Tony McEnery: Swearing in English. Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present. Routledge, 2005.

The title of this work in combination with its inclusion in a corpus linguistics series seems to promise not only the chance to see actual swear words in print, but a whole lot of them as well. Reader beware. While Tony McEnery's Swearing in English ultimately does deliver to those readers who expect all sorts of four-letter words, a more substantial part of the text is devoted to the topics listed in the secondary title, that is bad language, purity, and power, with swearing as the point of departure for and nucleus of a corpus-driven, mostly diachronic study of the discourse of bad language. Indeed, the respective frequencies of different swear words can only fascinate to a certain point, and so after a look at swear word usage in a particular corpus, McEnery increases the scope from swearing to talking about swearing, turning to additional corpora to investigate attitudes towards the use of bad language. No leaf is left unturned, as McEnery employs a variety of methodologies, which result in a dynamic investigation of swearing that is part corpus linguistics, part historical linguistics and part social commentary.