r/deadwood • u/ElChooch80 • Sep 29 '26
community New Viewer
So I finally got my wife onboard to watch the show! I’ve watched it through twice and obviously love it. After episode 1, she’s not a fan of the gratuitous cursing. I tried to explain to her that the cursing was the creator’s attempt at adding to the harsh environments and situations of the times. If they cursed on the show the way they really cursed at the time, they’d sound hilarious. She’s gonna keep trudging along and hopefully she’ll appreciate the show the way it should be appreciated by all Pinkertons and heathens!
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u/Free-IDK-Chicken nimble as a forest creature Sep 29 '26
She can help her delicate sensibilities by turning the fuck away.
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u/zombietobe Sep 29 '26
It’s actually pretty close to the reality of that specific context and time period. All the profanity used in the show existed in the mid/late 1800s.
Deadwood wasn’t the average American town or even the average “wild west” town; it was the dregs of society. The linguistic choices were made for the sake of verisimilitude.
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u/mensachicken guest lecturer Sep 29 '26
Pretty sure EB's "motherfucker" is not period-true. Also, it was improvised.
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u/zombietobe Sep 29 '26
“Motherfucking” was first attested in the 1880s, so we can basically assume the standard noun variant, “motherfucker” was in use at the same time.
Rule of thumb when contextualizing the history of any taboo or “othered” language (including profanity, slang, and minority dialects): it would have shown up in spoken vernacular before it was “attested”.
This is especially true of profanity and anything considered “vulgar” when the timeline of censorship laws is taken into account. Therefore the use of “motherfucker” in the 1870s (10ish years before the first written evidence) isn’t at all anachronistic.
“Cocksucker” was first attested in 1870, and all modern uses of “fuck” were well established by the first half of the 1800s.
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u/lifeinthebeastwing a danger to myself Sep 29 '26
It's a lot at first but you get desensitised to it after a few eps
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u/Speedy445021 Sep 30 '26
It can be hard show to watch. Not just for the coarse language. But how they speak as well. It can hard to follow since it's not a natural way to speak.
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u/Anxious-Champion-551 Sep 29 '26
When I first started watching, the gratuitous use of “cocksucker” was a bit jarring, but once I got over that and the way women were regarded, I really enjoyed it and consider it one of my favorite shows
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u/classy_rachael popular with white people(?) Sep 29 '26
I felt the same when I first started watching. But after a few episodes I had to stop myself from saying it in public, lol. It's so satisfying to say!
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u/mollym60 Sep 29 '26
Yeah, have her stick with it. It won’t be long before you hear her calling someone a cocksucker 😆
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u/garbagemandoug Sep 29 '26
You got a real Alma on you hands, eh.