User Contributed Dictionary
Interjection
Extensive Definition
A minced oath, also known as a pseudo-profanity,
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" or "dang" instead of "damn", "heck"
instead of "hell", and "blimey" instead of "May God blind me!"
Nearly all profanities have minced variants; the words that are
most taboo give rise to the most.
Formation
The most common methods of forming a minced oath are rhyme and alliteration. Thus the word bloody can become blooming, bleeding, or ruddy. 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.)Minced oaths can also be formed by shortening:
b for bloody, or bitch, eff
for fuck. In the same way, bleep arose from the use of a tone to mask
profanities on radio.
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 the 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 real 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 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. Other examples from this period include slid for
"God's eyelid" (1598) and sfoot for "God's foot" (1602). Gadzooks
for "God's hooks" (the nails on
Christ's
cross) followed in the 1650s, egad for oh God in the late
1600s, and odsbodikins for "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". Bart Simpson from the The Simpsons 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
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.
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". Napoleon
Dynamite, in the film of the same name, which is rated PG, uses
minced oaths to a particularly comical effect.
Other instances
Online, alternative typographical glyphs
are sometimes used to evade profanity
filters (such as $hit instead of shit, @ss 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 like "fuck" with "fark" and
"nigger" with "attractive and successful African-American" (while
replacing overused phrases like "first post" with "boobies" to
prevent the common spam practice, and alters the time stamp of such
posts to two hours later). On the Something
Awful forums, filters replace "fuck" with the phrase "gently
caress" and "shit" with "poo-poo" for unregistered users.
In some rare cases, this makes matters worse
however. For example, ProBoards forums
replace the word "cock" with "thingy", thereby transforming the
statement "cock his shotgun" into "thingy his shotgun".
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 currently rather refers
to a person (usually male) who is perceived as obnoxious or
arrogant, a more profane synonym to jerk.
Notes
References
- Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens
- Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English
- Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (CD-ROM) (1994).