A trigger warning of sorts: this newsletter is about swearing, and it swears, though it will not use hate language. It is inspired by a piece in the New York Times by Rebecca Roach, “The Secret Power of Swearing.” Turns out that Roach, a Lecturer in philosophy at the University of London, has written an entire academic study of the subject, For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude and Fun, hot off the presses in all senses (Oxford, November 1). I’m sure she had to censor her title to get it onto bookstore shelves, but I will not censor any word that is allowed to appear on, say, the Amazon website, where her book is blurbed as follows by actor and writer Stephen Fry: “Finally a book that rips the fuck out of the arseholes who claim that swearing is 'the sign of a poor vocabulary' or 'unnecessary.' Bollocks to them. This book puts those dim wankers right in as serious, intelligent, knowledgeable and hilarious a fashion as the subject deserves." Which is followed by this comment from Jennifer Saul, Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language, University of Waterloo: “It's both insightful and an absolute page-turner, which made me laugh out loud several times—not a very common experience with philosophy books! In short, it's an excellent fucking book."
Swearing is the use of forbidden language, language ordinarily taboo. The first and most obvious reason that swearing is so much fun is that it breaks the taboo, overcomes the control that we are supposed to maintain as civilized, respectable citizens. It is cathartic, letting loose what has been repressed, and if nothing else can therefore be good for your blood pressure. Perhaps the commonest type of swearing is involuntary: you stub your toe, or drop and break your phone on the concrete, and out it comes. Swearing has definite class associations: the better quality citizens do not do it, remaining properly repressed, because it is vulgar: only “those people” do it. I picked up swearing from my dad, who swore like a sailor, partly because he was a sailor, in the Navy during World War II. He was also working class and a loud, reactive Italian, and so am I. I always knew when his swearing shifted into Italian that he was really angry, but, much as I admired his versatility, I remain a monolingual swearer. I was treated wonderfully by everyone in graduate school at the University of Toronto, but I was self-conscious all the years I was there, mindful of my natural loudness and labile personality in that cultivated and Anglophile setting, always feeling like Bruce Banner monitoring his blood pressure lest he let loose the incredible Hulk.
Forbidden swear words can be divided into two categories, one of which is in fact no longer forbidden, or is much less so, namely, the category of words referring to the aspects of the human body that civilization demands be kept private: those referring to sex and elimination. Despite appearances, our society has actually been growing slowly more civilized in some ways over the course of my lifetime, and it is a heartening sign that somehow, spontaneously, the public has grown aware of the difference between the harmless and the hateful in swearing and in language use generally, and since the 70’s has become much less uptight about words like “piss” and “shit” and, of course, “fuck.” When I came to Baldwin-Wallace College 34 years ago, that word was unacceptable in class. About once a decade in the first part of my career I would absentmindedly let slip the word in classroom, and each time got an “Ooh!” reaction, though I did not get into trouble over it. Nowadays, the students absolutely don’t care. Say what you will about “woke,” at least it has helped focus our priorities properly: what are truly obscene are words used to hurt and denigrate people, and they are quite properly forbidden because we are a community. The c-word is still forbidden because it is no longer merely anatomical but has become a hate term. As a vulgarity, it is venerable and occurs in Chaucer, but it has now become a weapon. The same is of course true of the n-word and other “fighting words.” Whatever they once may have been, they are vicious now. I’m absolutely fine with forbidding such words, even if I have reservations about other forms of “woke” behavior.
Except in “family” contexts, which is to say places where children may have access, I see little point in euphemisms like “f*ck” and “friggin’,” which nowadays come off as merely timid, like the people who are afraid to use Voldemort’s name.
After all, we all know that we all know those words. We are long beyond the old sexist pretense that a lady’s sensibilities are too fine to be violated by such crudities. Feeling that she has betrayed him by allowing herself to be used by her father and the king to spy on him, Hamlet sadistically torments poor Ophelia by forcing her to respond despite excruciating embarrassment to a series of double entendres:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap.
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
(3.2.110-16)
Here, “country,” doubtless pronounced with the appropriate, or inappropriate, emphasis, means the c-word, and “nothing” means “zero,” suggesting female anatomy. A woman nowadays might tell him to just go fuck himself, but Hamlet knows he is attacking a victim who is not allowed to fight back. In Tourette Syndrome and some psychotic episodes, the normal social censor is disabled, and what is normally repressed may leap out, including obscene and offensive language. In her mad scene, this becomes true of Ophelia, who sings a song about a young man who slept with a girl and then abandoned her, ending “Young men will do’t, if they come to’t; / By Cock, they are to blame,” where “Cock” means what we think it does. In reporting Ophelia’s suicide by drowning, the Queen reports that among the flowers with which she had decked herself were “long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them” (5.1.170-72). She knows all the words and the dirty jokes, because everyone does.
