āBy the first world war, soldiers swore so much that the word āfuckingā came to function as no more than āa warning that a noun is comingā.Ā ā
Guardian review ofĀ Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa MohrĀ
i would like to take this opportunity to present my headcanon about that infamous ālanguage!ā 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 weāre being filmed for the folks back home reaction.
in other words, he said ālanguageā not because he never swears, but because if heās not on guard he swears way too much. :D
āthe word āfuckingā came to function as no more than āa warning that a noun is comingā
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 donāt 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 āfuckā or āshit,ā ever, but people casually tossed slurs around like nobodyās business. Now people use āfuckā and āshitā like punctuation, but slurs are increasingly tabooāand thatās exactly how it should fucking be.
You can tell we were kids in the 80s in different placesā¦
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 isnāt wrong, but what the original gifset doesnāt 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 ā 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 didnāt swear during the 1940s. Most of us fell into the ākidā or āfemaleā categories, or both, and guys our grandparentsā age would never, ever say āfuckā around us. And those words werenāt 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 itās 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.
Thereās 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. (āThey laugh, you know,ā he said, ābut dammit I get so embarrassed.ā)
ā¦ so, right, even in the middle of a war, pilots saying āfuckā 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 āswearing around menā and āswearing around womenā. Most guys my dadās age donāt do it anymore, at least not to that much of an extreme. By the time you get to my generation (Iām 40), people might swear or they might not, and they usually donāt swear around young kids, but swearing around men but not around women is just not a thing anyone does anymore. At least I donāt know anyone who does it specifically and consistently whoās not elderly.
Itās not really an individual-sexism thing, more of a socialization thing ā sexist on a societal level, sure, but I donāt think Steve would balk at swearing around women, kids, or in a refined or professional social setting because heās a sexist or a prude. Itās just something you didnāt 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 itād take time.
So, to me, about half the examples up there work just fine (ānow why the fuck would I do thatā to Bucky ā absolutely! Or āIs everything a fucking joke to you?ā to Tony) and several jar horribly, because theyāre not the right context (like the āthereās only one God ma'amā bit ā noooo, you arenāt going to get āfuckā and āma'amā in the same sentence! not for a Steve fresh from the 1940s! ā or āwe have our fucking ordersā ā¦ in a polite, professional context like that, no). Steve would never. Or, I should say, someone from Steveās culture ā who tries in general to be a polite and respectful person, as Steve does ā would never. Maybe after heās had a few years to acclimatize to the more relaxed social climate surrounding swearing in the 21st century, but I think itād take him awhile; he would sort of instinctively jerk himself back from doing it in all but the most relaxed sort of āpalling around with your teammatesā environment.
(Headcanon-wise, I could see Steve very quickly incorporating someone like Natasha into his mental schemata as āone of the guysā ā not consciously, but on a subconscious level: like, he doesnāt hold back from swearing around her pretty quickly ā 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 Iām wrong on things here.
Iām so glad someone said this, because this is something I think a lot of the Steve meta about swearing misses. Situational profanity, exactly! He wouldnātĀ cuss in anything heād considerĀ āpolite companyā, because you didnāt doĀ that. Iām absolutely sure heās capable of having a very foul mouth in some circumstances (he was a soldier who grew up in working-class Brooklyn, soā¦ yeah), but in the cultural context where he grew up, you sure as hell didnāt sayĀ āfuckā 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 Steveās ālanguageā line Iāve ever seen.
So, basically. He'd swear around Bucky.
