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Narrative Profanity Filter
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alt title(s): Implied Profanity Ralphie: Oh, fudge. Adult Ralphie (voiceover): Only I didn't say 'fudge'. I said the word, the big one, the queen mother of dirty words, the 'F-dash-dash-dash' word.
So you're writing a book, and one of your characters, for whatever reason, has to swear. Not a problem — unless your intended audience is children/people living before the mid-twentieth century. Is the risk of offending them worth the artistic reward of using exactly the right word? What can you do?
Easy. Just say that the character swore, without going into exactly what he said.
There are two ways to go about this. The first way is to use direct dialogue, with a note that the offensive word the character "really" used has been replaced with something tamer. E.g.:
"Do you want me to send the whole blasted army after you?" he snarled. Only "blasted" was not the word he used.
This has the advantage of capturing more of the character's content and phrasing, but only a Lemony Narrator or a fairly intrusive first-person storyteller can get away with it.
The second way is to use indirect dialogue, more or less avoiding actual details. E.g.:
Carruthers cursed under his breath.
It can also overlap easily with Expospeak Gag, like so:
Jannaway speculated, loudly and at length, on Strafford's parentage, sexual predilections, and eternal destiny.
Note that both versions involve the character actually swearing, and the narrator substituting less offensive language. That is what separates this trope from Unusual Euphemism, Curse Of The Ancients, and Goshdang It To Heck, in which the characters themselves use less offensive words rather than swearing. A combination of the two is occasionally used n which a character paraphrases an insult in-universe, as in:
"She told you to go away. Except... she didn't put it so politely"
See also Foreign Cuss Word and Pardon My Klingon, in which actual swearing is portrayed, but is incomprehensible and therefore inoffensive to the reader. And compare Symbol Swearing. Also note that this is chiefly a Literature trope. Sound Effect Bleep and Curse Cut Short are rough audiovisual-media equivalents, while T-Word Euphemism is often used for print.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In All Star Batman and Robin, after the Goddamn Batman throws "Jocko-Boy" Vanzetti into Gotham Harbor and lies that the hallucinogenic substance in his blood will never fade away, a text box reads "Standards of decency prevent us from printing Jocko-Boy's response."
Film
- For the "replaced the curses with another word" variety: A Christmas Story and "fudge".
- In a strange aversion, the postcard in In Bruges was much funnier when the profanity was bleeped for the trailer than when you could hear it.
Live Action Television
- Often used on How I Met Your Mother, most notably in ''How Lily Stole Christmas", in which "Grinch" is used to substitute for a much stronger word.
- Extended to calling a joint a sandwich and going as far as to making the characters eat a (very large) sandwich and giggling like stoners, and carrying around smaller sandwiches in rolled-up plastic baggies.
- Just Shoot Me, "How the Finch Stole Christmas" (sensing a pattern?): The narrator explains that Finch "expressed his displeasure with color and flair, using words that our censors will not let us share."
- On The Big Bang Theory, Raj whispers something to Howard, which he translates as Raj comparing Sheldon to "a hygiene product used by women who are not feeling fresh in a summer's eve." Penny adds, "and the bag it came in."
- From a later episode: "Yeah, she's pushy, and yeah, he's whipped, but that's not the expression."
- In the X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," Scully describes what she saw, and we see it, with Detective Manners saying "bleeping" over his profanity. Then we cut back to Scully talking with Chung, and she explains that "he didn't actually say 'bleeping.'" Chung replies that yes, he's familiar with the detective's speech style...
Close Live Action Television
Literature
- From Animorphs #1:
I guess Rachel thought the same thing. She slowed down just a little and began yelling and waving her arms. "Come on, come on, you-" And then she said some words I didn't realize Rachel even knew.
- Really, this trope shows up all the time in the Animorphs books,
- From The Homeword Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones:
"Unprintable things!" I said—only I didn't say that. I really said them.
- In Wilkin's Tooth, Buster and his gang used purple, orange, blank language- and they wouldn't be half as menacing if they actually used 'orange', 'purple' or 'blanking'.
- The reason that all of the orcs in Lord Of The Rings spoke like British cadets instead of degenerate monstrous pillagers is that, as the appendix put it, their actual speech was too offensive to bother writing.
- In Great Expectations, there is a scene in which a character's repeated uses of the word "damn" are printed as "bless".
- In For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is full of Spanish-speaking characters, Ernest Hemingway rendered some words as "obscenity" or "unprintable" in dialogue, rather than either translating them or leaving them in Spanish. Hence the famous line: "I obscenity in the milk."
- David Eddings takes this trope and runs with it in The Belgariad and The Malloreon. There isn't a single actual curse in the entire series, but there are plenty of descriptions of cursing, including shocked reactions from the characters present. The absolute epitome of this is in the exchanges between Beldin and Polgara, which are so epically vulgar that they can drive hardened warriors from the vicinity. It is said that Polgara can curse for hours nonstop, in multiple languages, without ever repeating herself.
