Gabrielle Alina Eugenia Maria Petit was born on February 20, 1893, to working-class parents in Tournai, Hainaut. She was living in Brussels as a saleswoman when the First World War broke out, and immediately volunteered to serve with the Belgian Red Cross.
In 1914, Petit helped her wounded fiancé cross the border into the neutral Netherlands to reunite with his regiment, and in the process passed some valuable information about the Imperial German Army along to the British. Seeing her potential as a secret agent, MI1 (which would later develop into MI6) soon hired her and sent her to spy on Germans after brief training.
Petit's career in espionage lasted for less than two years, during which time she collected information, assisted the underground mail service Mot du Soldat, and helped soldiers cross the Dutch border. Her fate, however, was not quite to be a real-life James Bond. In 1916, she befriended a German agent posing as a Dutchman, who exposed her identity to the military police. She was arrested, tried and convicted as a spy, sentenced to death.
Petit's bravery did not falter even during her trial, and she refused to reveal the identities of her fellow agents despite offers of amnesty. On April 1, 1916, she was shot by a firing squad in Schaerbeek and died at the age of 23. Her alleged last words were: "I will show them that a Belgian woman knows how to die. Long live the King! Long live Belgium!"
After the war, Petit's story began to circulate and the brave young agent was praised as a national martyr. In May 1919, a state funeral was held for her, attended by the Queen, and her remains were buried with full military honors. A life-size bronze statue of her was also erected at Place Saint-Jean in her honor in 1923, created by Égide Rombaux, the first sculpture to be dedicated to a working-class woman.
“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” So said Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a historian whose work demonstrates that women’s important contributions to society are often overlooked. Taken wildly out of context, the quote could apply to any of the women highlighted in our five stories below. Often born into struggle and fed up with the men who underestimated them, these women stole, schemed, and conned their way into history.
Sarah Rachel Russell grew up poor in London’s East End. After selling rabbit furs, working as a fortune teller, and a brief stint as a prostitute, she set her sights on the beauty industry. Russell sold exotic makeup with a dark twist: it contained a heavy dose of highly toxic arsenic.
From the late 19th century into the early 20th century, Comtesse de Monteil—a cat burglar, jewel thief, and fake countess—wreaked havoc across the Mediterranean’s most lavish tourist destinations. She led a crew of highly skilled thieves, targeting only the wealthiest of victims and establishments until her arrest in 1908.
The Roaring ‘20s were known for jazz music, speakeasies, and a new generation of female criminals. Celia Cooney wasn’t America’s only “Bobbed Haired Bandit,” just one of several robbers the press glorified as provocative women’s rights icons.
The only woman ever executed in New Zealand, Minnie Dean, was labeled a baby farmer, a murderer, and a monster—but was she really any of these things? What we do know is that Frost took in kids without a home, 17 died in her care, and three were buried in her garden. Was she a killer, a crook, or a woman doing what she could to help?
Prussian immigrant Marm Mandelbaum, also known as the Queen of Fences, was one of the most influential crime bosses in New York’s history. Not only was she well-versed as a con artist and financial fraud, but she started her own school of crime for young people living on the streets.
We will not go gentle into that good night here at Strong Language. We will rage. Oh, we will rage, all right, uttering our shit’s, fuck’s, and damn’s until the bitter-ass end.
And that’s true for a lot of us, according to Michael Erard in his latest book, Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our and First Last Words, out now from the MIT Press.Apparently some of us even come into speech, let alone leave it behind, kicking and screaming—and swearing!
The story of first and last words that Erard, a linguist and author, tells in Bye Bye I Love You is intelligent, humane, cross-disciplinary, beautifully written, and comprehensive, offering a historical and cultural account of our first and final utterances as much as a linguistic one.
Germane to my fellow vulgarians here, I was fascinated to learn that cursing does have a place amid the mama’s and famous last words we associate with our initial and ultimate speech acts. (And as Erard well explains, these verbal bookends are indeed far more complex than those associations.)
Bye Bye I Love You by Michael Erard (2025, MIT Press)
Erard’s research shows that we are far quieter in our dying, and, when actually observed, the substance of our speech is far more ordinary than we, the surviving, might otherwise expect or desire. That’s in large part because so many of us are living longer—and dying in medicalized circumstances, afflicted with multiple conditions that limit our cognitive, physical, and thus linguistic capacity. We may well be delirious if not already unconscious.