Mind you, there are limits even in these enlightened times. I am at times bemused by a kind of persisting double standard that is never talked about, perhaps not even recognized. It is easy for liberal people to accept gender difference, to welcome gay, lesbian, nonbinary, trans, and other identifications to their rightful place in the human community, and the acceptance is genuine and heartening. But there is clearly a kind of shared agreement to pretend that, no matter what the gender identifications involved, what goes on behind closed doors is always the epitome of middle class respectability. Nevertheless, anything that is forbidden is “cathected,” as the psychoanalysts say—it is fetishized, turned into forbidden fruit. Therefore, some people find it a turn-on to use unexpurgated language in bed. At one point in my grad school years I was renting a room in a very cheap hotel in Toronto rather than make the 100-mile commute every single time back to Buffalo where I lived. The walls were paper thin, and the woman of a couple down the hall used to shout her colorful vocabulary loudly and expressively when they were in medias res. I was amused, but the fellow who lived next door was outraged and disgusted. Speaking of fetishized, anything “kinky” is still in the “okay, but let’s not talk about it” category. Heavens, we can’t even talk about masturbation. A class discussion about trans and non-binary could be possible, depending on the class, but an attempt to discuss masturbation would be instantly uncomfortable and inappropriate. It’s complicated: part of that is because a discussion of masturbation could be a form of sexual harassment, but my guess is that the subject matter is uncomfortable in itself. I'm sure there are a hundred terms for masturbation, some of them hilarious, and we can say them all. The one thing we can’t do is talk about what they refer to in any relaxed way.
Another area of discomfort indicating that we’re not as unrepressed as all that is the blues category of the “hokum song.” These were humorous, double entendre songs whose premise was that sex is (1) exuberantly dirty and (2) the funniest thing in the world. At least one artist, if that is the word, made a whole career of them in the 1930’s. I have an old Yazoo vinyl album (#1064) of hokum songs by Bo Carter, called Banana in Your Fruit Basket. Titles include (okay, maybe another trigger warning is in order here) “My Pencil Won’t Write No More,” “Mashing That Thing,” “Don’t Mash My Digger So Deep,” “Pin in Your Cushion,” and “What Kind of Scent Is This? (yikes). Guitar players interested in actually learning some hokum songs, though I’m not sure where you’d get away with playing them, may search for a DVD by Fred Sokolow, Bawdy Blues for Fingerstyle Guitar, which includes such classics as “Ain’t Got Nobody to Grind My Coffee,” “She’s Your Cook but She Burns My Bread Sometimes,” “You Can’t Tell the Difference after Dark,” and “Big Ten Inch.” The latter is, by the way, the size of records before the advent of long-play…among other things.
No good to get on the usual high horse about Black male sexism and “bravado”: two of the songs on the Sokolow DVD are by women, and the women’s versions are sometimes more daring than the men’s. The most jaw-dropping of them all is Lucille Bogan’s “Shave’em Dry.” When I taught a course in the blues, I told the students that it is on YouTube and they could listen to it if they wanted, but I was saying no more. The song “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” which gave August Wilson the title for his play, is hokum-style double entendre. In the recording, a voice says that now Ma Rainey is going to show you her black bottom. It meant—among other things—that during her stage act, that was the point at which Ma would dance the “black bottom,” a dance type that originated in the Black Bottom district of Detroit. “Shake That Thing” was a hokum hit by the great slide guitarist Tampa Red with “Georgia Tom”—who later reverted to his actual name of Thomas Dorsey and became one of the great names in early gospel music. Rap continues the tradition of unreconstructed sexual language, but I reach the limit of my expertise there. I have heard there is misogyny and violence in it, and there is a corresponding type of blues that features violence against women (and occasionally female violence against men), but the hokum songs were more innocuous, mostly just plain goofy.
