A minced oath is an expression formed by altering a profane or taboo term to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics.

Many languages have such expressions. In the English language, nearly all profanities have minced variants.^[1]

Examples include but are not limited to:

• Alterations of religious names, titles, and/or concepts:

• instead of God, golly, gosh, or (chiefly British) gad or gor

• instead of Jesus, gee, geesh, geez, geeze, or jeez
• instead of Christ, crikey or cripes
• instead of Jesus Christ, Jiminy Cricket or Jiminy Christmas

• instead of hell, heck

• instead of damn, darn or dang
• instead of damnation, tarnation
• phrase substitutions such as what on Earth or what in the world for what in hell

• invocation of lesser beings/properties as an alternative to the deity of one's professed religion:

• invocation of a deity's attributes or of physical objects associated with that deity:

• God's will and God's peace (see, e.g., the St. Crispin's Day Speech in Shakespeare's Henry V)
• criminy or crimony, an alteration of Christ's money, the thirty pieces of silver in exchange for which Judas betrayed Jesus
• gadzooks, originally a dialectal pronunciation of God's hooks, the nails with which Jesus was affixed to the cross
• zounds, a contraction of God's wounds, the injuries that Jesus suffered while being crucified^[2]

• substitution of oneself or one's own attributes for the deity that would otherwise be aggrieved, e.g., [my] goodness, dear [me], and my lands, my stars, or my word for my God, dear God, and my Lord respectively
• substitute invocations of nominally divine beings (e.g., pagan deities) presumed to be nonexistent by the speaker and his/her audience:

• ye gods (marked as a reference to non-Christian deities by the plural form indicating polytheism)

• egads or egad, itself an alteration of ye gods intended to placate those who consider ye gods blasphemous in that its literal meaning constitutes an appeal to non-Abrahamic deities and thereby violates stricter interpretations of the First Commandment in Judeo-Christian tradition

• by Jove, jumping Jupiter, etc.

• Alterations of sexual or excretory terms:

• instead of fuck/fucking, flipping, freaking, "fudging", fluffing, frigging, effing, fricking, farging, frakking, fecking, or funking/phunking
• instead of shit, shoot or shucks

• instead of crap (itself often a milder substitute for shit), crud

• Alterations of insults considered grievous affronts to personal honor:

• instead of bitch, beach/beech or biatch/beotch/bee-yotch

Formation[link]

The most common methods of forming a minced oath are rhyme and alliteration. Thus the word bloody can become blooming, or ruddy.^[1] 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.^[3] In rhyming slang, rhyming euphemisms are often truncated so that the rhyme is eliminated: prick became Hampton Wick and then simply Hampton. Another well-known example is "cunt" rhyming with "Berkeley Hunt", which was subsequently abbreviated to "berk". Alliteration can be combined with metrical equivalence, as in the pseudo-blasphemous "Judas Priest," substituted for the blasphemous use of "Jesus Christ".^[4]

Minced oaths can also be formed by shortening: e.g., b for bloody or f for fuck.^[1] Sometimes words borrowed from other languages become minced oaths; for example, poppycock comes from the Low Dutch pappe kak, meaning "soft dung".^[5] The minced oath blank is an ironic reference to the dashes that are sometimes used to replace profanities in print.^[6] 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.^[7] which combined together gave the name of the long running and popular British TV show "Blankety Blank". In the same way, bleep arose from the use of a tone to mask profanities on radio.^[6]

History[link]

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," with "the dog" often interpreted as referring to the bright "Dog Star," i.e., Sirius. 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".^[8] Since no god was called upon, Lampon may have considered this oath safe to break.^[9]

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).^[10]

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 (with the vowel as in "found") so that it no longer sounded like By God's wounds.^[11] 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,^[12] and ods bodikins for "By God's bodkins [i.e. nail]s" in 1709.^[13]

Acceptability[link]

Although minced oaths are not as strong as the expressions from which they derive, some hearers 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".^[14] The minced oaths "'sblood" and "zounds" were omitted from the Folio edition of Shakespeare's play Othello, probably due to Puritan-influenced censorship.^[15] In 1941 a U.S. federal judge threatened a lawyer with contempt of court for using the word "darn".^[16] Zounds may sound amusing and archaic to the modern ear,^[17] yet as late as 1984 the columnist James J. Kilpatrick 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".^[18] (He had written an article entitled "Zounds! Is Reagan Mad?" in the Spartanburg Herald for 12 June 1973,^[19] and also used "zounds" in June 1970.^[20])

Literature and censorship[link]

It is common to find minced oaths in literature. Writers sometimes face the problem of portraying characters who swear, and often include minced oaths instead of profanity in their writing so that they will not offend audiences or incur censorship. 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.^[21]

See also[link]

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

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Dickens, Charles (1999). Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens. Hazelton, PA: Pennsylvania State University. pp. 150. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/dickens/pieces.pdf. 
• Hughes, Geoffrey (1991). Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16593-2. 
• prep. by J. A. Simpson ... (1989). Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-861186-8. http://www.oed.com/. 

Steven "Steve" Michael Lake (born March 13, 1957 in Inglewood, California) batted and threw right-handed, and is a former professional baseball backup catcher.^[1] He played Major League Baseball from 1983 to 1993 for the following teams: Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies, and finishing his career with the Cubs. He started Game 7 of the 1987 World Series for the Cardinals and went 1-for-3 with an RBI single. Over his career, Lake threw out .4543% of the base runners who tried steal a base on him, ranking him 9th on the all-time list.^[2]

External links[link]

• Baseball Reference

References[link]

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