The blogger nostalgicitalian (“just a guy who likes the classics”) has a 2021 post on things you can say when you don’t want to offend those offended by bad words:
I have mentioned the cartoon Bluey on here in the past. On the Bluey Facebook page a while back, they had a video of the dad (Bandit) using alternate expressions where swear words might be used. Exclamations like “Cheese and jam,” “Beans on toast,” and “Biscuits” are used in place of swear words.
“Biscuits!” is a favorite of mine right now, especially since Ella is starting to copy and say things we do. As much as I want to scream a dirty word when I step on a Lego, “Biscuits” works just as well.
And he has an image of a pleasing set of Alternative Cuss Words, from “Shucks” to “For cryin’ out loud,” with stops at “Geez,” “Nerts,” “Great googley moogley,” “Shut the front door,” and many others in between — “turd” and “bull snot” are about as vile as it gets.
When in college i learned some alternates. from a Mormon missionary (they have a collection all their own) . One that stayed with me was “vootsac”, Afrikaans for “go away”, which has just the right sound.
Has a map of the American distribution of cuss ever been published? To me that word sounds particularly Deep South or possibly old Western (vittles is a similar bastardization). I was therefore surprised to recently hear a white person born and raised in Michigan use the word.
I certainly heard “cuss” in my childhood (northern Delaware, nothing like either the Deep South or Old West). I was not aware that it was etymologically a doublet of “curse” and the words were not used as if they were interchangeable, although I suppose there was some overlap in their semantic scope such that they could have been substituted for each other in some, but not all, contexts.
I’ve never heard of “bolshevik”. I’ve seen its counterpart, “booshwa”.
Used correctly these can be effective. I’ll always remember my surprise, while talking to someone I thought of as a prudish HR lady, and she referred to one of our colleagues as a “see you next Tuesday”.
Has a map of the American distribution of cuss ever been published?
DARE doesn’t have cuss at all. It does have cuss-fight, with a map showing it mostly attested from the South, plus a bit up in Illinois along the Mississippi.
Bertie Wooster’s “son of a bachelor” is not so much a minced oath as chewed and regurgitated
so, um, a cud-oath?
Long ago I worked with a woman from Alabama who said ‘dadgummit.’ It was her rawest swear.
And I learned ‘Gordon Bennett’ from a guy I worked with as a teenager. Except the way he said it — venomously, under his breath — made it sound Very Bad Indeed.
made it sound Very Bad Indeed.
I’d always assumed “God” > “Gawd” > “Gord” (and Dammit). So yes, Very Bad.
But I see wp claims there was an actual person.
When Repo Man was to air on American broadcast TV, its director, Alex Cox, was put in charge of bowdlerizing it, which he enjoyed. He came up with “melon farmer”, which supposedly took hold elsewhere where the patch was to look obvious.
Die Hard did likewise, with “Mister Falcon”, but I haven’t seen that movie in any version.
My father (b. 1907) used to use “Gordon Bennett” and, yes, I understand there was a real person of that name who was well-known in the early 20th century.
My favourite non-offensive expletive is “Rats!”
In the late 1960s I was sort of adopted by a wonderful family in Santander, in northern Spain.
The mother was something of a rarity at that time, a university graduate well versed in many subjects. She worked hard and well as a housewife and mother. In actions and speech she was always well composed, even elegant, despite the frumpy house dress and lack of makeup of any kind.
One day a government minister was heard on the radio, spouting atrocious garbage. I’d never heard Lucia curse, so it was with delighted shock that I listened to her proclaim, “¡Hijo de…
parentesco variado!”
“¡Hijo de…parentesco variado!”
How sweet !
Here’s an example of Gordon Bennett being explained as deriving from the name of a real person. It strikes me as a prime example of folk etymology — cute story, but no actual evidence adduced.
Like AntC, I’ve always assumed it was a minced ‘goddammit.’
“ vootsac”, Afrikaans for “go away”, which has just the right sound.
During college I spent summers playing soccer for an Italian club in Chicago. I felt fa caldo similarly had the right sound for expressing my dissatisfaction with the reffing, and the right plausible deniability.
Especially if the ref’s named “Aldo”, I suppose?
