Minced oath

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A minced oath is an expression based on a profanity which has been altered to reduce or remove the disagreeable or objectionable characteristics of the original expression; for example, "gosh" used instead of "God," "darn" instead of "damn" and "heck" instead of "hell". Nearly all profanities have minced variants; the words that are most taboo give rise to the most.^[1]

Contents 1 Formation 2 History 3 Acceptability 4 Minced oaths in fiction 5 Other instances 6 Notes 7 References 8 See also

[edit] Formation

The most common methods of forming a minced oath are rhyme and alliteration. Thus the word bloody can become blooming, bleeding, or ruddy.^[1] In Cockney rhyming slang, rhyming euphemisms are sometimes 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.)^[2]

Minced oaths can also be formed by shortening: b for bloody, eff 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".^[2] The use of French foutre for fuck dates to 1592; later forms include foot (1600s) and footer (1753).^[3]

The minced oath blank is an ironic reference to the dashes that were sometimes used to replace profanities in print.^[4] 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.^[5] In the same way, bleep arose from the use of a tone to mask profanities on radio.^[4]

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!^[6]

[edit] 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 the birds instead of by the gods, adding that the soothsayer Lampon still swears by the goose "whenever he's going to cheat you".^[7] Since no real god was called upon, Lampon may have considered this oath safe to break.^[8]

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) and "by Jove" for "by God" (1570).^[3]

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 God's blood from Shakespeare, 'slight for God's light from Ben Jonson, and 'snails for 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 (God's truth) came to be spelled 'strewth and zounds changed pronunciation so that it no longer sounded like God's wounds.^[9] Other examples from this period include 'slid for "God's eyelid" (1598) and sfoot for "God's foot" (1602). Gadzooks, for "God's hooks", followed in the 1650s, and odsbodikins, for "God's little body", in 1709.^[10]

[edit] 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".^[11] The minced oaths "'sblood" and "zounds" were omitted from the Folio edition of Shakespeare's play Othello, probably due to Puritan-influenced censorship.^[12] In 1941 a U.S. federal judge threatened a lawyer with contempt of court for using the word "darn".^[13] Zounds may sound amusing and archaic to the modern ear,^[14] 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".^[15]

[edit] Minced oaths in fiction

Writers of fiction sometimes face the problem of portraying characters who swear without offending audiences or incurring censorship. Somerset Maugham directly 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.^[16]

In The Naked and the Dead (1948), Norman Mailer wanted to accurately represent the speech of soldiers, but had to substitute "fug" for fuck for publication.^[17] In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway used words like "unprintable" and "unspeakable" in place of obscenities,^[18] while Gore Vidal, in the first edition of Myron, pointedly used the names of the Supreme Court Justices who had defined obscenity in Miller v. California.^[19] Comic strip writers in the 1930s, unable to print profanity in newspapers, used existing substitutes or made up their own; some of the expletives they invented later came into general use as minced oaths.^[20]

A few other invented profanities have been used outside the context of the original fiction. "Frell", one of several invented oaths from the science-fiction TV program Farscape, was sometimes used in conversation by the show's fans,^[21] and "frak", a substitute for fuck used on the television series Battlestar Galactica, has entered wider usage.^[22] In 2006 it was used by characters on two other TV series, Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars,^[23] as well as in a Dilbert comic strip.^[24] On the Language Log weblog, linguist Arnold Zwicky suggested that frak is particularly successful because it phonologically resembles both fuck and frig.^[25]

[edit] Other instances

• "fsck" is commonly used in technology-related communications. "fsck" is also the name of a Unix program which analyzes and fixes potential filesystem problems after an improper shutdown of the operating system, standing for "filesystem check".

• Online, alternative typographical glyphs are sometimes used to evade the profanity filters (such as $hit instead of shit, @rse instead of arse). Although, when profanity is detected, it is usually replaced by random glyphs or simply an asterisk per each character.(c***)

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Dickens, Charles (1999). Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens. Hazelton, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 150. 

• 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, 2nd ed. (CD-ROM) (1994).

[edit] See also

• Blasphemy
• Bowdlerization
• Euphemism
• Expletive deleted
• Judas Priest (A music band whose name derives from a euphemism for Christ)
• List of exclamations used by Captain Haddock (A well-known fictional user of minced oaths)
• Profanity