Besides, he adds, “I’m not publishing a dictionary. “It’s a resistance to the existence of the imaginative world I’m portraying,” he says. A lot of this, he thinks, is that people have been brainwashed by old Westerns-they’re used to the taciturn, deeds-not-words stereotype, not cowboys as sailors. And Milch is equally determined to win this shoot-out. Sheidlower, however, won’t back down: “I have absolutely no doubt the language is inauthentic,” he says. Milch, for his part, dismisses the OED for basing its citations on “the first appearance in literature.” After all, he says, “it might take fifteen years for a verbal expression to make it into print.” So Deadwood could cuss like this and the OED wouldn’t know. “The dates which appear in Spears’s book are not based on solid evidence,” he says. But Sheidlower dismisses Spears’s scholarship. “Spears guesses that it began to appear early in the century,” says Milch. Spears’s Slang and Euphemism (1981) and Ashley Montagu’s The Anatomy of Swearing (1967). “It’s called ‘Profanity in Deadwood,’ and it has like 50 sources.” The two main ones he says he used are Richard A. He cites a bibliography he put together in his research. Milch counters that he spent a year researching the real town of Deadwood, South Dakota, including reading letters and diaries. Sheidlower has found it in court-martial testimony from the Civil War, too, but says that all evidence indicates “it was not as common as it is in the show.” In most dictionaries, cocksucker, which is said eight times in the first episode, dates to around 1890. “There are examples of ‘ mother fucking’ from court cases in Texas in the late 1880s.” (It was used as an insult.) However, “the word itself doesn’t show up until late nineteen-teens.” “ Motherfucker, as far as anyone knows, was not in use at the time,” he adds. But he says most of the nonsexual uses of it-as an intensifier, for example-didn’t come about until around World War I. Next day he gives him his money back And re ruces her rent. The scene of Vito talking to landlord for the old lady being evicted for having a dog. Sheidlower agrees that the F-word was in use back then. However the sopranos have enjoyed credit for making up a word that was. So fuck or fucking is used 43 times in the first episode of Deadwood. But “the evidence that we have is that they were using more religious blasphemy than the sexual insults which are popular today.” And on the show.Īs with his earlier boundaries-of-taste-pushing series, NYPD Blue, Milch’s dialogue is designed to let viewers know they’ve entered a world with different standards. “There were cursing contests when cowboys would get together and insult each other,” he says. Jesse Sheidlower, the American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and the scholar of cussing who wrote The F-Word, says probably not. to answer the question once and for all: Did 1870s Americans really use such colloquially foul language with the Tourettic frequency of a Hollywood producer? “After a while, it gets a little discouraging,” he growls, calling right back from L.A.
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David Milch, creator of the new HBO Western, Deadwood, is peeved that TV critics keep carping about his potty-mouthed pioneers.
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