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Hold Your Hippogriffs
Gabe: This jackass just said that something can go "through a ferrocrete bunker like a neutrino through plasma." I get it, man. It says Star Wars on the cover. I know I'm reading about Star Wars. It's like, do they not have butter in space? Or hot knives to cut it with?
Tycho: Listen, don't get your mynocks in a... sarlacc.
—>—Penny Arcade, 2008-7-23

The author uses a popular and/or modern phrase in a work of Speculative Fiction, and adjusts it to the setting by replacing certain concepts with their more-or-less appropriate counterparts. Works as a sort of Shout Out to make the reader/viewer more at home in the world, while at the same time highlighting the difference; it can also be used to disguise swears. Can backfire if the adjustment comes off as too arbitrary (e.g., if the proverb refers to concepts that should exist in the speculative setting as well).

At times these are specific to an exact scene, too. The replacement concepts can be tailored to characters and current action, rather than being a common phrase of its own. A cop with an antagonistic relationship to his Imperial liaison can sardonically say the liaison's investigation team got past security like X-Wings go through a Death Star. In this way it can overlap with Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?, though it can refer to past moments anywhere on the spectrum of awesome and suck.

Related to Call a Rabbit a Smeerp and Future Slang inasmuch as they're all about creating immersion through language use. The difference is that Hold Your Hippogriffs is, for one, not about words but phrases; for another, Hold Your Hippogriffs doesn't always create new words, although it can. It's also related to Flintstone Theming, but with fewer puns.

Supertrope of Oh My Gods!. Not related to Call a Pegasus a "Hippogriff". The inverse of this, when a word is replaced due to never having the chance to exist, is Orphaned Etymology.

Examples

    open/close all folders 

    Multiple Media 
  • The Transformers:
    • "You can stuff it up your exhaust pipe."
    • "Do you ever think you could be programmed for something bigger?"
    • "Processor over matter."
    • "Megatron?! The cruel and vicious Decepticon leader who eats Autobot protoforms for breakfast?!"
    • "I've got one servo in the scrap heap.."
    • "Human! It's the Matrix or your protoform batch initiators!"
    • "You'll have to pry it from my cold, offline servos!"
    • "I'll tear out your optics!"
    • Also used for Unusual Euphemism to get crap past the radar:
      • "What, is my gearbox hanging out or something?"
      • "Don't just stand there with your pistons in your servos!
      • "Kiss my skidplate!"
      • "Whoa! What crawled up your tailpipe?"
      • "Go stuff it up your reactor linkage!"
      • "Brilliant my boron compressor!"
      • "Blow it out your actuator!"
      • "Tell him to blow it out his exhaust port!"
      • That restaurant where the waitresses go around without torso plates?
      • Bearings of chrome steel.
  • BIONICLE:
    • "Hold your Rahi, I'm coming!"
    • "All my friends went to Po-Koro, and all I got was this lousy rock."
    • "Like Matoran opening presents on Naming Day."
    • "It's a load of Rock Steed droppings!"
    • "I have a feeling we're not in Karda Nui any more!
    • "He clapped his hands over his audio receptors."
    • "Kill two Gukko with one stone."
    • "The metal claw's on the other foot now!" (This one was Lampshaded, as another character tells the speaker that what he just said makes no sense.)

    Anime & Manga 
  • Pokémon: "Hold your Horsea!"
    • "I'm so hungry I could eat a Horsea!"
    • "Maybe if you weren't such a big fat Swinub, we'd get to the boat on time!"
    • "When the Swinub fly."
      • Justified in that horses and pigs may not exist in the world of Pokémon, though "Hold your Ponyta/Rapidash!" would have made more sense. Plus Horsea is a really small Pokémon, so eating one wouldn't be all that satisfying either.

    Comics 
  • This is especially ridiculous in the Marvel Apes comics; "a human's uncle" is an idiomatic phrase, except there are no humans in the Marvel Apes universe. Literally none. A few characters are mutated into human-like forms, but humanity is by and large nonexistent.
  • René Goscinny liked using this trope in his comics:
    • In Astérix, typical French curses involving God are transformed into those which involve Roman and Gaulish deities.
    • Lucky Luke's intellectual horse says, when crossing a river, "And the veterinarian told me not to bathe immediately after pasturing."

