In Terry Pratchett’s The Truth, Mr. Tulip managed to convey quite a lot using only part of a swear word with “_ing.”
*So called because it was an instrument for –ing young ladies!
My word, was it? I thought it was just a sort of early piano! *
I caught myself saying “shrok” the other day after playing Shadows of War for like 10 hours straight.
The Old Man was trying to think of a witty response, but only had “NottaTHinga! My buddy and I use this one. It’s handy when you’ve completely lost an argument, but you just have to say SOMEthing.
I’ve always liked his furnace-fighting curse: “Frattenhousensnicklefeifer!”
Funny thing, I posted the same link immediately after reading the OP. Didn’t even see yours.
Just thought of another one.
In one of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” stories, one character uses a lot of profanity. However, since they were published by family-friendly companies in the 1940s and 1950s, the publishers had to substitute the word “unprintable”, and let the reader imagine what word was being used.
Toward the end of the story, Asimov hints that the character had a broader and more colorful vocabulary than the reader had been imagining.
From Pogo:
Dog my cats!
Rowrrbazzle!
[“The very air was blued!” “Good. I blewed as hard as I could,”
I was about to mention that given–coincidentally–that that is the book that I’m actually rereading right now. You left out the relevant part, where a few people reacted in confusion to his pausing in the middle of talking and saying “ing” all the time.
That is good, but the classic bowdlerization is from Big Lebowski, where the nice version has Walter Sobchak yelling “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!”
Dr. Smith always had a good one for the Robot. Jonathan Harris, literally, had a paper and pencil on his nightstand in case one came to him in his sleep.
Grud!
shut the front door!
wait what? no all caps? how the seven seven three four am I supposed to shout without all caps?
The D&D comic strip Nodwick once had an arc with the all-purpose cuss “Krutz!”. Say it whenever you’re angry, and somehow it always makes you feel a little better about whatever you’re angry about. Except that, unbeknownst to everyone, it was actually an incantation of sorts created by the Big Bad, and whenever anyone said it, it incrementally increased his power.
Another one that doesn’t really count: There’s a game I used to play where my first character was a fire sorceress. Now, fire sorceresses did the most damage, but the catch is that there are some monsters in the game that are just plain immune to fire, no matter how much damage you do. When playing, I referred to those as “asbestos” or “halon”, and used both terms as profanities.
[noparse]SHUT THE FRONT DOOR! x[/noparse]
The software won’t turn all caps into lower case if you also include a lower case letter. Put “white” color tags around the smaller case letter to make it blend into the background. I used [noparse] tags to make my coding visible.
SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!x
aaaahhhhh, that’s better:D
Thanks cochrane
Noy Jitat! Chongo-longo! Nat-chut! Noy Borga! *Pirates of Darkwater *had the best swears.
Muttley, from the Wacky Races was always effing and blinding [as we say in real swearing] under his breath.
Scholars differ on the exact wording of what he was saying:
“God rotten” from Tai Pan, as in “you god rotten sweaty lump of dog meat!”
There’s a Richie Rich story that for some reason has stuck with me. Richie’s mom decides to impose a no-swearing policy on the household, with cash penalties for certain phrases. “Phooey!” costs the speaker a quarter. Richie’s father suffers a foot injury (I believe someone drops a bag of cash on him, such being a common hazard in the Rich residence) and he suppresses his response until he gets outside, cradling his foot aNd shouting “DAG NAB THE DING-DONG! KNOCKLE-DE-WOCK!”
The table supporting the “curse jar” and all the accumulated fines eventually collapses, which for some reason infuriates Richie’s mom, who expresses her outrage as “ROWR! FAZZBAZZLE!”, which is apparently so severe she has to give up a $10,000 necklace to cover her fine.
Are you of the opinion that Airplane invented the word golly?
Not fiction, but music: “plook” from Frank Zappa on the album “Joe’s Garage”.