Consarn It! Here's How Yesteryear's Profanities Rose and Fell (and Rose and Fell Again)

Great horn spoon, if one more of you wet blankets tells me about how you don't fuck with lowly slang and swears (because you do), or try convincing me that there's just no honor in dropping a well-placed curse, I just might have to go blow off some steam, all chaining ciggies and shaking my damn head. I don't even smoke.

Profanities are a part of life. Always have been. And yet their individual usage has in no way held constant; not to beat one's gums, or anything, but this goddamn Google nGram viewer casts a pretty fascinating portrait of how the crass, the cutting, and the otherwise lowly slang of ages have fallen in and out (and in and out) of style from 1660 to 2008, right around the time many of us began conversing more so through pared-down texts and chats than drawn-out face-to-face exchanges.

Here are some takeaways from arguably the most blatantly horsefeathered slice of the search giant's growing corpus of digitized (English language) texts:

We hit peak "zounds"—with usage flagged in 0.000009994 percent of books—in 1823. For some perspective, James Monroe was president, the Oxford Union was founded, and Beethoven was given a very charming performance by an 11-year-old Franz Liszt. Of course, it was zounds' triumphant return, having hit an initial high-water mark back in 1688.

We never really used "dadsnizzle" and "jimenetty". Both turned up in the NGram precisely zero times. Says you.

"Cripes" is sort of hot again. Look at that. After peaking in 1944, at 0.0000048784 percent, before dipping down to a paltry 0.0000008704 percent in 1975, cripes is back in the race, you bluenoses. As of 2008, cripes constituted 0.0000029268 percent on NGram returns.

Which is all to say, this has been admittedly cringe-rich and you're a real darb for sitting through it.

(h/t sihtydaernacuoytihsy)

@thebanderson