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • Balto:
    • "That's 'cause you're looking at the bowl half empty"
    • "It's not exactly a one-dog show, Dixie."
    • "I'm sticking here until I'm sure you can stand on own four feet.
    • "Balto, I was so scared, I got people bumps!
  • A lot of Disney's humor is based on this trope.
    • Aladdin:
      • "Don't stand until the rug has come to a complete stop."
      • "Wake up and smell the hummus." (which is ironic since coffee as we know it hails from Arabia)
      • "Mr. Doubting Mustafa."
      • "That two-faced son of a Jackal!"
      • "Hold onto your turban, kid!"
      • "It never fails, you get in the bath, and there's a rub at the lamp."
      • The Aladdin series also does this, with lines like "In a Gomorrah minute!"
    • Hercules
      • "Holy Hera!"
      • "Is this an audience or a mosaic?"
      • "Wanna buy a sundial?"
      • "The honest-to-Zeus truth."
      • Thebes is called the "Big Olive."
      • "Keep your toga on, pal!"
      • "Someone call IX-I-I!"
      • "That's it, I'm moving to Sparta!"
      • "He's just another chariot]] chaser."
      • "...but I could see through that in a Peloponnesian minute."
    • The Little Mermaid:
      • "You're not getting cold fins now, are you?"
      • "You are such a guppy!"
      • "You give them an inch, they'll swim all over you."
      • "The seaweed is always greener / In somebody else's lake!"
      • "Someone needs to nail that girl's fins to the floor."
      • "It's time Ursula took matters into her own tentacles!"
    • The Lion King
      • "This child is getting wildly out of wing."
      • "I'm so hungry I could eat a whole zebra."
    • Pocahontas
      • "It's enough to make your sap boil." (said by Grandmother Willow)
    • Mulan
      • "You don't meet a girl like that every dynasty."
      • "Who spit in her bean curd?"
    • Dumbo
      • "Girls, girls, listen. Have I got a trunk full of dirt."
  • Osmosis Jones: "You're pulling my membrane!"
    • "You saved my cytoplasm back there."
    • "I should be out in the veins fighting disease!"
  • Happy Feet: "Can you speak plain penguin, please?" and "I'm speaking plain penguin."
  • Toy Story has "Son of a [[hottip:building block!: bitch!]]" and "Save your batteries."
  • A Bug's Life: "Ladies and gentlebugs! Larvae of all stages! Rub your legs together for the world's greatest bug circus!"
  • Cars:
    • "Ladies and gentlecars..."
    • "His undercarriage is showing."
    • "Float like a Cadillac, sting like a Beamer."
    • Tractor tipping.
    • Rust Eze Medicated Bumper Ointment.
    • "The loser will be stripped of all modifications and become... ...STOCK!!!"

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Planet of the Apes:
    • "Human see, human do."
    • Considering that the whole franchise was a commentary about racism, you can't forget a line like "The only good human is a DEAD human!"
  • Alexander manages to naturally do this, replacing phrases like "By God!" with "By Zeus!" or "In the name of the Gods!" instead of the singular, and other such things using ancient Greek-era things in place of more modern phrases and outbursts. A few times, it tends to get too clunky and usual, with things like "By Athena's Justice, this girl has spirit" that tend to be less artificial and more sticking out like a sore thumb.
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country had one of the military men threaten that if the Klingons declared war, "we'd clean their chronometers."
  • At the climax of Oh, God! You Devil, when the Devil (George Burns) loses his nerve in a poker showdown with God (also George Burns), God comments, "I put the fear of me into you."
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Had Kirk mentioning "Moon over Rigel-7" as a potential campfire sing-along. When this movie was later riffed, Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy mocked the use of this trope with such song titles as I Left My Heart On Tau Ceti Five and I Have Thirteen Eyes For You.
  • Lord of the Rings "As the Nazgűl flies."
    • Justified, since they are actually talking about Nazgűl flying there.