When we hit a nerve, or knock our coffee mug onto the carpet, we swear in annoyance. There is actually nobody to swear at. We are having a momentary temper tantrum, registering a complaint against the universe for injuring us. We yell “Goddamn it!” unthinkingly, but behind it lurks the child’s wish that some great power will punish, well, somebody or something for daring to frustrate us. Mad on the heath during the storm, King Lear commands it to wreak vengeance on the whole world:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!... And thou, all-shaking thunder Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once That makes ungrateful man! (3.2.1, 6-9)
This is the aspect of swearing driven not by a repressed pleasure principle but by the will to power, which means that we swear against others, we curse them. This may turn, at least in literature, into an agon or contest of words, the mutual insult contest that in the Middle English period was called “flyting.” In certain friendships between two men, occasionally between a man and a woman, this can become a half-affectionate bantering. A Shakespearean example of the latter is the rapier-crossing wit of Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing; of the former, the back-and-forth insults of Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. Poets love such agons because they provide occasion to unleash all their verbal energy and inventiveness in full force. At one point, Hal pretends to be his own father, the king, launching a tirade against the bad company his son is keeping, namely Falstaff:
Thou art violently carried away from grace. There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that gray Iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? Wherein is he good but to taste sack and drink it? Wherein neat and cleanly but to carve a capon and eat it? Wherein cunning but in craft? Wherein crafty but in villainy? Wherein villainous but in all things? Wherein worthy but in nothing? (2.4.441-54)
The verbal exuberance of such a catalogue is invigorating, the energy of language unleashed. In the Middle English period, flyting became a kind of public contest, a fast, back-and-forth game like tennis. The famous example, “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie,” was apparently actually performed by the Scots poets William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy before James IV of Scotland somewhere around 1500. Flyting is often compared to the modern African American phenomenon of the Dozens, the insult contest played for status. Sometimes, however, it is neither friendly banter nor a game, but a satiric weapon used to annihilate one’s enemy, nuking him with an irresistible verbal barrage, as when, in King Lear, Kent accosts Oswald. When Oswald asks, “What dost thou know me for, Kent replies:
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deny’st the least syllable of thy addition. (2.2.14-24)
In our time, the Epilogue to On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke is titled “A Tirade Turning.” It begins like this and goes on for four pages:
I think of my more tedious contemporaries:
Roaring asses, hysterics, sweet-myself beatniks, earless wonders happy with effects a child of two could improve on; verbal delinquents; sniggering, mildly obscene souser-wowsers, this one writing as if only he had a penis, that one bleeding, but always in waltz-time; another intoning, over and over, in metres the expert have made hideous; the doleful, almost-good, over-trained technicians—what a mincing explicitness, what a profusion of adjectives, what a creaking of adverbs!
Roethke loved the early Elizabethans, and is deliberately resurrecting a tradition.
Debate poems, even if they are not flyting in the strict sense, may take on an element of combativeness. As each side tries to win the debate, it may attempt to do so by painting a negative picture of the opposing side. Milton’s twin poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso debate the virtues of Mirth and Melancholy respectively, and each side begins to make its case by mischaracterizing the other. L'Allegro begins:
Hence loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born, In Stygian Cave forlorn ‘Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.
This is a completely false picture of a Melancholy that is actually pensive inwardness. But the slander is mutual: in Il Penseroso, Melancholy refers to Mirth’s “vain deluding joys, / The brood of folly without father bred,” although we know that Mirth is actually an embodiment of pastoral “Unreproved pleasures free.” Neither side in fact wins the debate, for Mirth and Melancholy are actually what Blake called Contraries, equally necessary aspects of the imagination, and the trick is to keep them in creative tension rather than choosing between them. The two debating birds in the remarkable Middle English poem called The Owl and the Nightingale seem to be conducting the same argument, centuries earlier. As the Introduction to a scholarly edition puts it: “The Nightingale sees the Owl as full of the miseries of winter, while she herself is part of the joys of summer (412-62), and is answered by the Owl’s accusation that the Nightingale is full of the lechery of summer, in song and deed (497-500), and when she has glutted her lust her boldness and songs are gone (501-22)” (23). It is an admirable and wise Introduction, speaking of a centuries-old poem in a way that is surprisingly relevant to the present moment:
Many of the problems discussed incidentally by the birds stood at the intellectual centre of the age, religious and moral problems to which there are sides but no solution….what it teaches is that there is a place in the world for both solemnity and lightheartedness, that when an Owl and a Nightingale survey the great problems the side taken by the one is irreconcilably different from that taken by the other” (24).
The verbal agon of course is not always a game. The tragic plot of the Iliad begins with the shouting match of Agamemnon and Achilles, which escalates as each man gets more and more furious, Achilles finally calling Agamemnon a dog-face. Before he faces the monster Grendel, Beowulf has to defeat the arrogant Unferth, who calls him a boastful coward, by putting him down verbally and boasting of his exploits. Unferth is what we would now call a troll, in the Internet rather than the mythological sense. But, far from being a product of modern social breakdown, the mean-spirited negativity of trolling is apparently a permanent aspect of human nature, a form of what Jung calls the shadow. In the Norse Elder Edda, it is projected as the Trickster god Loki, better known these days as Tom Hiddleston. In the amazing “Loki’s Flyting,” Loki pushes into the hall of the gods and goes up against the whole room, skewering each god and, especially, each goddess, one by one. When Freya rails at him, he replies:
Enough, Freya! I know you a witch Who has done many wicked deeds: You enticed into bed your own brother, remember, And then, Freya, you farted.
