"Damn" -- Funny

The History of Swear Words smartly leads off with an episode about the F-word, which is pretty much the summit of all swearing , in all its forms..and never acceptable.

But in a rather witty final episode -- an final touch -- "A History of Swear Words" takes a look at the word "Damn."

The point is well made after several episodes with far worse swear words: damn is pretty damn mild mannered now, almost NOT a swear word.

Nick Offerman -- one of the actually funny comics in the series -- opines: "I'd say damn is about at the level of, oh --"crap" -- now." Nothing special.

And yet, the historical linguists remind us.."damn" has Biblical connotations(it is the only swear word in the Bible, they say) and in tossing it at another person, you can be summoning up God himself to do horrible things to the person you sling it at.

Meanwhile, host Nic Cage spends some time on the Hollywood Hays Code of the 30's throught the 60's and gets into the famous controversy over letting Clark Gable as Rhett Butler say "Frankly Scarlett, I don't give a damn." Damn was a BIG swear word to overcome in 1939(of course, the F-word was completely out of the question then.)

The episode raises something and then misses the payoff. Cage notes that a 1955 Broadway hit musical was called "Damn Yankees." What he doesn't note is the that the 1958 movie version went out in some countries as "Whatever Lola Wants" (because "Damn" was considered a bad word) or placed on some American marquees as "Darn Yankees." Damn. 1958 was pretty primitive.

And unless I missed it, the episode didn't delve into the fact that, on TV and sometimes in movies, its the addition of the word "God" before "Damn" that bothers censors more than anything else. Understandably.

Damn.