    Literature 
  • From Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Wouldn't stand a whelk's chance in a supernova." Much to Arther Dent's confusion.
  • In The Integral Trees by Larry Niven, several characters use the expression "feed the tree," which means, "The words you are saying are a commonly used form of natural fertilizer."
  • The Trope Namer is Harry Potter; several of this expressions we hear from Mrs. Figg after she's revealed to be a Squib:
    • "Hold your hippogriffs!"
    • "What's got your wand in a knot?"
    • "No use crying over spilt potion."
    • "The cat's among the pixies now."
    • "Wasn't enough room to swing a kneazle."
    • "Might as well be hanged for a dragon as an egg."
    • "Fell off the back of a broom."
    • "Son of a Bludger!
      • This also doesn't make sense, as in-universe, this is basically "Son of a football".
      • Bludger has also been used in other contexts as a generic curse. Since the purpose of Bludgers in Quidditch is basically to impede and harm the players, it makes a bit more sense used that way than "football" would.
    • "God rest ye, merry hippogriffs" being sung by Sirius at Christmas in Order of the Phoenix. (This may very well have been Sirius messing with the words for his own sake, since he was attending on Buckbeak at the time.)
    • "Just yanking your wand."
    • "Get off his high hippogriff."
    • "Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?"
    • "You look like you've lost a Galleon and found a Knut."
    • In fact, in the Film, the band in one movie does a song pretty much entirely of this trope.
    • They also tend to refer to Merlin instead of God. Which makes sense, one supposes.
    • Rita Skeeter also once makes reference to a "bring and fly sale".
  • In the Discworld books, most of the examples of this trope are simply their setting-appropriate equivalents. E.G.:
    • "...guaranteed to have fallen off the back of an oxcart." (Guards! Guards!)
    • "He's going to go totally Librarian poo." (The Fifth Elephant and The Truth)
    • "...as the high priest said to the vestal virgin." (Witches Abroad)
    • "Crysophrase, he not give a coprolith about that stuff" (Men at Arms) and "I'm in deep copro, right?" (Thud!). (Trolls are living rock, and a coprolith is fossilised animal dung.)
    • "Been there, done that, bought the doublet." (The Fifth Elephant)
    • Men at Arms has "...some Watchman blundering around upsetting things, like a loose ... a loose siege catapult."; "...up the Ankh without a paddle"; "Does a dragon explode in the woods?" (although the original version is also in use); and "Like a fish needs a ... a thing that doesn't work underwater, sir."
    • "When the midden hits the windmill." (Thief of Time and The Fifth Elephant)
    • "How many trolls does it take to change a lamp wick?" (Sourcery)
    • A weird one that started out as a Nanny Ogg malapropism in Carpe Jugulum, and then somehow became the accepted version of the phrase in later books is: "The leopard does not change his shorts." In Unseen Academicals, this phrase's complete meaninglessness gets lampshaded.
      • Another common mangled saying is "the worm is on the other boot", a mash-up of "the worm has turned" and "the boot is on the other foot".
    • The tendency of Honest Johns in UK media to call everyone "squire" (CMOT Dibbler does this) gets extended to other Discworld cultures, with a camel merchant who calls Teppic "emir" in Pyramids, and Disembowel-Meself-Honorably calling Rincewind "shogun" in Interesting Times.
    • Klatch's role as the "generically foreign" country to Morporkians means we get "Excuse my Klatchian" and "That isn't Klatchian mist, lad" (both by Ridcully in Soul Music).
    • A few aversions are lampshaded early on, when he notes that the use of the phrase "gypsies" is anomalous, given that there is no such thing as Egypt, but some words of place-name origin need to be kept for coherency's sake, so he's not calling them Djelibabes, as technically apropriate as that would be.
    • "This is a hell of a way to spend Hogswatch!" (Hogfather)
