profanity vs. obscenity

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

> From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Date: August 18, 2011 9:31:25 AM PDT
> Subject: Re: profanity vs. obscenity
>
>
> At 8/18/2011 04:50 AM, victor steinbok wrote:
>> I'm also not sure where "profanity" would fit
>> vis-a-vis "obscenity".
>
> My experience with the Puritans says (IIRC) that they
> distinguished.  Although the OED doesn't - see "profanity": "... a
> profane or obscene act or word".  (It doesn't include "profane" under
> "obscenity".)  And under "obscenity" there is a quotation that does
> distinguish:
>
> 1768    H. Brooke Fool of Quality III. xvi. 243   Whenever he hear'd
> any Profaneness or Obscenity in the Streets, he would stop to reprove
> and expostulate with the Offender.
>
> I wouldn't be surprised to find the distinction defined in British
> (or colonial) law or commentary.  Blackstone, anyone?
>
> Joel


There's a very good discussion of this in Joss Marsh's Word Crimes (Chicago 1998). The crucial legal distinction is between obscenity and blasphemy, which was the historical basis for condemning profanity. The blurring of the boundaries began in the mid-eighteenth century, he says, when e.g. Wilkes' Essay on Woman was deemed both obscene and impious. Later,  "blasphemy was submerged in obscentity" in the 19th c.  (p 208 ff):

"In the mid-nineteenth century mundane circumstances seemed to conspire to produce it. Smutty and irreligious books looked the same, for a start.  Both were sold under the counter, clandestinely. Both were denied the protection of copyright. Sentences for obscenity tended to be lighter;.. By the mid-nineteenth century, obscenity like blasphemy had undergone two centuries' parallel progress from religious 'sin' to secular 'crime.'"

There's also one-stop shopping on this in Leonard Levy's book Blasphemy (Knopf 1993).

The extension of 'profanity' to other than religiously based oaths is quite late, I think. The earliest cite that makes this use explicit in the OED is from a 1969 letter from Hunter S Thompson ("I was particularly struck by the fact that you ‘take exception to the profanities utilized in (my) letter’‥. and to that I can only say Fuck Off"). But Burgess Johnson, a critic who had earlier written a nostalgic book called The Lost Art of Profanity, in which the term referred only to damn, hell, etc., wrote dismissively of WWII solider talk in a 1954 NYT article: "The profanity of the army is a poverty-stricken thing… current profanity consists of a pitifully small supply of words used an astonishing number of times, even in a brief conversation." In the context, 'profanity' can only have referred to obscene words. That use probably goes back earlier than this but by not a whole lot, I would guess.

Actually the OED's def is a little misleading here. It gives as part of the general meaning, " a profane or obscene act or word (freq. in pl.," but that meaning wasn't operative until the mid-20th century: at the time of the earlier cites, the term didn't comprehend obscene acts. This is a type of anachronism I've run into before, but I can certainly appreciate the dilemma these words pose for the definers.

Geoff

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