of using

a word like shame or bitch or bullshit you know it's interesting i i totally agree with that that we become familiar as with them and the more we become familiarize the less bad or you know band they seem in the morgue the easier it is for us to say them but at the same time that that is the case and that might become the case with the word bullshit the fact that the president saying that word suggest something about his character which is why you know i think it's important for us to know that he said that word right so that at the same time that we're stating here that you're saying that might make it not mean something the family said it does mean something a scary moment in both of those things are true at the same time so you there's enough to like this question but i'll ask both of you doesn't the fact that he said that making even more authentic to at least forty five percent of the american public the data

on this is clear right of your trustworthy cursing and so yemeni somehow that you're telling the truth because you're not you're using political language are spinning tales that censoring yourself a point to a historical moment that strengthens what you just said and that's richard nixon and cursing like a sailor in the watergate tapes not in public right and so what donald trump is doing in some ways is being authentic by using the same language ostensibly over maybe four were some private using some of the same language that he uses in private in front of millions of people and that adds to this but enough for some of quote authenticity because he said it because that number one will as you're suggesting bramble make him seem authentic but also because it is still a dirty word part of what he accomplished by saying i believe he said it more than once is it will stand out to people that is not normally we expect someone to

say and when we think about the things he was saying about the mall investigation that's the word is gonna pop into our heads yes it's abortion witch hunt right exactly exactly that's it for us today but you can keep the conversation going online players know what you finally it's so important as this are questions about history you'll find us the backstory greedy of the fort worth sending emails backstory at virginia dot edu were also on facebook and twitter at backstory radio whatever you do don't be a stranger backstory producer virginia humanities they just force has provided by an anonymous donor the national endowment for the humanities the provost office universe should begin year the johns hopkins university that shows and robert cornell memorial foundation and the author of it additional support provided by the tomato for cultivating fresh ideas in the arts

committees in the vines brian balogh is a professor of history at the university of virginia davis is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of richmond john freeman is professor of history and american studies at yale university nathan connolly is ever like saddam's associate professor of history at the johns hopkins university his back story was created by handling them for virginians united states