    • "Now we're cooking with charcoal!" (Interesting Times and others)
    • Trolls refer to "legends from the sunset of time." Either because they're nocturnal (according to The Light Fantastic), or because they think we go through time backwards (according to Thud!, based on a line in Reaper Man).
    • "Evil Emperor. Evil Empire. It did what it said on the iron maiden.(Unseen Academicals)
    • "Couldn't expect to get away Feegle free" (Snuff)
    • There's more than one way of choking a dangdang than stuffing it with pling." (Thief of Time)
  • The vampire culture in The Saga of Darren Shan: "In this night and age"
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe books:
    • "Out of the reactor core and into the supernova."
    • Playing Sith's/Dark Side's Advocate. Started in the X-Wing Series, but other novels picked it up later.
    • Better the Moff you know than Emperor's new envoy.
    • He was as green as the foam on Lomiin-ale.
    • The Star Wars Holiday Special is largely cringed over and ignored, but a few things have worked their way into canon. Boba Fett, Chewbacca's family, and Life Day.
      Wedge: [after a very agreeable breakup, and having said that he hopes she'll still consider him a friend] "Meaning you can still call on me. Send me messages. Send me Life day presents."
    • "These guys◊ went through the estate's defenses easier than [[hottip: Rebels go through a Death Star: joke about cheap food of any kind / hot knife through butter]]."
    • It's not the work of Venthan Chassu, but it beats bare walls.
    • Less chance than a flame on Hoth.
    • If one person calls you a Hutt, laugh it off. If two people call you a Hutt, start to wonder. If three people call you a Hutt, buy a drool bucket and start hoarding spice. (Stackpole invents a lot of these.)
    • You look like something the poom dragged in.
    • How many Corellians does it take to change a glowpanel?
      • None. If the Light's out you can't see them cheating at Sabacc.
    • Speaking of which, there's no such thing as a "poker face". Instead, you'd have a "Sabacc face".
    • She took to it like a sarlacc to sand.
      • That one is strange, since they do have ducks. And water.
      • And because not all sarlaccs live in deserts.
    • If The Force is with us, it's definitely The Dark Side.
    • This looks like a dew-run.
      • Also used: a "blue milk-run".
    • Stick the vibroblade in and modulate the oscillation rate.
    • The airspeeder dropped like a freefalling Hutt.
      • The same character a few pages later said the same speeder "dropped like a rock", so "freefalling Hutt" was probably just for color.
    • As the smugglers say, we were putting all our [[hottip:spice: eggs]] in one freighter.
    • Don't plot a course into that black hole.
    • I get the holo.
    • I'll walk away, shedding my crimes like a Trandoshan sheds its skin.
      • In that case it was deliberate — a criminal offered to hand over some crucial info in exchange for immunity from prosecution, money, and a way off planet, and was amused when an old enemy was sent to pick him up. He knew she needed the info and was too honorable to go against the deal, so he used this phrase to remind her that he had let the Trandoshan who had murdered a friend walk free.
    • This really came out of the asteroid belt.
      • Alternately, it came out of the black, as in deep space.
    • "Like a neutrino through plasma."
      • A similar but less arbitrary example from one of the Young Jedi Knights books: Lando says that a certain diamond drill can cut through durasteel just as easily as a laser can cut through Sullustan jam.
    • A particularly egregious one: What time is it when an Imperial AT-AT Walker steps on your wrist chronometer? Time to get a new wrist chronometer.
    • Wedge Antilles is said to have ice water in his veins and cold-space lubricants for blood.
    • "And then ask yourself if that doesn't make you look a bit like a dewback's cloaca."
