Minced oath

A minced oath, also known as a pseudo-profanity or an expletive-deletive, is an expression based on a profanity that has been altered to reduce or remove the disagreeable or objectionable characteristics of the original expression; for example, "darn" or "dang" instead of "damn", "heck" instead of "hell", and "frig" or "frack" instead of "fuck". Nearly all profanities have minced variants.

Formation

The most common methods of forming a minced oath are rhyme and alliteration. Thus the word bloody can become blooming, bleeding, or ruddy. Alliterative minced oaths such as darn for damn allow a speaker to begin to say the prohibited word and then change to a more acceptable expression. In rhyming slang, rhyming euphemisms are often truncated so that the rhyme is eliminated: prick became Hampton Wick and then simply Hampton. (The phrase flashing his Hampton, in turn, led to the use of the word flasher for an exhibitionist.) Alliteration can be combined with metrical equivalence, as in "Judas Priest," substituted for blasphemous use of "Jesus Christ"[1]

Minced oaths can also be formed by shortening: b for bloody, or bitch, eff for fuck. Sometimes words borrowed from other languages become minced oaths; for example, poppycock comes from the Low Dutch pappe kak, meaning "soft dung". The minced oath blank is an ironic reference to the dashes that are sometimes used to replace profanities in print. It goes back at least to 1854, when Cuthbert Bede wrote "I wouldn't give a blank for such a blank blank. I'm blank, if he doesn't look as if he'd swallowed a blank codfish." By the 1880s, it had given rise to the derived forms blanked and blankety. In the same way, bleep arose from the use of a tone to mask profanities on radio.

Adjectival probably first became current around 1910, though in 1851 Charles Dickens wrote:

Bark's parts of speech are of an awful sort—principally adjectives. I won't, says Bark, have no adjective police and adjective strangers in my adjective premises! I won't, by adjective and substantive! [...] Give me, says Bark, my adjective trousers!

History

The Cretan king Rhadamanthus is said to have forbidden his subjects to swear by the gods, suggesting that they swear instead by the ram, the goose or the plane tree. Socrates favored the "Rhadamanthine" oath "by the dog". Aristophanes mentions that people used to swear by birds instead of by the gods, adding that the soothsayer Lampon still swears by the goose "whenever he's going to cheat you". Since no god was called upon, Lampon may have considered this oath safe to break.

The use of minced oaths in English dates back at least to the 14th century, when "gog" and "kokk", both euphemisms for God, were in use. Other early minced oaths include "Gis" or "Jis" for Jesus (1528).

Late Elizabethan drama contains a profusion of minced oaths, probably due to Puritan opposition to swearing. Seven new minced oaths are first recorded between 1598 and 1602, including 'sblood for By God's blood from Shakespeare, 'slight for God's light from Ben Jonson, and 'snails for By God's nails from the historian John Hayward. Swearing on stage was officially banned by the Act to Restraine Abuses of Players in 1606, and a general ban on swearing followed in 1623. In some cases the original meanings of these minced oaths were forgotten; 'struth (By God's truth) came to be spelled 'strewth and zounds changed pronunciation so that it no longer sounded like By God's wounds. Other examples from this period include 'slid for "By God's eyelid" (1598) and sfoot for "By God's foot" (1602). Gadzooks for "By God's hooks" (the nails on Christ's cross) followed in the 1650s, egad for oh God in the late 17th century, and ods bodikins for "By God's little body" in 1709.

Acceptability

Although minced oaths are not as strong as the expressions from which they derive, some still find them offensive. One writer in 1550 considered "idle oaths" like "by cocke" (by God), "by the cross of the mouse foot", and "by Saint Chicken" to be "most abominable blasphemy". The minced oaths "'sblood" and "zounds" were omitted from the Folio edition of Shakespeare's play Othello, probably due to Puritan-influenced censorship. In 1941 a U.S. federal judge threatened a lawyer with contempt of court for using the word "darn". Zounds may sound amusing and archaic to the modern ear, yet as late as 1984 a writer recalled that "some years ago", after using it in print, he had received complaints that it was blasphemous because of its origin as "God's wounds". Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy introduced to American audiences the minced oath, "¡Ay, caramba!" (pronounced [ˈai | ka.ˈɾam.ba]) from the Spanish interjection ¡ay! (denoting surprise or pain) and caramba (euphemism for carajo/penis). This exclamation also appears in the Disney film The Three Caballeros, in which even the Spanish-speaking characters state that they do not know what it means.