No one escapes, not even Sif, the wife of Thor, who claims that she is at least one deity in whom he can find no fault—except that she seems to be forgetting something:
That would be Sif, for, wary ever And cautious, you kept to yourself, Except that you lay with a lover once As well as Thor, I think, And the lucky one was Loki.
Swearing, flyting, debating: behind all these agonistic uses of language is the question of whether words have power. Our culture has grown from a Biblical foundation, and of course in the opening of the Old Testament God creates through the power of the word. In the New Testament, according to the opening of the Gospel of John, God is the Word. In the Old Testament, the sin God hates most passionately, more than any moral transgression, is the worship of idols. It seems to be a sore point: his followers are repeatedly tempted to worship gods they can comfortably believe in because they can be seen, while he has difficulty making his presence felt because he is invisible, as words are invisible. He is forced to rely on prophets to speak for him while he must remain forever offstage. The fanaticism about belief to which Biblical religion is susceptible, resulting in various forms of literalism that give worshippers something tangible to have faith in, originates in this elusiveness of its God, who is a breath, is air. How can we have faith in air? Such insecurity draws the Biblical God into relying upon another form of words with power: the curse. A curse is also air, but its effects may be devastatingly visible. It is no accident that one of the fiercest of divine curses, which takes up the entire 26th chapter of Leviticus, is a warning by God of what he will do if the Israelites revert to the worship of idols and graven images:
I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it….
I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate….
Then will I walk contrary to you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.
And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat….
And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth. (Leviticus 26: 16, 22, 24, 29, 36)
Would anyone worship such a God except out of fear, as they would obey a Mafia boss? Oh, yes: this is the God of Christian nationalism, which exults in the same kind of imagery at the end of the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation. Donald Trump is their prophet, and Trump, as he slips more and more obviously into madness, sounds increasingly like a reality-TV version of King Lear, who in his madness threatens, “And when I have stol’n upon these sons-in-laws, / Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! (4.6.186-87).
It is one further step from cursing to summoning the forces of darkness to the aid of one’s will to power, conjured by rituals, but most of all by words. As everyone knows, if only from Harry Potter, spells and incantations have to be pronounced in exactly the right way, or the demon you summon might turn around and devour you, as happened to Abdul Alhazred, the author of H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. As I might have known, however, these days a would-be black magician can do helpful research on the Internet. One site, stumbled across at random, says, “Calling on demons is generally inadvisable, but if you must, here are the best evil spirits to summon,” followed by brief bios. I half expected to find user satisfaction reviews and 5-star ratings.
White magic also proceeds through the power of words, sometimes special words like abracadabra and abraxas, the latter having been a Gnostic magical name before it was the title of a Santana album. In the Jewish Kaballah, the name of God himself is a creative power: the Tetragrammaton, meaning the four letters, YHWH, spelling in Hebrew the name usually translated as Yahweh, from which, in English, we get Jehovah. It is a name so powerful it dare not be spoken. Ordinary human language, being fallen, may no longer have power, but John Dee, the great occultist of Shakespeare’s time, along with his partner Michael Kelly, spoke with the angels and made notes about “Enochian,” the unfallen language spoken by angels and used by Adam before the Fall to name all creatures. A whole Enochian magic was supposed to derive from this language, whose existence I was surprised to discover, since it was not mentioned in the treatment of Dee and Kelly in one of the great fantasies of our time, John Crowley’s Aegypt.
Language creates by imposing order upon chaos, but demonic language, by logic, works in the other direction: it is the manifestation of a death wish spiraling backward towards the Chaos out of which Creation first arose. Shakespeare was fascinated by the theme of the power of language for good and evil, and it shows up in plays that are on the surface about something else. One of these is Othello, which is about jealousy and racism and all that realistic stuff, but which is also more deeply about the demonic power of language. On that level, it is, strangely enough, a play deeply relevant to our time, for Iago poisons Othello’s imagination in exactly the way that evil politicians, social media, and Fox News have poisoned the imaginations of tens of millions of people. The corrupting process works almost entirely by language, the images it summons up being in the mind’s eye—and therefore having an impact more intense than any sensory images. When I teach Othello, I like to pair it with The Tempest, in which Prospero uses his magic to rebuild his society, which has fallen into delusions and power games. Iago is very much an anti-Prospero, and the Chaos towards which he works is symbolized by the tempest in the early part of the play. The characters think they have survived the storm unharmed, but they are wrong. Through insinuating language, Iago instills paranoia, twisting innocent appearances into insinuations that eat away at Othello’s hidden insecurities. When the disgraced Michael Cassio goes to Desdemona to beg her to put in a good word for him to her husband, Iago makes it seem as if they are having an affair. Fox News, social media, and the British tabloids could do no more.
