Swearing, or cursing, is slang often with blasphemy, sometimes with physiology, more recently with personal insult added. Men traditionally swore more than women, but there is some evidence that the gap here is slowly closing. Some settings — prison, the athletic field and locker room, the military — are difficult to imagine free of swearing. When I was in the Army I once heard a fellow soldier say, “The motherf***ing mother f***er motherf***ed me,” a sentence I still admire for its economy.

Swearing can also be artful. In my late adolescence I worked with a man named Bob Larman, a man so heavy he kept a cloth (his schmatta) over his stomach when driving lest the steering wheel wear out his trousers, who, when honked at by other drivers, quickly rolled down the window of his baby-blue Plymouth station wagon and replied, “Blow it out your duffel bag, farthead.” In the Army, at basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, I encountered Staff Sergeant Andrew Atherton, who combined the high and low language to comic effect. When urging church attendance, to cite but a single example, he remarked: “As for those of you of the Hebrew persuasion, it behooves you to get your sorry asses to services on Friday evening.”

The linguist John McWhorter, a man of wide learning and impressive common sense — not a combination one meets with every day — has taken up the subject of swearing in his excellent new book Nine Nasty Words. The words are damn, hell, the s-word, the f-word, ass, words for private parts, what he calls “the other f-word” (this used to put down gay men), the b-word for women, and a final chapter he calls “A Motherf***ing Addendum.” In the chapters devoted to each, he provides the etymologies for the words, their earliest uses, their changes over time, their sometimes different uses in different countries, their contemporary usage and variations. He does so with a pleasing evenhandedness and a winning sense of humor. “Language change,” he notes, “becomes a spectator sport for linguists.”

It’s difficult to imagine a more companionable spectator on this “linguistic journey through profanity” than John McWhorter. He is always ready to stop to note the interesting oddity — the origin of “God bless you” to one who has sneezed, the distinction between profanity and swearing, the use of ass as a suffix: “big-ass,” “broke-ass,” etc. He is especially good at picking up small differences in the use of “cuss” words. “Ass makes one think ‘dirty,’” he writes, “but butt is, while crude, more negotiable.” He claims there is no past tense for the s-word, though it is unclear why he rejects “shat.” He does not take up all the various names for the bathroom or toilet, so I grant him full rights to my favorite, found somewhere decades ago in the pages of Dylan Thomas, “the House of Commons.”

I can record with some precision my own introduction to and gradual use of profanity. Until I was eight and a half years old, I regularly said “gosh” (for God), “heck” (for hell), “darn” (for damn), “cripes” (for Christ), “crap” (for the s-word), and “phooey” (for the f-word). All this ended in the summer of 1945, when I went off to an all-boys camp at Eagle River, Wis., and learned how the older boys dispensed with these childish euphemisms. I don’t say that I returned home after that summer to ask my mother to pass the goddamn peas, but I had turned in my old words for the more lustrous vocabulary of profanity.

My father, who was no angel, swore, but only infrequently, and with a highly restricted choice of words. I never heard him use the f-word and he only used the s-word as a noun with the prefix “bull” before it. On rare occasions he might call a businessman he thought had cheated him or not played by the rules an s.o.b., or, more rarely, a bastard, but never by one of the scores of names for human genitals. At age six or seven, I came home to recite the playground verse that begins “Eeeny meeny miny moe” and goes on to use the n-word, to have my father severely upbraid me for doing so, instructing me that we Jews were the last people to call other people by such names. He may have been no angel, my father, but he was never less than a good and honorable man.

Profanity entails dysphemism, the choice of the unpleasant or derogatory term, the opposite of euphemism. Take what for me is still not an easy word to say, and one I rarely use, a-hole. “Profanity first involved the holy,” McWhorter writes, “and only later the holes.” In an early age the a-hole was a jerk, but no longer. McWhorter nicely defines the creature thus: “The essence of being an [a-hole] is contravening the expected,” and “the key element is that he knew he could do so differently.”

