The discussion of killing the children of one’s enemies (see my previous blog post) led me to wonder if ancient Greek society was very much a society of blood feuds, so that the children of your enemies would indeed be a threat to you.
This prompted our seminar leader to say, Oh, yes, there you
are, having vanquished, or so you think, but off in the wings people are
plotting, saying, We’ll get you, you f----ing b----. And this led me to wonder about cursing in
ancient Greece. Did the ancient Greeks have words like
that? Maybe in spoken language, but they
never wrote them down? Just like a
reading of mainstream Victorian would expose you to nothing stronger than d---d
(with the hyphens in place), so the reading of ancient Greek texts may expose
you to no curse words at all (we weren’t actually sure about this, and we had
no experts on ancient Greek society and literature among us).
But the larger issue was, Are there words some societies use
in speech that they never write down?
Are there words that are known but that are never repeated in polite
society? And if polite society is the
only source of writings from an era, how can we ever know their impolite
utterances?
This led us to muse about modern day society and the
Internet. Everything goes now, we
thought at first. No one a thousand
years from now will have to wonder if we had some private words not seen in
public forums. Everything gets said in
public forums, in novels, movies, and as I said, the Internet. Every conceivable swear word must be there
somewhere.
But then I thought, But don’t we still have some forbidden
words? Racial epithets and the
like? People still know them, but how
often do they appear in print? Well,
again with the Internet, there are no doubt sites spewing out hatred, so they
may be around. Still, it was interesting
to speculate about words that might be widely used and yet not make it into the
historical record.
And I came up with a great title for an academic study:
Curse Words of the Ancient Greeks.
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