  • The Redwall books love these. Some examples include "the leaf calling the grass green" and "I'll bet you an apple to an acorn" (the equivalent of "dollars to donuts").
    • "If wishes were fishes, there'd be no room in the river for water." (Also many creative insults, the best being "If brains were bread you'd have starved to death before you were born!")
    • "There's more than one way of frying a frog." Weird, you'd think Ferahgo would love to talk about skinning things...
  • From The Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, we have "Never bring a tazer to an artillery duel", and the ReMastered philosophy "Upload them all, the unborn god will know its own".
  • The Hollows has several, such as "You look like the vamp who drained the cat."
  • Lots in the Star Trek Novel Verse:
    • Like a targ out of gre'thor. (Klingon)
    • "If life hands you ungaberries, you've got to make detergent." (Ferengi)
    • "Played me like a Syn Lara." (Trill)
    • "The Bloodwing's share", and "like h'vart in an alley." (Both Romulan)
    • "The pin that broke the zipthar’s wing.(Human colonists on Deneva)
    • "If Ice Bores kill your Ailicorne, make Ailicorne steaks". (Andorian). There are also the Andorian axioms "Absence makes the heart forget" and "What goes around comes around...but with a sharper knife".
    • The Ferengi morality tale of "The Boy Who Cried Audit"
    • "Like Honge on fresh meat" (Cardassian). Also the Cardassian saying "the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, but may prove useful".
    • "Sap and fog", for when Nasats are being dismissive.
    • "Screw with the Mugato, you're getting the horn".
    • "In a Tribble's eye!" (Which didn't need to be said, because McCoy uses the phrase "In a pig's eye!" in the original series).
  • Dragaera: In the book Issola, Lady Teldra makes a reference to Vlad engaging in "gray humor". This is the equivalent of what we would call "black humor"- the difference is that in the series, black is the color of magic and gray is the color of death.
    • They also have "how many X does it take to sharpen a sword?" instead of Light Bulb Jokes.
  • Warrior Cats does this quite a bit.
    • "When hedgehogs fly!"
    • "Don't be a scaredy-mouse!"
    • "Don't get your whiskers in a twist."
    • "That's a load of fox-dung!"
    • "You're crow-food!"
    • "Cloudtail's mew is worse than his scratch."
    • "We shall kill two prey with one blow, as it were."
    • "Who made dirt in his fresh-kill?"
    • "You look as if you've lost a rabbit and found a shrew."
  • A clever and appropriate use in Robert Heinlen's Starship Troopers novel, "...on the bounce." Its meaning ranges from along the lines of 'don't waste time' to 'stay alert', depending on the context it's used in.
  • Rosalie hisses "Over my pile of ashes" in Breaking Dawn.
  • In Insurrection (War of the Spider Queen series) one drow said "putting the cart before the lizard".
  • In Safehold, "kill the wyvern that fetched the golden rabbit."
    • Fridge Logic: But why would you kill the wyvern out of greed? Does it puke up the rabbit after fetching it? And they have chickens on Safehold, so why not geese? Why not just use another bird in place of the goose? Arrgh!
    • Also, "between the doomwhale and the deep blue sea."
  • The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov: "built like a force-field latrine." (If you're wondering about the practicality of a force-field latrine, note that that's the point of the original metaphor.)
  • The Automatic Detective loves this trope - among others, Mack, as narrator, once says that "Grey had me by the directives", and use of "exhaust port" (as per the Transformers example) is a common stand-in for "ass" in all manner of expressions.
  • Guardians Of Gahoole does this a few times. Most common is the use of 'gizzard' in place of things like 'know in my heart' or 'bad feeling in my gut'.
    • "Are you yoinks"?
    • "Racdrops" is a common swear, short for 'raccoon droppings'.
    • "Glaux" is used in place of "God" ie "Great Glaux!".
  • H. Beam Piper: one book replaced "hot knife" and "butter" with "fast neutrons" and "toilet paper".