Minced oaths in fiction and entertainment

Writers sometimes face the problem of portraying characters who swear without offending audiences or incurring censorship.

Literature

Somerset Maugham referred to this problem in his 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence, where he admitted:

Strickland, according to Captain Nichols, did not use exactly the words I have given, but since this book is meant for family reading, I thought it better -- at the expense of truth -- to put into his mouth language familiar to the domestic circle.

In particular, authors of children's fiction sometimes put minced oaths into the mouths of characters who swear a lot, as a way of depicting a part of their behaviour that it would be unconvincing not to represent, but also avoiding the use of swear words which would be considered unsuitable for children to read.

In some cases, minced oaths are used which it seems very unlikely people would actually use in real life; examples include "blessed", "By Jove", "golly" or "gosh", "gee", "dagnabit" and "goldarn it".

Captain Haddock, from the Tintin comic books, swears unlike a real sailor with sesquipedalian ejaculations like "billions of blistering blue barnacles" and "thundering typhoons".

Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead uses "fug" in place of "fuck" throughout.

Mystery writer Fran Rizer deploys "kindergarten cussin'" in her Callie Parrish series, where the main character can be heard muttering, "Dalmation!" and "Shih Tzu!"

In Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, character's use oaths such as "flaming" or "blood and ashes" or the interjection "light" in the same strength as a curse word, without having to print swear words.

Science Fiction writer, John Brunner, in novels such as Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar, uses 'shiv' and 'slit' to refer to male and female body parts (and sometimes males and females respectively).

The lead characters of Anthony Crowley (a demon) and Aziraphale (an angel) from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, both use minced oaths on a number of occasions, though for different reasons (Aziraphale genuinely means to avoid offense, while Crowley, being a demon, simply finds it more acceptable to his post to say 'gosh' instead of 'God').

In Stephen King's 2006 novel Lisey's Story, the main characters, Lisey and Scott Landon, use the word smuck instead of fuck, replacing it wherever fuck would be conceivably used: smucking, mothersmucker, smucked up, etc.

In the Gaunt's Ghosts series by Dan Abnett, the Imperial Guardsmen use the word feth as a general all-purpose swear word, primarily to replace the word fuck.

Film

In the Al Pacino epic Scarface, the title character Tony Montana, played by Pacino, is warned with hilarious effect by his Colombian accomplice in the censored version of the film, "Don't fool with me, Tony", and "I warned you not to fool with me, you foolish little monkey". Otherwise, the film, especially in its' uncensored version, is filled with use of the word 'fuck', and the censored TV version replaces these in their dozens with 'fool'.

Napoleon Dynamite, in the film of the same name, which is rated PG, uses minced oaths to a particularly comical effect.

In the 1945 war film A Walk in the Sun, the screenplay substitutes "loving" for "fucking" (the universal American soldier's descriptor).

In the series TZA, John Spencer uses Spash in place of most curses from the second book forth.

In the trailer for Monsters vs. Aliens, the villian Galaxhar is shown shouting "What the flagnod?!?" after Ginormica pokes him in the eye.

Theater

The gang members in the musical West Side Story talk in an invented 1950s-style slang that includes several minced oaths. At the end of the "Jet Song," they sing "We're gonna beat / Every last buggin' gang / On the whole buggin' street / On the whole ever-mother-lovin' street!" where "buggin'" and "mother-lovin'" are obvious minced oaths.

Television

In the Father Ted episode The Old Grey Whistle Theft, Ted's picnic at the local picnic area is disturbed by people claiming that he is in their "fupping spot". The woman yells out "Fup off, ya grasshole" and when Ted asks them why they are talking like that, the man points to a list of picnic area rules, one of which is "No Swearing". The man finishes by yelling out "Fup off, ya pedrophile."

