Gadzooks!
The Case for Quirky Curses
Whew! We’ve had three intense posts in a row on healthcare. (If you’re just joining us, here are part 1, part 2, and part 3.)
Time to lighten things up, don’t you think?
Readers may have noticed that there are never any curse words in my posts. This is not because I’m a prudish bluenose who is offended by swearing. After all, my favorite show is Succession, and my favorite comedian is Chris Rock. I actually decided from the start never to swear in the Happy Wanderer to honor my dad, who could not STAND bad language. (You can hardly blame him. He was a middle-school principal and probably heard more profanity every day than you’d get from Samuel L. Jackson and the cast of The Wolf of Wall Street combined.)
There are multiple reasons to prefer old-timey curses to the conventional ones. I asked my friends to help me make my case, and they kindly allowed me to share their favorite quirky curses. Thanks, guys!
A Quixotic Quest
When our family lived in Prague, an American friend embarked on a well-intentioned fool’s errand. She had noticed that many of the students at our kids’ international school who were not native speakers of English would pepper their conversations with F-bombs and other strong curse words. When you don’t speak a language fluently, you’re not always aware of the emotional resonance of certain words, or of the impact they will have on your listeners.1 My friend tried to persuade the kids that it was in their own best interest to avoid words that might be shocking to native speakers. Why alienate potential friends when, with a bit of restraint, they could create a positive first impression?
Sadly, my friend was tilting at windmills. The kids were not about to stop swearing just because some American lady advised against it. But we can follow her advice in our own lives and remember that we don’t always know other people’s attitudes about strong language, and milder expressions help us communicate with more people.
A Soft Answer Turneth Away Wrath
Most of us have heard about that study purporting to show that swearing decreases our perception of pain.2 Which makes sense; when we’re hurt, angry, or frustrated, our first impulse is to erupt. However, as Proverbs 15:1 continues, “A harsh word stirs up anger.” We already have too much anger these days. Why stir up more?
One reason I love old-timey curses is that they allow us to express our frustration, but without shocking other people or escalating conflict. Because they are silly and unexpected, they turneth away wrath and make us laugh. This is especially important when we’re around our kids, because parental anger can be scary to little children. I’m grateful to my mom, whose very, very worst curse, when she is truly at the end of her tether, is “Oh honest to Pete!” and to my dad, whose go-to expletive was “Holy buckets!”
Some friends offered other examples of expressions that provoke smiles rather than discomfort:
Mary likes “‘Oh, fudge!’ [This is] obviously a nicer sounding expletive than the alternative F-word, but still satisfying. I have a friend who says, ‘Mother Father!’ and it always makes me laugh. Pickleball generates a lot of these!”
Janelle has “been saying ‘Fudgesicles!’ a lot in public instead of dropping F-bombs when I’m in pain. Last night I randomly said ‘Hot Fudge Sundae!’ while trying to get up. Not sure if that one will stick, but it made us laugh.”
Old-timey curses also help us show our kids that it’s possible to control ourselves and keep our sense of humor, even when we’re upset. One day when our son, Noah, was about four, my mom overheard him say “dammit.” “Oh dear,” said my mom. I’m not saying Noah picked this word up from me, but, well, I’m not not saying it. Needless to say, I learned to watch my language around Noah from that day on. Amy had a similar experience to mine: “When Craig was four years old, I was driving. . . . A guy cut me off and I called him a ‘dickhead.’ From the back seat Craig says, ‘Mommy what’s a “dickhead”?’ . . . After that I learned to say ‘POO!’ when someone was driving badly!”
[Redacted] and Giggles
Quirky curses are also just plain fun. Here are some of my friends’ favorites:3
Son of a biscuit eater!
Great Scot!
Oy yoy yoy!
By cracky!
Rats! and Good grief! (from a Peanuts fan)
Consarnit!
That’s a fine how de do!
My stars and garters!
Fiddlestix!
The Platonic ideal of adorable cussing is found at We Rate Dogs, which protects our tender ears to a comical extent, for example with “h*ckin,” instead of stronger terms we could imagine:
“%#*@$!” is an amusing substitute too. We get our point across, with a little frisson and without harsh words. I used a curse-substitute to good effect for Noah’s Halloween costume one year—a traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike (because what’s more terrifying than that?). His classmates saw the “#!@#!!” on his shirt and decided that Noah had the best costume in the school.