And so we come to that all-purpose nasty word, the f-word or, as it is sometimes known, the f-bomb. Clifton Fadiman, John McWhorter might be pleased to know, long ago termed it “the coital intensifier.” Intensify the word surely does, along with much else. I know people who cannot mention the name Trump without the coital intensifier in front of it. McWhorter runs through the various etymologies proposed for the f-word and concludes that its origin “is finally unknown.” (The same, he holds, is true for the dreaded c-word.) He remarks on the satisfying sound of the word — “What the f***!” “F*** that!,” and let us not forget “flying f***.” He notes its all-purpose utility, and allows that he himself, though “a rather reserved person,” tends “to use f*** casually.”

The f-word has by now become all but commonplace, and on cable-television dramas more than commonplace. I recently watched a cable show called “Mare of Easttown,” in which the eponymous hero, a retired detective played by Kate Winslet, speaks more sentences with the f-word in them than without. My favorite example of the use of the word is that by W. C. Fields. A young man who claimed Fields was his true father — Fields denied it — one day showed up at Fields’s home. When Fields’s butler asked what he ought to tell the young man, Fields replied: “Tell him something equivocal — like go f*** yourself.”

A contender for the vilest of all nasty words is the dysphemism for fellater. (Fellatio, the word from which it derives, has always seemed to me to sound more like a pasta than a sex act.) McWhorter devotes three pages to the word “c***sucker,” holding that it has “come to just mean someone who was generally annoying, wrong,” and that it has long since joined “the slang of yesteryear” and ceased to be a “living word.” This is probably so, for the last man to have used the word with some regularity was George Halas, the owner and for years coach of the Chicago Bears, who used it to curse out opponents and his own players when they erred. And yet in its standard, as opposed to dysphemic, form, the word has found its occasionally comic usefulness. Tennessee Williams, for ex­ample, speculated that King Edward VIII of England abdicated his throne for the not especially attractive Mrs. Wall­is Simpson because she was, in Wil­liams’s words, thought by the king to be the “best fellatrix in all of Europe.”

Does the new ease and openness with which people now use nasty words — begun soon after the end of World War II, when, as McWhorter notes, “damn” and “hell” were replaced by the s- and f-words — denote greater freedom, a defeat for censorship, a boost for candor and sophistication generally? Some would say no, perhaps the reverse, and I am among them. Consider only the damage that the ready use of nasty words has done to comedy. All the gates now being open, comedians, at least in nightclubs and on cable television, can now make jokes and do bits on masturbation, blow jobs, and any other once-prohibited subject they choose. (Some earlier comedians, Buddy Hackett, Lenny Bruce, Belle Barth among them, worked what was called “blue” or off-color humor, but such effect as they had was owing chiefly to their daring to cross the conventional boundaries set down by what was once known as that now disappeared entity called “polite society.”) The problem is that these subjects and the use of profanity in punch lines in comedy turn out not to be all that amusing, whereas before, comedians, forced to fall back on their imaginations, produced more winning comedy.

As for my own swearing, I should say that it has never been egregious but generally what passed for standard for a man of my generation. If as an adolescent playing baseball I hit an easy pop-up with men on base, I might loose the f-word; if I made an error afield, I doubtless muttered the s-word. I never knowingly swore among women or children. I don’t believe I ever used any of McWhorter’s slur words to put down ethnic or minority groups. Still, regular profanity came easily enough to me, and only recently have I made the conscious decision to abandon it.

I have, however, kept open the option of using Yiddish profanity, so that on forms asking for my preferred pronoun, I sometimes fill in the word schmuckowitz. I recently used the word dreck, Yiddish for the s-word, in print. Occasionally I refer to someone as a putz. I don’t believe I have ever, until now, used the word yentz, Yiddish for the f-word. But, then, my Yiddish is limited, being just sufficient to fool gentiles into thinking I know the language but insufficient, alas, to talk to real Jews.

Nasty words and their many variations are somehow less repulsive coming out of the mouths of men much younger than I. Now an alte kocker (translation, if needed, on request), I have come to find using profanity in English unseemly. Enough so that in recent years I have determined to delete it from my vocabulary, and by and large have done so. A stubbed toe might still bring out an errant f-word, a stymieing computer problem in exasperation an s-word. Quitting swearing is much easier than quitting smoking, and, I am pleased to report, life without the regular use of profanity is in no way diminished.