Still, Erard identifies patterns. Answering the question of “Will approaching death change the shape of my utterance?” in his chapter “A Linguistics of Last Words,” he explains:
When people do speak, they call out: people’s names, curses, religious phrases. They state the obvious (“I’m dying”). They ask questions with sadly obvious answers (“Am I dying?”) … They direct a carer to do something mundane (“Take off my mask”; “Lift up my head”; “Water”); these utterances resemble the action schemes of first words. Sometimes they bid farewell (“I’m done”) or demand release (“Let me out of here”), as they’re leave-taking in the literal sense. They can be unfailingly polite (“thank you”). Yet from a doctor I heard that Anglophones often say, “Oh fuck oh fuck.” This is because cursing has a well-documented analgesic effect; actual vulgarities relieve more pain than made-up ones. Yet vulgarity and transgression are culture-specific, so the experienced person might encounter a variety of curses, to be matched with Samoan babies’ first words (“shit!”) As to whether or not a dying person swears more (or does any other linguistic behavior), the only way to tell is if you know how often they swore before. Which is something few of us are able to say with objective certainty.
Present company excluded, of course.
There is something intuitively palliative about end-of-life profanity. Yes, swearing puts the anal in analgesic (wait, that’s not how that word works); it can help reduce the sensation of pain, as Erard noted. But we would expect swearing, too, seeing that this class of language functions to help give expression to intense emotions, inter alia. And what is more intense than death? “[T]he brain reserves a special place for words with emotional associations, something that the names of loved ones and curses both share,” Erard writes.
But Erard goes further, contextualizing cursing within an initial paradigm he sketches for our last language. I quote at length (paragraph-initial bolding is his, other bolding is mine to transpose his original italics not rendered in formatting here; sic passim):
Final utterances are likely to be short. Without knowing what was linguistically typical for an individual, it’s impossible to say what changed for them. One thing that’s reasonable to say about final spoken utterances is that they’re shorter than the ones a person would typically use. Curses, names, imperatives, interjections: these are all short, one or two words. So are moans (if one includes them as behaviors that can be last words) and cries. This may seem like an unsubstantial conclusion, but linguists often consider utterance length, which immediately opens the door to considering what remains of syntactic complexity. …
Final utterances are likely to be disinhibited. Even if they aren’t outright delirious, people who are known to be discreet or proper may say things they wouldn’t have before. They might curse, comment on someone’s appearance, or accuse someone of a bad act. But this is to be expected, as one of the functions of the brain’s cortex is to inhibit behaviors and attention, and its failure means its inhibitory powers fall away. The neurochemical commotion in the dying brain will have less effect on the limbic system at first. Consequently, such limbic vocalizations as emotionally charged language, exclamations, and cursing have fewer impediments to expression. …
Final utterances are likely to be formulaic. It’s likely that the laissez parler[“say what you will”; unscripted] last word has been used beforewith some frequency, an aspect of language at the end of life that has escaped notice so far. Many last words like these reported anecdotally … fall into the category of “formulaic language,” which researchers have defined as “conversational speech formulas, idioms, pause fillers, and other fixed expressions known to the native speaker.” In English, these are utterances like “I love you,” “Thank you,” “Can I go?” “I’m going,” Cheerio,” “My dear wife,” “Amen,” “Oh God,” “Oh fuck.”
Erard goes on to explain that formulaic language—which is more familiar, automatic, and recallable—does a lot of heavy lifting for us both cognitively and communicatively. And when we’re dying, our cognitive capacity is low but our need to communicate is high.“ Thus, at the end of life,” he writes, “formulaic language shows up as prayers, other religious language, expressions of affection and relationship, and other words or phrases a person might have used a lot in their lives, including names and curses.” He continues that “if you want to have a prayer, a sacred phrase, or a deity’s name on your lips in your final moments,”—or, you know, a refulgent F-bomb— “it helps to practice well in advance of the deathbed, ideally for most of your life.”
We need no further encouragement to rehearse our moribund motherfucker’s, Michael.
For his part, Erard told me in an email that he submitted an abstract to the 2025 international conference on the f-word, positing fuck as “an ideal last word” due to “some psycholinguistic properties that give it some advantages in some end of life circumstances.” (Yes, there very much is such a so-called WTF Conference, and this year will feature keynotes from Strong Language’s very own Jonathon Green and Jesse Sheidlower as well as Tony McEnery.)
Erard includes a fourth element to his framework for our lives’ closing remarks: people will communicate differently with different partners. Here, he cites moving examples of intimate nonverbal communication from people who have variously lost speech in their final moments. My incorrigibly irreverent mind, of course, is surmising sweary scenarios.
Now, to rewind the lifespan to first words, a topic where I, for one, was surprised to learn swearing pertains. We wouldn’t want babies, now would we, to mark this moment in their languagehood with some vulgar vocable? Oh, their frickin’ ears! Oh, their precious, toothless, frickin’ slavering little mouths!
