Damn! : a cultural history of swearing in modern America / Rob Chirico ; foreword by Keith Allan.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Swearing, cussing, or cursing, out of anger, excitement, or just because, is something most of us do, at least to some degree. Turn on the television or open a magazine, and there it is. Damn! is an insightful and entertaining look at our evolving use of profanity over the last half-century or so, from a time when Gone with the Wind came under fire for using the word "damn" to an age where the f-bomb is dropped in all walks of life. Writer and artist Rob Chirico follows the course of swearing through literature, the media, and music, as well as through our daily lives. From back rooms and barracks to bookshelves and Broadway; and from precedents to presidents, the journey includes such diverse notables as George Carlin, the Simpsons, D. H. Lawrence, Ice T, Barack Obama, Nietzsche, and, of course, Lenny Bruce. If you have ever stopped and wondered WTF has happened to our American tongue, don't get out the bar of soap until you finish Damn!

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In nine brief chapters and a lengthy introduction, Chirico surveys the so-called dirty words of English, with the aim of getting readers to recognize their complexity. The title word plays a relatively small role in the work; Chirico focuses mainly on the word sometimes minced as "fug," "fud," "flip," "feck," or "fudge," along with various other expletives and epithets. The author takes the reader from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin to recent FCC cases and back in history to Anthony Comstock, Gone with the Wind, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. The major strength of the book is Chirico's voracious amassing of detail to support his discussion-including popular culture (news, politics, film, and television), the military, music, journalism, literature, and children's language, among other topics. He also draws on relevant scholarship-from H. L. Mencken to Melissa Mohr--and both celebrates and interrogates the English cursing vocabulary. This reviewer's major frustration with the book is the exposition, which suffers from sudden changes of topic and the author's penchant for ending discussions with humorous asides rather than specific conclusions. This book is best suited to recreational reading. Summing Up: Optional. General readers. --Edwin L. Battistella, Southern Oregon University