“Uff Da” Means “Oy Vey”
Many years ago, a guy from New York heard me say “uff da!”—a typical way we Minnesotan descendants of Norwegian immigrants express frustration. He asked what it meant. I translated it into a Yiddish expression familiar to most New Yorkers: “It means ‘oy vey.’” Epithets from other languages reflect our immigrant origins. Lee, a fellow Minnesotan, concurs, recalling that in his childhood, “Norwegian words replaced many American words.”
Lynn adds, “There’s one involving horse parts in Hungarian. I don’t actually use it, but it is fun to know it exists. I do try to use ‘tök jó’ (pumpkin good!) because pumpkins are fun.”
Eli shares a funny story:
After my Dad passed away, we five “kids” got together and bought my mom a vanity license plate. In all caps, it reads “E D B T Z.” While he was alive, my father had something of a bad temperament, which sometimes came to the fore when he was driving. If, for instance, someone cut him off, his left arm would come out of the window and up into the air and he’d yell it out in Arabic . . . the rough translation is “my hand up your [redacted].” So, as her fond remembrance of the man, my Mom’s driving around in a car that, every once in a while, gets some Arabic speaker behind her in traffic honking their horn and laughing uncontrollably!
As Eli’s story shows, these expressions give us affectionate memories of our loved ones. For example, Anne’s “dad was famous for: ‘Ittle dee divel dee furden dee furden.’” (Was he the Swedish Chef?) Karen recalls that “One of my grandmother’s was ‘Oh, rat’s tail in a churn.’” And my brother and his friends got such a kick out of two expressions our dad made up that they adopted them for their own. So if you ever hear someone muttering “Birch bark canoe!” or “Dirty work shirt!” on the golf course, now you know why.
Thou Whoreson Zed! Thou Unnecessary Letter!
This insult (King Lear II.2.65) reminds Oswald that he is as useless as the letter Z, which had been added to the English alphabet in Shakespeare’s time—and I guess people resented it for some reason?4 (Isn’t the letter that is actually unnecessary a C? We already have S and K, after all. But I digress.) Anyway, who doesn’t love a good Shakespearean curse?
And who among us has not been an irksome, brazen-faced jolthead on occasion?
When I was in high school, our drama class staged act 3 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My best friend was short, and I am tall, so our teacher cast us as Hermia and Helena. We had enormous fun hurling curses at each other. To this day, when I am aggravated by a short person in the news,5 I think to myself, “You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made! You bead! You acorn!” (III.2.329–30).
A final advantage of quirky curses, then, is that they’re interesting. Anyone can drop an F-bomb, and it takes no effort whatsoever to grab people’s attention with scatological or obscene words. But when we use our imaginations to express ourselves in original ways, we are, in our own small way, emulating Shakespeare. A worthy goal indeed!
How about you, readers? What are your favorite old-timey curses? Please share your thoughts—and cuss us out creatively!—in the comments!
The Tidbit
George Carlin, Chris Rock, and other excellent blue comedians aside, it is possible to work clean and still be totally hilarious. Take Nate Bargatze, who is responsible for one of the funniest sketches of all time. Check out his recent opening SNL monologue:
The impact of certain words can be positive too. One morning while we were walking around Prague, our daughter had to go to the bathroom, but nothing was open yet. I went up to a lady who was sweeping the sidewalk and said, “Prosím, moje dcera musí odskočít,” which is a colloquial euphemism for needing the toilet. (The literal translation is “Please, my daughter has to hop,” but an apt English rendering of “odskočím” might be “I need to see a man about a dog” or “I’m gonna hit the head.”) The lady’s face lit up in surprise, and she took us straight back to the employee restroom.
Was p-hacking involved? Maybe! Is the study replicable? Doubtful! Is it possible to do a double-blind study when participants know whether or not they are swearing? Nope!
Thank you to Diane, Julia, Deb, Sandy, Mark C., Mark D., and Susan.
Cough cough Ben Shapiro cough cough.
Son of a Mother! is one that’s hard to argue with
This is a great post, even though my first thought was "stop using the F word? over my dead f---ing body!!" ... a phrase that hints at one additional reason why F-bombs are sometimes subideal. (Think about it! On second thought, don't think about it!)
The Arabic soundalike license plate anecdote is so, so charming. Puts me in mind of Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.!