But my surprise, as it happens, precisely reinforces one of Erard’s main points—what we count, even condition, as first words is a product of cultural expectations. As he puts it, “a first word is less something that a baby produces and more something that babies and adults do together.”
The phenomenon, however, is ostensibly by no means widespread. One user on Bluesky, for what it’s worth, shared that his first word was “bugger.” In my own family, there is lore that my uncle’s first word was fockengock—a nonsense term he used to signify “water” and which he and my mother embraced as a sometime minced oath. Keep practicing, Uncle, and you can make it your last! Maybe, dear fucking reader, you have your own sweary first word tale to recount? Pray tell,
(Fockengock: does such gibberish even count as a first word? This is exactly the kind of question Erard deftly unpacks throughout Bye Bye I Love You. And if you’re curious, the ten most frequent first words in American English, according to one important study, were: “mommy,” “daddy,” “ball,” “bye,” “hi,” “no,” “dog,” “baby,” “woof woof,” and “bananas.” Many of these are frequent in many other languages as well. And to be sure, the topic of children’s first swear words is one for a different day.)
But the phenomenon is not unheard of. Which leads us to the Samoan “shit!” alluded to before. Erard cites influential fieldwork on infant language learning by linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs:
As a young mother herself, [Ochs] spent time studying children in Western Samoa in the 1970s and 1980s, carefully portraying how the baby interacts with many caregivers: not just a mother but other children and female family members (though rarely fathers). Ochs noted that Samoan concepts of natural behavior (amio) and socially appropriate behavior (aga) preside over how infants and caregivers react. Samoans tolerate behavior in children that would be considered a disciplinary problem from the Western point of view—running and shouting during church services, throwing stones at caregivers, hitting siblings—because children aren’t able to control amio nor adequately perform aga.
It is in this context that Ochs related Samoans’ emblematic first word, which is a shortened version of a longer curse, “ai tae,” meaning “eat shit.” This word embarrassed the Samoan mothers, at least when they mentioned it to Ochs, even though it confirmed a socially acceptable view that children are ruffians, unfit for social interaction, and even though the children didn’t actually know the meaning of tae. Yet saying “shit” for the first time confirmed that the young child was indeed fitting the template of what young children do.
In his notes, Erard directly quotes from Ochs, worth sharing here as much for the additional context as learning more about how Samoans think and talk about swearing:
When we asked why young children produced tae as their very first word, we were told that very young children palauvale(“use bad or indecent language”) or ulavale(“make nuisance of oneself, make trouble”) … In other words, this is the nature of children.
Because children act like little shits, of course they are going to say “shit.” Erard raises this example from Samoa not to gawk at how exotic or different the culture is from the West. Again, he uses it to emphasize that first words are culturally constructed, not natural or universal—parents and caregivers extract them from babbling as emblematic of cultural beliefs and values, as “a prescribed verbal form that human babies must produce as the threshold that grants them personhood.” This is as true of shit, he argues, as mama, which reflects culturally specific beliefs and rituals surrounding the mother-child bond, the primacy of the domestic sphere, and, yes, gender dynamics in society.
In his 2016 book What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, author Benjamin K. Bergen also covers Ochs’s research on the Samoan shit-y first-word, as previously excerpted and reviewed on the blog.
Finally, Erard cites field studies by Don Kulick, a linguistic anthropologist who has worked, among other places, in Gapun, a small and isolated village and community in Papua New Guinea whose people speak a disesteemed language, Tayap, along with the creole Tok Pisin.
Kulick observed that a child’s first word in Tayap, among other variations on the theme, was okɨ, pronounced like “okuh” and meaning “I’m out of here”—almost more adolescent than infantile, which corresponds to the Gapun view that children are “emotionally bristly and definitely antisocial.” (I mean, can you blame them? Adults are the worst.)
Kulick added that Gapun adults don’t exactly converse with children, holding the view that such an enterprise is futile. However, Erard goes on:
… children do get enough interaction to realize that everyone is constantly lying to them—in Kulick’s account, village life consists of a surprisingly large amount of low-grade, overlapping and mutual gaslighting—as well as enough exposure to obscenity that Kulick suggested that children’s realfirst words are two Tok Pisin phrases, “kaikaikan” (“eat cunt”) and “giaman” (“that’s a lie”).
I’ll let that prospective first word, kaikaikan, be my last.
Discover so much in Michael Erard’s incisive, affecting, and sometimes sweary achievement, Bye Bye I Love You, published by the MIT Press and available from your preferred booksellers. The publisher sent me a copy for review on my etymology blog, Mashed Radish, during which reading I was compelled to discuss the topic of swearing in first and last words for this blog.