- This appears in Harry Potter, about 50 times a book, usually with Ron doing it, followed by Hermione berating him (or possibly his mother). Verily, JKR married this trope and had about 50 billion of its babies.
- Madeline l'Engle's The Young Unicorns.
- In her nonfiction book Talk to the Hand, Lynne Truss uses the word fuck a few times in the introduction, but then adds a note saying, "The author apologises for the high incidence of the word 'Eff' in this book," and thereafter uses Eff even in direct quote.
- Tamora Pierce does this a fair amount — it shows up in the Song of the Lioness and Circle of Magic series.
- The "describe the obscenities in non-obscene terms" use is done fantastically in The Shining when Stephen King describes the reactions of another driver to the Magical Negro accidentally swerving across his lane.
"He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo-driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limo-driver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution."
- In Terry Pratchett's Nation, the narrator mentions a parrot shouting words "a 10 year old girl shouldn't know, but she was more concerned about the words she didn't know."
- He also uses it from time to time in the Discworld series. For example, in Reaper Man, Mustrum Ridcully uses a word "unfamiliar to those wizards who had not had his robust country upbringing and knew nothing of the finer points of animal husbandry" to cuss out the Dean for careless use of a fireball spell.
- Toyed with in The Truth, possibly an example of another trope; the brutal Mr. Tulip has a speaking habit punctuated with (SIC) "-ing", used in ways that heavily suggest swearing. The implication with more adult readers is that this is a censored "fucking", but the characters in the novel actual react as though he is just saying "(pause)ing" or actually pronouncing the dash.
- In one of Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson's Hoka stories, one character describes another as the offspring of a union that the compilers of Leviticus would not have approved of.
- Conan The Barbarian, when he wasn't swearing by Crom or his other gods, would often let loose with curses in his native tongue, such as in one scene in "The Scarlet Citadel" where, as his final words to Evil Sorcerer Tsotha before being shut up in the dungeons, he "let loose a searing Cimmerian curse that would have burst the eardrums of an ordinary man."
- In the Louise Fitzhugh book Sport, the (child) characters are described as using the worst language they can think of to describe bad situations, and, when even this isn't enough, substituting the word "blank". Naturally "blank" is the only blanking expletive that ever appears in the blanking book.
- Robert A Heinlein loves this trope, since he was both writing in the days when such curses were still considered somewhat unprintable, and often for the juvenile market. So his characters sometimes will say things like "Expletive Deleted!" or the first-person narrator will merely describe the profanity in vague and general terms.
Juan Rico: He never once repeated himself and he never used either profanity or obscenity. (I learned later that he saved those for very special occasions, which this wasn't.) But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail.
- In Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus:
"Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP
Only he didn't say 'doggone.'"
- Archie Goodwin of the Nero Wolfe books does this frequently, including to himself. He claims to do it because he doesn't want to lose any readers (like this one grandma in Wichita).
- Joe Haldeman's The Forever War has this with the protagonist's far-future squad members. "He said a word whose vowel had changed over the years, but whose meaning hadn't."
- In one book of the Sword Of Truth series, Annalina describes Zedd's reaction to one of Nathan's plans with, "Zedd has succumbed to a bout of loud cursing and arm flailing, he is swearing oaths about what he intends to do to Nathan, I am sure he will find most of his intentions physically impossible."
- In Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, Han Solo tends to curse in every language he knows. Naturally, we never get to actually hear any of these curses, unless they happen to be Unusual Euphemisms....
- In one novel in the X Wing Series the Big Bad calls him up to mock him and demand his surrender, only for Han to have Chewie take the call so he can wander off to direct the rest of the fleet. Since Han is the only one present who understands Shyriwook, the novel's periodic cuts back to the ongoing call reproduce Chewie's lengthy rant indirectly. It's mentioned that Chewbacca lists up the various ingredients that make up Zsinj, none of them fit for polite company.
- Apparently Wookiees have a thing for this - generally the writers are unwilling to write out "Arrn whooon urr" and such, so just about anything they say is formatted like this trope. In Death Star, the viewpoint character, a doctor describing side effects for a treatment, doesn't understand the language and has to rely on a translator droid.
The next comment was one 4ME-O seemed reluctant at first to translate; when it did, Uli had to hide a smile. He hadn't been aware that members of this species were so imaginative. [...] Hahrynyar snarled an offensive remark concerning Palpatine's personal hygiene that Uli was willing to swear brought a blush to 4ME-O's durasteel skin.
- C.S.Lewis uses the word "bucking" in That Hideous Strength, where a more literal reportage of the events might be a word which begins with "F".
- Ian Fleming used the wonderful example "___" a few times. It's clear James Bond was refering to what he likes to do with the girl of the week . . . .
- Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes has something like these lines (quoted from memory):
And said a very dirty word
That luckily you've never heard.
