If you’re reading this post, you probably love words. If you’re reading this and involved in the legal profession in any fashion, you probably love swear words. Lawyers, particularly criminal defense and family lawyers, use swear words more often than they would likely admit.

That’s why the book “Nine Nasty Words: English in The Gutter, Then, Now and Forever” by John McWhorter is such an interesting read. If we’re going to use these words, it would do us well to learn something about them. And who better to teach us than a guy like McWhorter, a linguist and English professor at Columbia University.

McWhorter’s book differs from traditional academic fare in that it eschews the usual ivory tower intellectual bullshit and reads like a beach novel. I finished the book in about two days. It’s also chock full of information on every potential bar trivia one could ever need about words we deem improper to use in polite company.

You’ll learn the first time each was recorded on print, music, and film. After smartening you up on the etymology of a word, McWhorter also examines derivatives of each we’ve used to get around the offensive word in question (darn, shoot, fudge).

Myths are busted in several chapters. I hate to be the spoiler, but if you thought sexual congress deemed Fornication Under Consent of the King is where we get “fuck,” or labeling barrels of manure as Ship High In Transport is how we got to “shit,” I’ve got news for you–both are urban legends with little factual basis.

If we travel back in time, though, we find at one point a man named Roger Fuckbythenavel could sip tea in a place called Fuckinggrove. If, during this time, you sipped tea with Mr. Fuckbythenavel and remarked, “That’s goddamn good tea!” you’d come off as unseemly for the remark.

Which brings us to the first theme of the book: our ever evolving view of profanity. At one point in time, uttering something that could potentially offend the Divine was low class. As we became more secular and less worried about what the man in the sky thought, our views of the profane turned to the secular, bodily function stuff.

Another theme of the book is the dilution of profanity. The more a profane word is used, the less impact it carries, until we reach the point where it’s as common in our usage as a pronoun.

To illustrate, most of us who speak English would generally understand someone who said, “Oh fuck. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to fuck off to this fucking place and pick the fucking steaks up from that fucker of a fucking fuck butcher. Motherfucker,” as generally being the grumbling of someone having a pretty bad day. To an alien or someone completely new to the English language, such a stream of utterances would be incomprehensible.

Before it pops up as a question in the comments, yes, the N-Word, that horrible word no white person dare utter, is one of McWhorter’s Nasty Nine. As a black man and a linguist, McWhorter takes the word and approaches it with clinical analysis, treating it the same as the other eight.

Whole books are devoted to the N-Word. McWhorter covers everything you’d ever want to know about it in one chapter.

Who knows what words of choice will get one canceled from a writing gig twenty years from now? If it hasn’t been made clear yet, the dirty words that George Carlin once educated us about aren’t really all that “dirty” anymore.

Reading this book will give you at least an entertaining journey into why that happened.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Ten pages into it and I bought a copy for my mean-ass editor because I knew he would enjoy this book as much as I was. If you want a copy you can get one wherever books are sold.

Have a great fucking weekend, you wonderful bastards! We’ll see you next week!