Chapter 7: Proverbs, Exclamations, and Genteel Profanity
Learning Objectives
- Use period proverbs and stock phrases to add texture to improvised dialogue.
- Choose interjections and filler words appropriate to the eighteenth century rather than the twenty-first.
- Use mild religious exclamations the way genteel eighteenth-century speakers actually did, without anachronism.
Grammar gets a conversation started, but proverbs, interjections, and stock exclamations are what make it sound lived in. This chapter is a well-stocked pantry: dip into it whenever a line feels a little flat and needs seasoning.
7.1 Proverbs
Eighteenth-century social critics loved to complain about proverbs. Lord Chesterfield sneered that "a vulgar man is perpetually using vulgar proverbs," and etiquette writers of the day insisted that an elegant speaker avoided them entirely. Primary sources tell a different story: everybody used them, constantly, and the elder gentry and the lower and middling classes leaned on them hardest of all. Many are still instantly recognizable today:
Birds of a feather flock together. Actions speak louder than words. A burnt child dreads the fire. Fortune favors the bold. Make hay while the sun shines. A fool and his money are soon parted. Necessity is the mother of invention. No news is good news. It never rains but it pours. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Others have faded from everyday use but are perfectly intelligible on first hearing:
He that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing. Beggars must not be choosers. What can't be cured must be endured. Of two evils choose the least. A man's house is his castle. Give him an inch and he'll take an ell. Misfortunes never come singly.
Beyond full proverbs, the period had a rich stock of what one etiquette writer dismissively called "trite phraseology" — figurative idioms that would have been instantly familiar to any listener, hackneyed by 1770 the same way "think outside the box" is hackneyed today:
to put on airs • to beat about the bush • to let the cat out of the bag • to count one's chickens before they're hatched • to bury the hatchet • to strike while the iron is hot • to have too many irons in the fire • to be at the end of one's tether • not care a farthing for • to keep one's head above water • as poor as a church mouse • as sober as a judge • a wild-goose chase • by hook or by crook
A proverb or idiom, dropped naturally into a sentence, is one of the lowest-effort, highest-payoff tools in this book — it requires no grammar changes at all, just a bit of vocabulary confidence. Keep a handful in your back pocket for whichever character you're playing that day.
7.2 Interjections
Thomas Dilworth's period grammar defined an interjection as a word denoting "a sudden Passion of the Mind, without the Help of any other Words" — and eighteenth-century speech had a colorful set of them, most now unfamiliar:
ah • alas • fie • foh • pish • pshaw (or psha) • pooh (or poh) • good lack • heigh-ho • hem • la
Ah, poor soul! I dare say he has been vexed enough. Fie, fie! You know it perfectly well, though you deny it. Pooh, pooh, that's the old story. Good lack! Why didn't you tell me?
Modern interjections like "wow," "oops," and "no way" will jar a guest right out of the moment. Swap in period interjections even in small, throwaway reactions — they're easy to learn and instantly recognizable as old-fashioned without requiring any explanation.
7.3 Fillers
What we'd call verbal filler — words that carry little information but keep a conversation moving — worked differently in the period than they do now. Modern fillers like "you know" and "like" have no eighteenth-century equivalent and should be avoided entirely in character. Period speakers reached instead for:
well • come • why • pray • in truth
Well, I am vastly glad to see you. Come, Jack, will you go? Why, I had determined when I went into my new house to give a ball. Pray, Ma'am, don't believe it. In truth, I desire no better entertainment than his company.
7.4 Genteel Profanity
Swearing "by God" — as in You have used me ill, by God! — was understood as genuinely profane, and was, by convention, confined mostly to men speaking among other men; a man who let such an oath slip in front of ladies was expected to apologize for it. But a whole set of milder invocations of the Deity sat comfortably within polite conversation and were used by men and women alike, functioning more like modern "goodness gracious" than a real oath:
God knows • God forbid • Lord • for God's sake • God bless me! • thank God
How it can have got about, God knows, but everybody speaks of it as certain. Lord, I wish I could remember it! God bless me! I hardly knew you!
Genteel profanity — Mild invocations of religious language (Lord, God knows, thank God) that eighteenth-century polite society treated as acceptable exclamations rather than as swearing, distinct from a genuine oath sworn "by God."
7.5 Putting It Together
Take a flat modern reaction — "Oh, come on, that's ridiculous, I can't believe it" — and rebuild it with tools from this chapter:
Pish, come now, that's the most ridiculous thing ever I heard — Lord, who would believe it!
Try building your own stock of two or three interjections and one proverb you can reach for reflexively; having them ready will keep you from reaching for a modern reaction under pressure.