I am glad this forum does not use word replacement. The forum I ran for nearly 10 years did, and (being a small gaggle of high school friends), quickly it was used to trick people into things they were not trying to say. And of course there was an unwritten rule that they could never be removed, so conversations got…hard to understand for outsiders or newcomers.
While many were foul and mildly racist, my favorite was quite mundane: “white castle” > “olive garden”.
Right on. I don’t remember ever being flagged, though when I feel the moment calls for it, I’m as foul-mouthed as my mother-in-law. Well, almost. Maybe only a longshoreman.
But Lord, let me never rely too heavily upon the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker.
That is a far bigger slur in the US. Apparently in the U.K. it is considered normal for mothers to use that term to affectionately refer to their children.
LOL, i’m on a forum that’s dwindled to 5-10 regulars. There’s an internal history of injoke memes and pointless callbacks going waaay back.
There’s an autocorrect that was set up by a mod trolling vegans on the board. In the context of arguing about eating meat, something like “eww you realise you’re eating rotting flesh of a corpse”
My spouse tells me about a forum with word replacement, in which they were discussing the main characters of “Much Ado About Nothing”: Beatrice and Benethingy.
One of my favorite examples of this was a sentence that read something like:
“I would expect this kind of reasoning from a freshman or maybe an immature sop****re, but it is inexcusable coming from a graduate student.”
Also any mention of the word shit. This includes words ending in -s followed by words starting in hit-, words ending in -sh followed by words starting in it-, so basically a whole bunch of totally innocuous phrases. You can’t even talk about members of the Chicago ************** three-point shots!
Linguists have been known to classify cultures according to whether the shits, fucks, or damns are most prevalent. IIRC, there’s a fourth category, but it escapes me at the moment. (It might be ethnic slurs.)
By this measure, Quebecois French is a Holy language. It makes heavy use of what it calls sacres (“consecrations”)—strong profanities related to Catholicism and Catholic liturgical concepts. Far stronger than merde (“shit”) or foutre (“fuck”) in Quebec are tabarnack (“tabernacle”), calisse (“chalice”), and calvaire (“Calvary”). This is despite—or due to—the fact that Quebeckers have largely lost their religion. The “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s left most of them Roman Catholic in name only. And yet the holy curses persist, even in the face of a populace that has lost touch with the sacred origins of the words.
And Quebecois isn’t the only Holy language. Italian has a set of words similar to the Quebecois sacres, known as bestemmie. Most involve adding the word porco (“pig”) to words for Catholic figures, like porco Dio (“pig God”) or porca Madonna (“pig Madonna”). Similarly, in some dialects of Spanish, ostia (“host”) is profane, as is naming the virgin (La Virgen) or the “blessed chalice” (Copón bendito). It’s no coincidence that these are languages spoken in places where the Roman Catholic Church has had a significant cultural presence. And while Catholics don’t have the market cornered on Holy-derived profanity, they nevertheless are laudably consistent in populating local profanity with religious terminology.
Fucking-category languages are more pervasive. A good example is Cantonese, which, as I mentioned earlier, uses words for the act of copulation like diu (“fuck”) or relevant body parts, like tsat (“boner”), as its strongest terms. Same with most varieties of English—as we saw earlier, whether in the United States, New Zealand, or Great Britain, the majority of the words judged most profane or most inappropriate relate to sexual acts, the organs used to perform them, or the people who engage in them. By this measure, Hebrew is probably also a Fucking language, although due to its unique history (the language had largely died out and was reconstructed in its modern form in around 1900, predominantly from religious texts), most of its swearing is borrowed from other languages, like English and Arabic. And Russian is quite clearly a Fucking language, with all of its mat’ referring to sexual organs, acts, or actors. Not a hint of Holy or Shit.
Shit-category languages are harder to come by. There’s a case to be made for German; although some strong profanity in German is drawn from the Holy and Fucking domains, it’s not as pervasive as in English. The German equivalent of fuck, which is ficken, is not commonly used in swearing. But German has a lot of Shit talk. Some of the most used and likely most familiar expressions make use of or are built from Arsch (“ass”) and Scheisse (“shit”): Arschloch (“asshole”), Arschgeburt (“born from an asshole”), Arschgesicht (“ass face”), Sheisskopf (“shithead”), and so on.
I fired up my laptop this morning
Thought I would surf for a bit.
Read the community guidelines,
and laughed at the big pile of Shaving Cream,
Be nice and clean,
Shave every day and you’ll always look keen.