My time spent among the LDS led to my learning “flip”, “fetch”, “frick”, and “oh my heck”, but my northern Delaware (read, just outside Philadelphia) upbringing always made me sound ridiculous when I employed them.
So I can say I still relish the F-bomb I dropped on one of the elders whom I shared an apartment with in the last few months of my mission. I’d had enough of being told I was “trunky” (ready to pack my trunks) by this New Jersey-born half-pint imitation. So I let him have it. The dead silence out of the other four elders was so worth it.
a prime example of folk etymology
I don’t think that the use of “Gordon Bennett” as a minced oath is at all incompatible with it being based on the name of a real person: on the contrary, the fact of the name being that of a recognisable real person (at that time) would be the whole point of it: that’s the joke. It fits a pattern (I didn’t actually know that there really is a Berkeley Hunt, but then I don’t move in such circles much.)
The first bit clearly is a non-rhotic “Gawd” or course.
(Compare the Gordelpus, one of Olaf Stapledon’s less-happy coinages in Last and First Men. A weapon of mass destruction, IIRC. And “corblimey”, of course.)
Personally, I prefer “Arnold Bennett!” as a mangled oath. It’s more refined.
Etymologically, cuss is to curse as ass (the other one) is to arse, hoss is to horse, and bass is to German Barsch. Bust and burst are also usually included in the list, but that’s less clear.
Somewhat related, today:
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/20/sloshed-plastered-and-gazeboed-why-britons-have-546-words-for-drunkenness
Wikipedia quotes the OED as speculating that the relevant use of “Gordon Bennett” was “perhaps a euphemistic substitution for gorblimey.” Which suggests there must have been contexts and occasions where “gorblimey” was too shocking a thing to say and required a euphemistic substitute? One internet reference (which does not give a source for the assertion) says that “gorblimey” is itself a minced version of “God blind me,” but were there really contexts and occasions for which it was insufficiently minced?
there’s some jewish precedent for that level of re-mincing: “adonai/adoynoy” [my lord], as a longstanding replacement for “יהוה”, has acquired sanctity by association. that means that it’s usually not written out in full, to avoid the necessary rituals for disposing of papers with unerasable holy names on them, but also that a lot of the observant world extends the “not to be spoken aloud” principle to it, often opting instead for “adoshem” [roughly lor-name].
I knew a fellow in college who carefully eschewed the normal list of mildly taboo lexemes by using an impressive array of off-beat minced alternatives (“cussbubbles” is the one that I can recall off hand). He was not a Mormon or from some other obvious demographic background that would seem a predictor of this tic — in fact (I had to check an old directory for the geographical bit) he was an Ashkenazic-American from the San Fernando Valley, and I think I’ve known enough SFV Ashkenazim over the course of my life to have some confidence that more-rigorous-than-average avoidance of taboo lexemes is not one of their stereotypical traits at the group level.
In my own northern-Delaware youth (which may or may not have been further in the past than Craig’s) I had some LDS classmates, and I find that 40 years later I have no identifiable memories of any of them either using taboo lexemes or using lame-sounding workaround substitutes therefor. Although maybe the latter would have been more memorable? And they perhaps weren’t, in a general public-high-school setting, “on duty” the way they would have been while doing a mission. I do think that Dr. Evil’s “throw me a frickin’ bone” scene in the first Austin Powers movie (a decade-plus after I’d departed from Del.) may have helped to rehabilitate “frickin'” among the general/Gentile public.
‘Gorblimey’ — also ‘corblimey’, sometimes reduced further to ‘cor!’ — is pretty gosh darn mild. You could hear it on BBC radio in the 1960s, I’m sure. The notion that it’s a minced version of ‘God blind me’ is widespread.
That’s why I’ve taken ‘Gordon Bennett’ to be a bowdlerized version of something stronger.
@DE: I agree that the said Mr. Bennett could be a real person, but I’d like to see a convincing argument.
Dr. Evil’s “throw me a frickin’ bone”
and Battlestar Galactica’s “frack”, perhaps?
The notion that it’s a minced version of ‘God blind me’ is widespread.
Well, yeah, because that’s what it is. OED: “Alteration of God blind me.” What else would it be?
Not as famous as his “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads” scene.
Later, reality tragicomically caught up with that one in the form of hydrofracturing.
@David M.: It’s arguably the fault of the Swiss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frick_and_Frack