George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris & London, 1933

  “…. twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word 'bloody'. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says 'bloody', unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is fuck. No doubt in time fuck, like bloody, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational. The indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret--usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example fuck. ...."

Jane Birkin's English Bull

Eric Elmosnino is awkwardly
elegant and louche as Serge Gainsbourg
in the appropriately titled Gainsbourg (2010)  There is more than a suggestion of Rowan Atkinson’s Bean as he shyly or slyly sips a cocktail. Like Gainsbourg, I fell in love with Jane Birkin’s Engish bull.

Une servante, sans vous dire un mot, vous précède

Des escaliers, des couloirs sans fin se succèdent

Décorés de bronzes baroques, d'anges dorés,

D'Aphrodites et de Salomés.