Category Archives: Profanity

1861: Abraham Lincoln’s hate mail

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Barely literate internet trolls may seem a recent phenomenon but only the medium is new. Ask Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States.

As can be imagined, Abe was less than popular with his constituents in the southern states. An expression of the president’s unpopularity can be found in this barely legible item of hate mail, sent to Lincoln by a Mr A G Frick in February 1861. Frick’s spelling, grammar and punctuation appear exactly as written:

“Sir,
Mr Abe Lincoln

if you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you you god or mighty god dam sunnde of a bith go to hell and buss my Ass suck my prick and call my Bolics your uncle Dick god dam a fool and goddam Abe Lincoln who would like you goddam you excuse me for using such hard words with you but you need it you are nothing but a goddam Black nigger

Yours, &c.
Mr A. G. Frick

[PS] Tennessee Missouri Kentucky Virginia N. Carolina and Arkansas is going to secede Glory be to god on high”

Source: Letter dated February 14th 1861, cited in Dear Mr Lincoln: Letters to the President, Harold Holzer (ed.), 1993. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1895: Bible quotes declared obscene, man fined $50

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Anthony Comstock, who waged war on obscenity in the late 1800s

The Comstock Act (passed 1873) was a United States federal law that made sending obscene materials through the mail a criminal offence. Under the Comstock provisions, the definition of ‘obscenity’ was very broad. Some of the prosecutions launched by postal authorities involved sexual health material, marriage handbooks, ‘coming of age’ guides, saucy poetry and love letters.

Even the most sacred of books was not sacred under the Comstock law. In 1895 John B. Wise of Clay County, Kansas was arrested and charged with sending obscene materials by mail. The material in question was a postcard containing two quotations from the Bible:

“Wise… sent a quotation of scripture by mail to a preacher friend, with whom he was having a scriptural controversy. As the quotation was obscene, the preacher got angry and caused Wise’s arrest for mailing obscene matter. The case is in the Topeka federal court… if the quotation is adjudged obscene [then] then Bible as a whole is unmailable matter.”

Wise’s case went to trial the following year and he was convicted by jury and fined $50. He declared his intention to appeal, however press archives do not contain any mention of this.

Source: The Advocate (Topeka, Kansas), June 19th 1895. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1780: Mozart trolls his sister with fake diary entries

In August 1780, Wolfgang Mozart, then aged 24, happened upon his sister Maria Anna’s diary. Pretending to be her, he wrote the following entry:

“About shitting my humble self, an arse, a break, again an arse and finally a nose, in the church, staying at home due to the whistle in the arse, whistle not a bad tune for me in my arse. In the afternoon Katherine stopped by and also Mr Fox-tail, whom I afterwards licked in the arse. O, delicious arse!”

This was not the first time Mozart had written in his sister’s diary without her permission. In May 1775 Maria Anna mentioned attending a concert in the city hall, featuring a female singer. Beneath her entry, Wolfgang scrawled:

“Terrible arse!”

Source: Diary of Maria Anna Mozart, August 19th 1780; May 29th 1775. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1524: Spanish boy invites cartographers to chart his backside

In 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, effectively dividing the rest of the uncolonised world between them. But the treaty only covered the Atlantic hemisphere, so by the 1510s, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and colonists were again clashing, this time in Indonesia and the Philippines.

In 1524, both powers convened more treaty negotiations to divide the other side of the world. These meetings, held in the border towns of Badajoz and Elvas, were attended by some of the most notable diplomats, cartographers, astronomers and mathematicians of the age.

Leading the delegation from Lisbon was Diego Lopes de Sequeira, a prominent military leader and a former governor of Portuguese Goa. According to a contemporary report, Lopes and his advisors took a break from the negotiations and went walking along the banks of the Quadiana river. On the Spanish side of the river they saw:

“…a boy who stood keeping his mother’s clothes which she had washed… [The boy] demanded of them whether they were those men who were partitioning the world [on behalf of] the emperor. And as they answered ‘Yea’, he took up his shirt and showed them his bare arse, saying: ‘Come and draw your line through the middle [of this].’ This saying was afterward in every man’s mouth and laughed at in the town of Badajoz.”

The negotiations ended with the Treaty of Zaragoza which, in general terms, handed Portugal colonial rights over the Asian mainland, while Spain was given access to islands in the Pacific.

Source: Richard Eden, The Decades of the Newe Worlde, London, 1555. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1862: Vermont captain invites colonel to kiss his “touch-hole”

William Cronan was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1838. At the age of 22 he enlisted in the Union Army as a lieutenant and quickly rose to the rank of captain. By early 1862 he was a company commander in the 7th Vermont Infantry. Cronan’s regiment was deployed to Louisiana and saw action in the Battle of Baton Rouge (August 1862). Cronan had been a good organiser but combat seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was sent for court martial for having quarrelled with superior officers, saying of one:

“The colonel can kiss my royal majestic brown military touch-hole.”

Captain Cronan was formally reprimanded but continued to serve. He later returned home to be honorably discharged. According to an obituary in Vermont, he died in August 1910.

