‘Mind your language’ is a reproach: stop swearing, or speak more politely. It is what a parent says when a child tries out a word learned in the playground, and what one adult says to another, usually half in jest, when an anecdote turns ripe. Dictionaries file it alongside ‘mind your manners’ as a polite warning to be careful what you say so as not to offend. In American English the same job is usually done by ‘watch your language’ or ‘watch your mouth’.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘mind your language’?
There is no coinage to hunt down here; the phrase assembles itself from a very old sense of a very common verb. ‘Mind’ meaning ‘give heed to, pay attention to’ has been in English since the sixteenth century, and the narrower sense ‘be careful about’ was established by the 1730s. That imperative ‘mind’ is a workhorse of British English: mind your manners, mind your Ps and Qs, mind the step, mind how you go and, since the recorded announcements first made in the late 1960s, the London Underground’s ‘mind the gap’. ‘Mind your language’ simply points the warning at speech.
The expression was in everyday use by the mid-nineteenth century. A report in the Otago Daily Times of 23 April 1863, covering the Resident Magistrate’s Court at Wakatipu in New Zealand, has the magistrate cutting off a plaintiff who had begun abusing a local gold official: “Mr Wood: Mind your language.” The courtroom setting is telling. Early examples reprove insolence and coarseness in general, not just profanity, and the phrase belongs naturally to people entitled to demand better speech: magistrates, schoolmasters and parents.
For a generation of British viewers the words are inseparable from the ITV sitcom Mind Your Language, made by London Weekend Television from 1977 to 1979, with a brief revival in the mid-1980s. Created by Vince Powell, it starred Barry Evans as Jeremy Brown, a harassed teacher taking an evening class of foreign students learning English. The title puns on both senses of the phrase: the students must attend to their new language, while the classroom mayhem regularly earns the rebuke. The show drew large audiences, reportedly around 18 million at its peak, but was cancelled amid criticism of its reliance on national stereotypes. It did, however, carry the phrase to audiences well beyond Britain.
Half a century on, the phrase needs no such help. It remains the standard British rebuke for a slip of the tongue, milder than demanding that someone wash their mouth out and a good deal politer than telling them to shut up.