Laudator Temporis Acti presents a quote from Josephus’ Jewish Wars (5.272, tr. H. St. J. Thackeray):
Watchmen were accordingly posted by them on the towers, who gave warning whenever the engine was fired and the stone in transit, by shouting in their native tongue, “Sonny’s coming”; whereupon those in the line of fire promptly made way and lay down, owing to which precautions the stone passed harmlessly through and fell in their rear.
He also provides Thackeray’s note on “Sonny’s coming”:
Probably, as Reland suggests, ha-eben (“the stone”) was corrupted to habben (“the son”); compare similar jocose terms, such as “Black Maria,” “Jack Johnson,” used in the Great War.
Due to expected inclement weather, the Burkwood Hills school district is moving to a Flexible Instruction Day (FID) tomorrow. All students should log in virtually for instruction and follow their typical daily schedule. And by “typical daily schedule,” we mean an absolute clusterfuck of pleading and consequence-threatening to get your kids to do literally any of their required work while you also somehow do your job from home. You will break down emotionally and spiritually multiple times throughout the day and annoy everyone in your family.
Scheduled activities will include playing Twister with the cats in a pile of Magna-Tiles, crying, throwing half-eaten Uncrustables at the kitchen window, running manically through the house in pajamas, watching TV, more crying, and eating a gross ton of Z-Bars.
Students will log onto their twelve-year-old tablet with no power cord for a Zoom call with twenty other children, most of whom are screaming into their screens, asking what to do. Eventually, your child’s teacher’s exhausted face will appear and go through an inaudible PowerPoint presentation about addition or phonics that your child will utterly ignore. The teacher will then email you a worksheet. You will go through the worksheet with your child, who is now distracted by his brother hanging off the side of the table, throwing gobs of Fisher-Price slime at the dog, screaming, “I’m Spider-Man! I’m Spider-Man!” You will end up doing the worksheet in your child’s handwriting.
All afterschool and evening activities will proceed as scheduled. You cannot imagine what these might be, but they are likely attended by parents who have it more together than you. Parents on the PTA. Parents who hand out snacks at soccer games. Parents who make costumes for the school plays, even for kids who are not their own. That is not you—therefore, please disregard the announcement about afterschool and evening activities.
Why did you study the humanities in college? Why didn’t you do what your uncle suggested and go into engineering? Or study law like your mom wanted? Then you might have a high-paying job and could afford to send your children to private school, where snow days are probably spent at the museum appreciating fine art or planting trees. No, you had to study English literature, and you now teach at one of several dying colleges, shuttling between blank-walled classrooms and bussing home frantically to trade off with your spouse, who is attending to the nightmare of Flexible Instruction Day. The article you are supposed to be writing is not even half-done, and your kids are eating chocolate chips straight out of the bag.
What is wrong with you? When did your life become like this? Don’t even think about blaming the economy. Your single mother worked three jobs and helped you and your siblings with homework in the evenings. You started crying the other day because you couldn’t open a jar of banana peppers. There are parents fleeing from terrorism and war who manage to read their children stories before bed. Meanwhile, last night before bed, you watched three TikToks with your kids, and one of them had the word “fuck” in it
If you don’t get your shit together parenting-wise, your kids are going to start thinking that being a YouTuber is a viable career path. One day, they’ll have to go to an important dinner with their boss and be unable to eat anything but chicken nuggets, embarrass themselves, get fired, and die. They’ll forget how to read, which is probably impossible, but if any kids could test this limit, it’s them.
All staff, besides the facilities department, should feel free to work from home or come into the building if they like. Members of the facilities department should report to work based on virtual instruction protocol per their supervisor. Parents should fuck off and die but also make sure their children somehow complete a full day of schoolwork.
Thank you for your patience (lol), BHSD Administration
early homo sapiens b like help i cant stop making bowls . help i cant stop domesticating plants and animals. help i cant stop developing language and architecture and religion
ok im obsessed w this tag
once in grade 6 I saw a ‘pottery making club’ in a ditch on the schoolyard- I assume at some point someone realized there was actually good quality clay in the ditch and when I walked up there were about a dozen 12 year olds sitting around the few girls who had brought their water bottles out to mix the clay, and a designated spot to put the finished bowls and tablets, and people going off and collecting sticks to make designs with and i really think that’s the natural state of the human race
In elementary school I learned that you can make paint out of certain sedimentary rocks on the playground if you crushed them and mixed with water and at one point I had up to 25 kindergarten through third graders making cave paintings on the underside of the slides
The nature of man is such that every so often, someone recreates the neolithic era.
Log in
In his 2016 book What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, author Benjamin K. Bergen also covers Ochs’s research on the Samoan shit-y first-word, as previously 
