“Indeed, your common Englishman now scarcely curses at all.  A more colourless and conventional affair than what in England is called swearing one can scarcely imagine.  It is just common talk, with some half-dozen orthodox bad words dropped in here and there in the most foolish and illogical manner.  Fancy having orthodox unorthodox words!  I remember one day getting into a third-class smoking carriage on the Metropolitan Railway about one o’clock, and finding it full of rough working men.  Everything they said was seasoned with one incredibly stupid adjective, and no doubt they thought they were very desperate characters.  At last I asked them not to say that word again.  One forthwith asked me ’What the ——­’—­I really cannot quote these puerilities—­’what the idiotic cliche that mattered to me?’ So I looked at him quietly over my glasses, and I began.  It was a revelation to these poor fellows.  They sat open-mouthed, gasping.  Then those that were nearest me began to edge away, and at the very next station they all bundled out of the carriage before the train stopped, as though I had some infectious disease.  And the thing was just a rough imperfect rendering of some mere commonplaces, passing the time of day as it were, with which the heathen of Aleppo used to favour the servants of the American missionary.  Indeed,” said Professor Gargoyle, “if it were not for women there would be nothing in England that one could speak of as swearing at all.”

“I say,” said I, “is not that rather rough on the ladies?”

“Not at all; they have agreed to consider certain words, for no very good reason, bad words.  It is a pure convention; it has little or nothing to do with the actual meaning, because for every one of these bad words there is a paraphrase or synonym considered to be quite suitable for polite ears.  Hence the feeblest creature can always produce a sensation by breaking the taboo.  But women are learning how to undo this error of theirs now.  The word ‘damn,’ for instance, is, I hear, being admitted freely into the boudoir and feminine conversation; it is even considered a rather prudish thing to object to this word.  Now, men, especially feeble men, hate doing things that women do.  As a consequence, men who go about saying ‘damn’ are now regarded by their fellow-men as only a shade less effeminate than those who go about saying ‘nasty’ and ‘horrid.’  The subtler sex will not be long in noticing what has happened to this objectionable word.  When they do they will, of course, forthwith take up all the others.  It will be a little startling perhaps at first, but in the end there will be no swearing left.  I have no doubt there will be those who will air their petty wit on the pioneer women, but where a martyr is wanted a woman can always be found to offer herself.  She will clothe herself in cursing, like the ungodly, and perish in that Nessus shirt, a martyr to pure language.  And then this dull cad swearing—­a mere unnecessary affectation of coarseness—­will disappear.  And a very good job too.