When Desdemona’s father claims that Othello must have used some kind of Moorish witchcraft to obtain his daughter’s consent to marry someone so different from her, Othello replies that Desdemona fell in love with him while listening to him tell stories of his early life and hardships. “This is the only witchcraft I have used,” he says, the witchcraft of language working upon Desdemona’s imagination. It is wrenching to hear Othello directly contradict this after he has gone over to the dark side. He tells Desdemona that the handkerchief she thinks she has lost but which has been stolen from her was a magic handkerchief made by an Egyptian charmer, which guaranteed a husband’s love so long as the woman possessed it. It is a complete lie, something out of QAnon, but it fits Othello’s paranoid state. The United States is collectively Othello these days, filled with inchoate rage instilled by a kind of false language worse than any four-letter words. Why? Critics struggle to understand Iago’s nihilism, which Coleridge famously termed “motiveless malignity.” But Iago’s wife Emilia says that Othello’s burning resentment, feelings of humiliation and sour grievance, are themselves motiveless malignity—the insecurities born of his age, race, and social class, while real enough, cover up a darker paranoia:
But jealous souls will not be answered so; They are not ever jealous for the cause, But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster Begot upon itself, born on itself. (3.4.160-63)
In the next scene, Iago breaks down Othello altogether with a single word, the word “lie,” used about Michael Cassio and Desdemona. In an extraordinary moment, Othello’s language, along with his sanity, disintegrates into complete babbling chaos:
Lie with her? Lie on her? We say “lie on her” when they belie her. Lie with her? Zounds, that’s fulsome. –Handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief!—To confess and be hanged for his labor—first to be hanged and then to confess.—I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such a shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. Is ‘t possible?—Confess—handkerchief!—O devil! (4.1.34-42)
The stage direction says, Falls in a trance. But it is precisely words that shake him thus. It is language that shakes us too, and the only defense against it is a counter-language, the language of the imagination working to decreate the paranoid lies, dispel the nihilistic curses, and work to recreate the collective psyche of the country, to counter the language of paranoia, of fear and hate, with the language of love. We do not have Enochian language, only our poor, bare words, and we can only hope the country is not on the verge of learning the truth the hard way, and too late, like Othello. But Othello’s fate is not predestined: fatalism is also part of the paranoid vision. In Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo, a story is told of the 20th-century esoteric writer Ouspensky, who had a vision in which he was given the ultimate secret, which he carefully wrote down to make sure he remembered it. When he woke up, what he had written was, “Think in other categories.” Disappointing, no doubt. But in the end not bad advice after all.
Postscript
As a follow-up to last week’s newsletter on animals, I would like to pass on a recommendation of a haunting two-volume book of photographs called The Day May Break, by Nick Brandt. The description on Amazon is in fact eloquent, so I will simply quote it:
“Photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, The Day May Break is the first part of a global series by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt, portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction. The people in these photographs were all affected by climate change, displaced by cyclones and years-long droughts. Photographed at five sanctuaries, the animals were rescues that can never be rewilded. As a result, it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed so close to them, within the same frame. The fog on location is the unifying visual motif, conveying the sense of an ever-increasing limbo, a once-recognizable world now fading from view. However, despite their respective losses, these people and animals have survived, and therein lies possibility and hope.”
My warm thanks to Alberto Manguel, author of The History of Reading and many other volumes, for this reference. I recommend his own wonderful books as well.
References
Roethke, Theodore. On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke. Edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. University of Washington Press, 1965.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. 4th Edition. Edited by David Bevington. HarperCollins, 1992.
Stanley, Eric Gerald, Editor. The Owl and the Nightingale. Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1960.
Taylor, Paul B. and W.H. Auden, translators. The Elder Edda: A Selection. Faber and Faber, 1969.
Thanks for the tip, Michael. I had to check to see whether my library purchased a copy, and I see that they did not but do make it available at the database Oxford Scholarship Online Complete which also includes standard texts of such renowned swearers as Jonathan Swift. So far I have not gone beyond the contents page, where I was delighted to see the author's response to an earlier classic of linguistics: J.L. Austin's "How to do Things with Words" (1955 lectures published 1962). Her ninth chapter explores "How to do things with swearing."