In both incarnations of the television series Battlestar Galactica, characters use the word 'frack' (original) or 'frak' (re-imagined) in place of 'fuck'. Characters in the original series also use 'felgercarb' in place of 'shit'.

In the TV series Farscape the characters use the word 'frell' as a combination of 'frig', 'fuck', and 'hell' (as in "What the frell is going?"), and the word 'dren' instead of 'shit'.

In the 1984 film Johnny Dangerously, the character Roman Maronie is known for butchering the English language, especially English vulgarities:

• You fargin' sneaky bastages! (You fucking sneaky bastards!)
• Don't bullstye me! (Don't bullshit me!)
• You lousy corksuckers. (You lousy cocksuckers.)
• Dirty son-a-ma-batches. (Dirty son-of-a-bitch.)
• I'm gonna shove 'em up your icehole. (I'm gonna shove 'em up your asshole.)

In the TV series "Firefly" characters often use the word "gorram" in place of "goddam" or "god damned." Additionally, the characters do much of their cursing in Mandarin Chinese. This keeps the show unobjectionable enough to air on network television, yet at the same time maintain a realistic level of profanity for a show about outlaws, inspired by the wild west.

In "South Park" the word "fudge" (instead of "fuck") is frequently used, especially in the episode Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls, where Chef sells chocolate fudge delicacies called "Fudge 'Ems", "Fudge This", "Go Fudge Yourself", "I Don't Give a Flying Fudge" and "I Just Went and Fudged Your Momma".

Undoubtably the most famous of these examples is Homer Simpson's "d'oh" which is used during a time of bad luck or physical pain. (Though calling it a minced oath may be innacurate, since it is more of a grunt than an actual word.)

Music

The Fugs, a mid-1960s band named by Tuli Kupferberg, used a euphemism for 'fuck' found in Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead (above).

The Busta Rhymes album "When Disaster Strikes..." features an intro to the track Get High Tonight which is voiced by a taxi driver who also mangles English with such gems as "Freeze mother-bitches" and "I blow you" (away) after he pulls a gun in response to the rapper smoking a joint in the cab. These samples are from the film Bad Boys, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, in the scene where an Arab shopkeeper in Miami mistakes the protagonists, who are police officers, for robbers.

Internet

Online, alternative typographical glyphs are sometimes used to evade profanity filters (such as $hit or $#!+ instead of shit, @$$ or @rse instead of ass or arse). "fsck", from "filesystem check", is commonly used on Usenet and in other technology-related circles to replace "fuck".

The Fark website replaces words such as "fuck" with "fark".

On the Something Awful forums, filters replace "fuck" with the phrase "gently caress" and "shit" with "poo-poo" for unregistered users.

In some cases, this makes matters worse. For example, ProBoards forums replace the word "cock" with "thingy", thereby transforming the statement "cock his shotgun" into "thingy his shotgun". See also Scunthorpe Problem. Writer Leigh Lundin complained about being 'nannied' by overly assiduous blog filters for such words as Hummer (the vehicle), cockatoo, and pussycat.

Other instances

The term dork (from Yiddish) is believed to have been coined as an alternative to "dick" which was coined as a vulgar term for a penis. In current popular usage, the term does not particularly have vulgar connotations as it is frequently used to describe an eccentric or quirky person, an accepted synonym for geek or nerd. In previous decades, the term "dick" was used in this fashion as well, but it currently refers to a person (usually male) who is perceived as obnoxious or arrogant, a more profane synonym for jerk.

References

• Dickens, Charles (1999). Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens (PDF). Hazelton, PA: Pennsylvania State University. p. 150. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Hughes, Geoffrey (1991). Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16593-2.
• Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Oxford University Press. 1989. ISBN 978-0-19-861186-8.

See also

• Blasphemy
• Bowdlerization
• Euphemism
• Expletive deleted
• Fuddle duddle
• Profanity
• Four letter word