Swearing in the old west?

[Op_Cit]

A friend recommended watching Deadwood (old west drama circa 1870 on HBO?). Anyway, rented the DVD, and in the first 5 minutes I was completely put off by the language.

They (seems like every character) must have said "fuck", "cocksucker", or "cunt", "blowjob", etc. twenty times in that first five minutes.

I don't care about swearing, it's just that those particular words seemed totally out of place/not realistic for the time period. The dialog sounded more like the series "OZ" or something Terantino wrote...

As the show went on there seemed to be other anachronisms in the dialog, like for example somebody saying "your fly is down" (as opposed to "open"-- isn't "down" an aspect of the zipper and when was that invented or in common use?)

Anyway, I got increasingly bothered and didn't follow up watching any more episodes.

Does anybody know more about common gutter speak of the old west?

Am I off base on this?

 

[cantdog]

Not in the slightest. You have a few details wrong, but you are dead on about the modern cursing.

Ignorant writing.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Agreed. I'm turned off by over use of swear words...like Cant said, ignorant writers...they must have run out of fillers.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

People swore in the old west. The expression swearing like a muleskinner is no accident.

The substance fo their curseing, was, from all sources I have seen, more likely to be religiously based blaspheming. Motherfucker and cocksucker can be found in Civil war era diaries and documents, but the general impression is that they were rarities. Fuck was around, and perhaps used often, but using the word as an adjective dates to around the mid-point of the first world war.

As with much of the common vocabulary, it's very likely many a cowboy's vocabulary of cursewords was probably liberally sprinkled with Mexian and or indian words. Even people who spoke no spanish and had never been south of the border knew the spanish for gold and whore.

I've never seen deadwood, but it sounds very much like the writers are trying to convey a rough, gritty, feel, at odds with the more sanitized version we are used to seeing. It seems likely that they are just jamming in the curse words to get that feel and aren't too concerned with making their curseing (used for authenticity of feel) authentic in terms of what was used on the frontier.

 

[oggbashan]

I couldn't understand the language used in Devon and Cornwall, our Old West, until I'd lived with the natives for some time.

Then I realised they were using the same swearwords I knew, just saying them differently, me dears.

As for the Celtic West: Welsh swearwords - a good Welsh curse sounds almost like a hell and damnation sermon - the expression has more impact than the meaning. Dylan Thomas almost managed to express some of the impact in English but it sounds much more impressive in Welsh.

Og

 

[Dar~]

[thread highjack]You need to watch water hole number three.[/thread hijack]

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

An interesting argument from New York Magazine

Intelligencer Briefing
Cussing and Fighting
Would 1870s cowboys really use such bad words? A verbal shoot-out over Deadwood.

By Carl Swanson

David Milch, creator of the new HBO Western, Deadwood, is peeved that TV critics keep carping about his potty-mouthed pioneers. “After a while, it gets a little discouraging,” he growls, calling right back from L.A. to answer the question once and for all: Did 1870s Americans really use such colloquially foul language with the Tourettic frequency of a Hollywood producer?

Jesse Sheidlower, the American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and the scholar of cussing who wrote The F-Word, says probably not. Not that frontiersmen were genteel. “There were cursing contests when cowboys would get together and insult each other,” he says. But “the evidence that we have is that they were using more religious blasphemy than the sexual insults which are popular today.” And on the show.

As with his earlier boundaries-of-taste-pushing series, NYPD Blue, Milch’s dialogue is designed to let viewers know they’ve entered a world with different standards. So fuck or fucking is used 43 times in the first episode of Deadwood. Sheidlower agrees that the F-word was in use back then. But he says most of the nonsexual uses of it—as an intensifier, for example—didn’t come about until around World War I.

“Motherfucker, as far as anyone knows, was not in use at the time,” he adds. “There are examples of ‘mother fucking’ from court cases in Texas in the late 1880s.” (It was used as an insult.) However, “the word itself doesn’t show up until late nineteen-teens.”

In most dictionaries, cocksucker, which is said eight times in the first episode, dates to around 1890. Sheidlower has found it in court-martial testimony from the Civil War, too, but says that all evidence indicates “it was not as common as it is in the show.”

Milch counters that he spent a year researching the real town of Deadwood, South Dakota, including reading letters and diaries. He cites a bibliography he put together in his research. “It’s called ‘Profanity in Deadwood,’ and it has like 50 sources.” The two main ones he says he used are Richard A. Spears’s Slang and Euphemism (1981) and Ashley Montagu’s The Anatomy of Swearing (1967).

Take cocksucker. “Spears guesses that it began to appear early in the century,” says Milch. But Sheidlower dismisses Spears’s scholarship. “The dates which appear in Spears’s book are not based on solid evidence,” he says. “It’s his supposition.”

Milch, for his part, dismisses the OED for basing its citations on “the first appearance in literature.” After all, he says, “it might take fifteen years for a verbal expression to make it into print.” So Deadwood could cuss like this and the OED wouldn’t know.

Sheidlower, however, won’t back down: “I have absolutely no doubt the language is inauthentic,” he says. And Milch is equally determined to win this shoot-out. A lot of this, he thinks, is that people have been brainwashed by old Westerns—they’re used to the taciturn, deeds-not-words stereotype, not cowboys as sailors. “It’s a resistance to the existence of the imaginative world I’m portraying,” he says. Besides, he adds, “I’m not publishing a dictionary.”

From the April 19, 2004 issue of New York Magazine.

 

[hmmnmm]

My granddad was very fluent in Profanity. He was born before after 1900 but before 1910. I know that's not quite in the 1870 frame, and he was not a cowboy. But I have lived in a predominant cowboy region for a few years and the profane words that I have heard from these people are very similar to those of my granddad. The line of descent regarding profane words would be almost unbroken in a rural place as this is. As the quoted articles already mentioned, most of these words hovered in the blasphemous category with liberal doses of 'fuck' in varied forms. 'bullshit' is/was standard. I cannot recall if my granddad used 'cocksucker' but it would be no surprise if he did. That the cowboys of the old west may have spoken profane words is something I would feel comfortable in assuming.
However - I also try to picture my granddad turning on the television, tuning in to a western, and hearing the profane language in the movie. Would he appreciate it? Do real cowboys who watch profanity-laden westerns find it tiresome or do they think it no big deal?
interesting thread.
Sorry I have not seen the show in question as I happen to generally despise television. I think I would not find it necessary and as much as profane language does not shock me, unless the show was otherwise laudable I'd probably turn it off.

 

[Op_Cit]

Cool, thanks all for the feedback.

It is an interesting subject, I remember Elisabethan cursing being an educational requirement for working at the ren fair many years ago, and it was quite interesting.

 

[Guest]

While some of the expressions used in Deadwood are a little too modern the amount of cursing is just about dead on. Speakining profanities in public had become such common practice that when the town of Deadwood hired its first sherriff, one of his primary duties was to reduce the use of offensive language in public.

Just saw a show on the history channel last week about Deadwood and Wild Bill Hickock. That's where you find real television entertainment folks.