Source: General Court Martial Orders, 1862, f.83. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1866: Gordon Ramsay uses indecent language to newspaperman

In late 1866, a newspaper in colonial Jamaica reported an incident in its own offices. The incident involved Gordon Ramsay, a high-ranking British military officer.

This Gordon Ramsay had a well earned reputation for heavy handedness and brutality. During his tenure as provost-marshall of Morant Bay, hundreds of civilians were tortured or executed by troops under Ramsay’s command. Ramsay was later sent to court martial for murder but was eventually acquitted on a technicality.

According to the newspaper report, Ramsay entered its offices objecting to its coverage of his military service:

“He thereupon became violent, both in manner and speech, and used language both offensive and indecent to Mr Robert Jordan… He was ordered out of the place but positively refused to go, and shortly after assaulted Mr Jordan who, in return, struck him with a ruler…”

Ramsay was eventually escorted from the premises but continued his tirade:

“He swears to murder someone in our office. It would, perhaps, not be the first murder that he has committed…”

Source: Morning Journal, Kingston, Jamaica, November 10th 1866. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1909: James Joyce can’t make it to the post office

In 1909, the Irish author James Joyce was living in Trieste with his lover, Nora Barnacle. Then both in their mid-20s, Joyce and Barnacle’s relationship was intense but sometimes variable and tempestuous.

In October, Joyce returned to Dublin on business, leaving Nora alone in Italy for three months. During this separation they agreed to send each other erotic letters. Some of these letters survive today and their contents range from passionate and erotic, to smutty and fetishistic.

Topics explored in Joyce’s letters to Nora include oral sex, self pleasuring, buggery, flatulence and defecation. He referred to her as “my little f-ckbird”, “little c-ntie” and “my sweet dirty little farter”. Joyce also confessed to masturbating, either while writing to Nora or immediately thereafter.

On December 15th, a week before starting his return journey to Trieste, Joyce wrote to Nora:

“I am sure my girlie is offended at my filthy words. Are you offended, dear, as what I said about your drawers? That is all nonsense, darling. I know they are spotless as your hearth. I know I could lick them all over, frills, legs and bottom. Only I love, in my dirty way, to think that in a certain part they are soiled. It is all nonsense too about buggering you. It is only the dirty sound of the word I like, the idea if a shy beautiful young girl like Nora pulling up her clothes behind and revealing her sweet white girlish drawers in order to excite the dirty fellow she is so fond of; and then letting him stick his dirty red lumpy pole in through the split of her drawers and up, up, up, in the darling little hole between her plump fresh buttocks.

Darling, I came off just now in my trousers so that I am utterly played out. I cannot go to the Post Office now, though I have three letters to post. [So] to bed, to bed! Goodnight, Nora mia!”

Nora responded with her own erotic letters, however, none of these survive.

Source: Letter from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, December 15th 1909. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1590: Just another altercation between London neighbours

In the spring of 1590, Sicilia Thornton of Clerkenwell sued her neighbour, Edith Parsons, for “uttering the lewdest of slanders” . According to a witness, Joanna Gage, Parsons leaned out of her window and screamed a tirade of abuse at Thornton, who was standing in her own doorway.

Some of the words uttered, Gage said, were “past womanhood to name”, however she recalled hearing Parsons shout:

“Thou art a whore, an arrant whore, a bitch… yea, worse than a bitch, thou goes sorting up and down the town after knaves… and thou art such a hot-tailed whore that neither one nor two nor 10 nor 20 knaves will scarce serve thee.”

The court found in Parsons’ favour, however no penalty against Thornton is recorded.

Source: Depositions of London Consistory Court, May 21st 1590, 213. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1913: Obscene war songs from the Ivory Coast

Maurice Delafosse was a French anthropologist and researcher who spent several years living and working on the west coast of Africa. Delafosse specialised in native languages and other cultural and behavioural aspects of tribal groups.

Writing in the first decade of the 1900s, Delafosse described how native Africans in what is now the Ivory Coast responded to threats or hostility, in this instance from the Okou:

“The women would assemble and, with their back to the enemy, make violent and exaggerated thrusts of the buttocks in the direction of the hostile party, while shouting “My arse for Okou!”

According to Delafosse, the menfolk would resort to a time-honoured tradition: the obscene song. He recorded some of the lyrics used:

“Okou is our enemy, cut off his head!”
“Okou is the excrement out of my backside!”
“Okou enjoys the sexual company of dogs!”
“The genitals of Okou are rotten and smell of feces!”

Source: Maurice Delafosse, Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociologie, No. 4, 1913. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1595: Beltrame banned from Venice for buggery claims

In October 1595, Giuseppe Beltrame was hauled before the elders of Venice, after falling out with a pretty actress named Giulia. Witnesses had observed Beltrame cursing at and abusing Giulia. He also publicly suggested that the young noblemen interested in Giulia were his sexual playthings, declaring that he had:

“..put it up the asses of the most excellent nobles who favoured the young woman [Giulia].”

Beltrame was banned from Venice for three years.

Source: Testimony of Giovanni Zenoni and judgement, October 1595, cited in E. Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice, 2008. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.