    Live-Action TV 
  • Charles Dickens in Doctor Who: "What the Shakespeare?"
    • Oddly enough, the phrase "what the dickens" actually appears in Shakespeare's writing and has nothing to do with the author Dickens at all ("the dickens" = "the Devil"), but it would be even odder for Charles Dickens to say "what the dickens".
  • Star Trek: Voyager has "I didn't want to be a third nacelle." (Ships in Star Trek almost always have an even number of warp nacelles, usually 2)
  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Amok Time" has one whose mundane equivalent isn't very common: "He's as tight-lipped as an Aldeberan Shellmouth."
  • Babylon 5 does this when Ivanova says to Sheridan, "What am I, chopped flarn?" ("Lines of Communication")
  • In The Suite Life on Deck: "Well I guess we're both up the Ganges without a paddle!

    Tabletop Games 

    Theater 
  • Wicked: "Wait one clock-tick."

    Video Games 
  • The Fable series:
    • Just wait a Skorm-damn minute, you!
  • The Discworld game:
    Sleazy Guy: Care to buy an hourglass?
    Rincewind: Where'd you get those?
    Sleazy Guy: Fell off the back of a donkey cart, sir!
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: Is Linebeck shaking over there?! He's such a cucco!
    • One of the CDi games has "I'm so hungry, I could eat an octorok!"
  • Wakka instructs Tidus over the course of Final Fantasy X to hold his chocobos. The Chocoboy of Final Fantasy VIII instructed Squall to do the same.
  • Zork: Grand Inquisitor has several characters exclaim "Holy Hungus!" and/or "Sweet Yoruk!"
  • Mass Effect 2 features an advertisement for a movie about "Blasto, the first hanar Spectre", whose trademark phrases are "This one has no time for your solid waste excretions" and "Enkindle THIS!"
    • When you first meet Legion, Tali mentions that a single geth would have no more intelligence than a wild varren. It makes more sense since varren are basically Space Dogs, and 99% of the characters, humans included, probably never saw a real life dog before.
    • Quarians in general use the term "Kee'lah" in place of "God" *.]], and "Kee'lah se'lai" is said at the end of certain discussions, including the hearing in front of the admiralty board. Replace it with "God be with you", and it's a perfect fit.
      • Mass Effect 3 reveals it to effectively mean "The homeworld which I shall one day see.", which is similar, given how mythical their homeworld is to the Quarians by this point.
  • Dwarven curses in the Dragon Age setting include "Go take a long breath out of a short shaft," which from context and phrasing probably means "Go die in a hole."
    • It might be a modification of "go take a long walk off a short pier", basically, "shut up" or "go f*ck yourself".
    • They also use "Nug-humping" where a modern person would probably use "Motherfucking."
    • In addition, there's the phrase "by the maker", as well as a few references to Andraste throughout both games.
  • The Mega Man Battle Network series has quite a few of these, primarily in the first three games, where the translators were using Woolseyisms:
    • "I was programmed ready!"
    • "You scared me half to deletion!"
    • "Prepare to meet your programmer!"
  • All over the place in Homeworld: Cataclysm. Some are reasonable, some are quite grating.
    Kuun-Lan Fleet Command(agitated): Join the Kiith!
  • Tales of Monkey Island has got LOADS of them, though a few examples are:
    • "Davey J. Nipperkin doesn't go handing over his secret sources to every Tom, Dick, and Guybrush that washes ashore!"
    • "Anyone up for a quick game of Five Card Draw-and-Quarter? Follow the Monkey? Męlée Hold 'Em?"
    • "The Club has a strict 'No Feet, No Service' clause."
    • "Talk to the hand, sicko, 'cause the pirate ain't listenin'!"
    • "Accidentally, my dorsal fin!"
    • "Does someone have a cannon to your head?"
    • "...but that guy is cannon]]-happy!"
    • "Just my two pieces of eight, sir."
    • "Blowholes to Betsy, could it be?"
    • "Hold onto your pantalones!"
    • "Your honor, pirates and wenches of the gallery..."
    • "...he seemed to think I could make a pretty piece of eight off of your untimely execution..."
    • "Time is grog, Captain."
    • "Malevolence is in the eye of the beholder, Guybrush Threepwood."
    • "Tore through here like a cat outta hell, off into the jungle."
    • "Mo' money, mo ability to solve puzzles."
    • "That witch is nothing but trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with V,]] and that stands for Voodoo.]]"
  • Hatoful Boyfriend has repeated uses of "everybirdie".
  • In Star Wars The Old Republic, a Hutt remarks, "You say keelpunah, I say keepunah."
  • When playing Sim Ant, if the "Funny" captions are turned on, ants will often share gems such as "I've worked my mandibles to the chitin."

