Mormons, of course, use the standard euphemisms of “darn” and “heck” (as well as “flipping”), but one of the weirdest ones I’ve encountered is “Oh, my heck!”
“Heck” is a substitutional euphemism you drop into a sentence in place of “hell”, but nobody says “Oh, my Hell”? It really does seem to mean “Oh my God!”, but then, why not say “Oh my Gosh!”, using the standard euphemism?
I’ve seen a webpage that tries to argue that this isn’t a Utahn or a Mormon concoction, but I’ve never encountered it anywhere outside the state.
Apparently not. Never even occurred to me that could have been origin until I read your note and went oh am I dense. But according to this: The “lick” in the expression was originally used by itself, to mean “a dab of paint” or the like, “a hasty tidying up,” or “a casual amount of work,” the OED says.
Re: the already-discussed “suck”, it didn’t occur to me that there was a suggestion of what someone was sucking until I was 10. As with many phrases, “you/that suck/s” was just a thing we said.
I just heard a weatherman on the local television news this morning use the expression “to brown-nose” and was surprised that he’d say such a thing on-air.
When I was a little kid, my dad and granddad and uncles and gents of their ilk would often use the word “peckerhead” as a sort of affectionate insult. I heard it so often I thought it meant “silly” or something like that.
So, once when I was like 8 years old and we were on a family vacation, we stopped at a little restaurant/snackbar sort of establishment. As the nice lady took our order, my little brother wasn’t paying attention, so I poked him and said “what do ya wanna eat, peckerhead?”
Mom, to my surprise, seemed aghast and whisper-hissed *“Why, [myname]…!” *at me. Once the waitress had left, Dad (the more patient and easy-going parent) informed me that I shouldn’t have said that, because “pecker” really meant your thing, but the waitress hadn’t noticed and it was okay, just don’t say that around folks. I remember he was trying pretty hard not to break out in a big grin while he told me that.
I always fondly remember a sketch by a Canadian comedy group “the Frantics”; Dirty words
“Areas” is a dirty word. Areas… AAAREAS. I’m touching my… Areas.
When I was a little kid, my mom used to say “Ubangi? Ubetcha!” which I think she got off some TV show (probably Laugh-In). I, of course, had no idea what it meant–I just thought it sounded funny, so of course I repeated it. I got a few strange looks before Mom took me aside and told me I maybe shouldn’t say that around other people anymore.
I well remember once having as a clerk (US-paralegal) to assist me in trials on circuit, a young woman of great charm and intelligence who had one teeny gap in her street education.
It was a custom on circuits for prosecution and defence counsel and clerks to have a dinner with the judge and his associate at a local restaurant at the end of the circuit. The rather elderly judge brought his wife on this circuit, so she came to dinner too.
This is where the educational gap appeared. I don’t know if Americans use the expression “dill” to mean a stupid person, but we do. Sort of like idiot, but less aggressively abusive. My clerk starts talking about one of the witnesses at one of the trials from the circuit, a person of extremely modest intellectual gifts. Instead of calling him a dill, she calls him a dildo, a word she apparently thought was just a diminutive or other variant of dill.
Judge’s eyebrows bury themselves up in his hairline. Defence lawyers look sharply at each other. Judge’s associate (a young woman also) nearly chokes on her mashed potatoes. Judge’s wife was perfectly polite of course, pretending she did not notice anything wrong.
My clerk did not pick up on any of these cues and kept using the word over and over.
I couldn’t do anything at the dinner table, didn’t want to embarrass her myself, and when we got home from the circuit, I had one of her female friends take her aside.
Like the joke (which has also appeared as a one-panel cartoon in Playboy) about the boy who goes into the pharmacy and asks the druggist for “a package of condominiums”
I had a friend who used the phase “chew him down,” as in “negotiate a lower price.”
When I heard her say this, I had to gently explain that a) that wasn’t the expression, and b) she really shouldn’t be using either that expression or the correct one.
The look of shock on her face was priceless.
