baseball cursing, 1898

[Jonathan Lighter]

Even the vocabulary of Lord Rochester's scandalous works is limited and mainly literal - quite anemic by present-day standards, with the same half dozen anatomical words used over and over.  Byrd is most notable for "roger," v.  Have not checked Belcher.

  The probably the most copious aggregartion of metaphorical bawdry before 1835 appears in bawdy Restpration songbooks, especially Playford & D'Urfey's multivolume _Wit and Mirth; or, Pills to Purge Melancholy_.  Even that is quite genteel compared to, say, the contents of Urban Dictionary.

  JL

"Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
Subject: Re: baseball cursing, 1898
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At 12/6/2007 10:16 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Whippersnappers may not appreciate the extraordinary rarity of early
>written exx. of these latterly nigh-ubiquitous terms. Occasional
>legal testimony and the odd infuriated personal letter from an
>uninhibited writer are almost the sole sources one can find.

Is there more in the perhaps linguistically-more-unrestrained 17th
and 18th centuries than the Victorian 19th? I am thinking of the
1665 "piss-house" (OED3), although that is from a court record, and
writings like Robert Byrd's secret diaries or Jonathan Belcher's
letters (which have been published). Letters to 18th century
newspapers were often blunt, sometimes with barely-disguised
scatalogical connotations (I sometimes think that the only censorship
was to the names of the writers and targets).

Joel

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