WIMBLEDON, England — The first audible obscenity in tennis history surely went unpenalized.

In a sport where perfection is unattainable — eventually you will miss — the game’s earliest practitioners must have felt compelled to utter an oath or two, perhaps on Day 1. Fast forward more than a century to Wimbledon 2015, and tennis’s foul-mouthed tradition is firmly entrenched, with code violations and fines meted out to the offenders like Serena Williams, who was penalized in her first-round victory on Monday, and like Heather Watson, the British player who was given a point penalty in her victory on Tuesday.

“I say things I shouldn’t say,” Watson said. “I apologize to anybody that’s offended. I need to control it, and I just can’t.”

Boris Becker, the three-time Wimbledon champion now coaching Novak Djokovic, recently claimed that on-court microphones have removed the spice from the rivalries in the game, forcing players to suppress their characters and muffle their frustrations for fear of penalties.

But even with Big Brother listening, it has been an audibly obscene stretch in the professional game, and certainly tame compared to the days of Jimmy Connors, Ilie Nastase and friends in the 1970s, but salty nonetheless. Veteran stars like Williams and Andy Murray continue to let the bad words fly. Williams dropped a string of F-bombs in the French Open final she won in three sets against Lucie Safarova.