We have been thus particular on the subject of Lord Thurlow's swearing,
partly because it is the main point of his lordship's character with
posterity, but chiefly that we might show what has already been
intimated; namely, what a nothing such talk has become, and what high
time it is to treat it as it deserves, and give it no longer in
typography those implied awful significances, those under-breaths and
intensifications of initials and hyphens, which make it pretend to have
a meaning, and are the main cause why it survives. The word _damned_ in
Lord Thurlow's mouth, for all its emphasis and effect, had as little
meaning as the word _blest_, or the word _conscience_. It has equally
little meaning in any body's. It no more signifies what it was
originally intended to signify, than the word "cursed" means
_anathematized_, or the word "pontificate" means _bridge-making_. This
is the natural death of oaths in any tremendous sense of the words, or
in any sense at all. They become things of "sound and fury, signifying
nothing." Who that utters the word "zounds," imagines that he is
speaking of such awful and inconceivable things as "God's wounds,"
though literally he is doing so? Or what honest farmer, who ejaculates
"Please the pigs" (such extraordinary things do reform and vicissitude
bring together!) supposes that his Protestant soul is propitiating the
_Pyx_, or Holy Sacrament box, of the Roman Catholic Church? Yet time
was, when the innocent word "zounds" was written with the same culpatory
dashes and hyphens as the "damns that have had their day;" and "pigs,"
we suppose, were exenterated in like manner: suggested only by their
heads and tails,--the first letter and the last. We happen to be no
swearers ourselves, so that we are speaking a good word for no custom of
our own; though, we confess, that when we come to an oath as a trait of
character, in biography or in fiction, we are no more in the habit of
balking it, than we are of ignoring any other harmless ejaculation; and
therefore, by reason of its very nonsense and nothingness, we like to
see it written plainly out as if it _were_ nothing, instead of being
mystified into a more nonsensical importance. We have known better men
than ourselves who have sworn; and we have known worse; but with none of
them had the word any meaning, nor has it any, ever, except in the
pulpit; where it is a pity (as many an excellent clergyman has thought)
that it is heard at all. Treat