    Web Comics 
  • Footloose: "You've got about as much chance as [[hottip:the ugly stepsisters had with Prince Charming.: Hinckley had with Foster.]]"
  • The webcomic Skin Deep has at least one: "What's got your feathers in a turn?" (oddly enough, said to someone who doesn't have feathers.)
  • Vexxarr gives us this version.
  • "I'm such a plague-head!" from My Milk Toof.
  • Digger
    • "Hold your moles, I'm coming."
    • "Never laid eyestalkson one before."
    • "I don't give a gnawed shoot."
    • "Don't salt the messenger."
    • " I'll make him regret the day he slid out of his mother's pouch.
  • Our Little Adventure has a few:
    • "For the love of the gods" replacing "For the love of God"
    • "For Stellina's sake!" replacing "For Christ's sake!"
    • "What in the three hells" replacing "What the hell"
    • "What on Manjulias" replacing "What on Earth" (at least when the creator remembers to change it.)
  • Homestuck plays this for laughs with the trolls, as part of the Expospeak Gag that is their biology and culture:
    • "You can glub to the content of your collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system."
    • Karkat explaining a troll romance novel "THEIR DYNAMIC IS THE GRUBLOAF AND TUBER PASTE OF THE OVERALL ARC."

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • In the The Little Mermaid animated series, disobedient children get beached.
    • Also:
    Triton: What under the sea is going on?!
  • The Jetsons: "That's the way the satellite spins."
    • "Jumping Jupiter!"
  • The Flintstones: "That's the way the boulder bounces."
    • "Just a rock pickin' minute.
  • Pac-Man, the Animated Series: "Over my chomped body!''
  • The Super Mario Bros. Super Show: "That's the way the meatball bounces."
  • Futurama has "You sound like a broken MP3."
  • Beast Wars does this a lot, replacing certain lines in stock phrases with robotic related terms. Most famously replacing various expletives with "slag".
    • Transformers in general does this a lot.
  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: "Get your muzzle out of those books."
    • "You little foal!"
    • "What the hay?"
    • "Every/Any/Some/Nopony" on many occasions.
    • "Old pony's/mare's tale."
    • "Goody four-shoes."
    • "Well, well, well, it seems we have some neeeigh-sayers in the audience!"
    • "It's time to pony up and confront Zecora!"
      • Somewhat hilariously, Pony Up is genuine slang for Pay Up, which changes the line's meaning a bit.
    • "Fillies and gentlecolts."
    • The UK trailers have "lend a helping hoof".
    • "You... get down here... this instant... young... colt!"
    • The fandom also tends to use "flank" in place of "ass" or "butt", like "flank-hurt", "dat flank", or "badflank".
      • "Buck" is also commonly used instead of the similar sounding four-letter word, though at least one comic has noted the problems with that.
  • Maryoku Yummy: "Yum's the word."
  • Adventures Of The Galaxy Rangers: Upon having to fight their way out of a Earth-government facility, running from the Space Navy, and learning they're headed for Tortuna. "Out of the blast furnace, and into the converter!"
  • In the Spongebob Squarepants episode "The Algae's Always Greener": "A rolling stone gathers no Algae!"
  • A number of phrases on Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends (which focuses on the adventures of sentient insects and other bugs), but most particularly "hold your horseflies!"
  • The main character in Widget The World Watcher likes to replace words of common sayings by something space-based.
  • The Buzz On Maggie: Oh, bug.
  • Adventure Time: "Oh, my Grod/Glob/Gob!"
    • "What the math?"
  • South Park has these in the "Go God Go" episodes, in the atheistic future, things like "Oh my science!" and "What in science's name?".
  • ReBoot used computer jargon to get crap past the radar:
    • "Me and good old Frisket just kicked Megabyte's bitmap!"
    • "If you ask me, they're just covering their ASCIIs."

    Real Life 
  • There was a story in Reader's Digest about a student of medieval history who explained she was far too busy to do something by saying "I've just got too much on my trencher."
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