(I dare not write it, or even hint it.
Nobody would ever print it.)
- Common in Dave Barry's columns, which had to use language suitable for family newspapers. For instance, "&*@##%$(!?,.<>+*&'%$!!@@$##%%^&" has this choice paragraph:
I felt pretty bad, saying the S-word right into my son's ear, but he was cool. "Daddy, you shouldn't say the S-word," he said. Only he didn't say "the S-word," you understand; he actually said the S-word. But he said it in a very mature way, indicating that he got no thrill from it, and that he was merely trying to correct my behavior.
- Atlas Shrugged:
"You can tell that railroad to—" followed by untransmissible words, was the message of the Smather Brothers of Arizona in answer to the S.O.S. of New York.
- A Tree Grows In Brooklyn:
"Let her give the kids a ride around the block. It ain't no skin off your teeth." (Only he didn't say "teeth," to the snickering delight of the youngsters clustered around.)
- In a Wing Commander novel, when a Kilrathi baron demanded humanity's surrender, Admiral Tolwyn said, "Direct your inquiry to President Quinson. I'm sure he will tell you to go perform a certain impossible anatomical act." When the baron specified he wanted the fleet's surrender, Tolwyn "replied with what he assumed the President would have said."
- Used throughout The Devil in Vienna which is written as protagonist Inge's diary. She says Seyss-Inquart's name sounds like "a certain dirty word", but fails to specify, mentions her mother saying "a word she hardly ever uses" and uses the old standby, "only he didn't say...".
- In Hickman and Weis' Rose of the Prophet trilogy, the djinn often 'made asperations that his parenthood included a goat' and such.
- One of the books in The Pigman series has the narrator explain that he will use #$%& for swears, and @#$%& for really bad swears. He then praises the usefulness of this scheme because the reader likely has a better imagination than he does.
- James White loves the second version of this trope, especially in his Sector General series. Phrases like "Conway told him exactly where to go and what to do when he got there" happen at least once a chapter, making the book simultaneously incredibly vulgar and suitable for kids.
- Asimov's Foundation has the following (the em-dash is used because this editor can't remember what is being cursed): "'— be damned!' he said, via a bouncing soldierly oath that ionised the air."
- Dorothy Sayers would also frequently use this, seeing how she was writing in a time when the radar sweeps were much lower than today. For example, one of her character once says something about another character that was "more flattering to his morals than to his manliness".
- Cheaper By the Dozen (the book, not the travesty of a Hilary Duff movie) has one kid calling another a "son of an unprintable word." Later there's "you unprintable son of a ruptured deleted."
- From Breaking Dawn, Leah manages to do this in werewolf form.
And then, when he added those last three words, her hackles rose and she was yowling a long stream of snarls through her teeth. I didn’t have to be in her head to hear the cussing-out she was giving him, and neither did he. You could almost hear the exact words she was using.
- Subverted in the The Land of the Silver Apples when the heroes are running in a rapidly flooding cave, two of the female characters are described as letting out a stream of curses and the little girl asks, "What does filthy #$@!!' mean?"
- Extra humor comes from the fact that a priest was among the heroes.
- Done a few times in The Amulet of Samarkand usually for a Babylonian swear word. But one instance takes the cake when both language and violence make a censor when an imp is about to say something very inappropriate we get a line of asterisk and the footnote.
These polite asterisk replace a short censored episode characterized by bad language and some sadly necessary violence. When we pick up the story again, everything is as before except I am perspiring slightly and the contrite imp is the model of cooperation.
- In the Babysitters Club Super Special "Snowbound", Dawn's mother hits a mailbox while trying to drive in the snow. She says, in Dawn's words, "a word I have never heard her use before. In fact, I've heard it only in movies that Mom doesn't know I've seen."
- In the fourth book of the Indian In The Cupboard series, while climbing up into the barn's hayloft to reach Kitsa and her kittens, Patrick falls through the weak boards and lands on top of his friend, breaking his ankle in the process. When he does, the friend cries out "Oh shoot!" Omri then notes, via the narrative, "except he didn't say 'shoot'."
Music
- Subverted in MeWithoutYou's "The Fox, the Crow, and the Cookie". The third verse begins:
Using most unfriendly words / that the village children had not yet heard / the baker shouted threats by canzonette / to curse the crafty bird.
Stand-Up Comedy
- In Himself, Bill Cosby relates the tale of his eldest daughter's birth. He describes his wife's response to a contraction as "She informed everyone in the room that my parents were never married."
- A Büttenredner in Cologne carnival was asked to describe the reaction of his parents after an unfortunate event This Troper no longer remembers. He asked: "With or without the curses?" After the other person said he should tell it without them, the reply it short: "In that case, they said nothing!"
- Woody Allen is frequently quoted as saying, "I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words."
Video Games
- Exile/Avernum 3 has a few sailors who constantly pepper their speech with gibberish-as-narrator-replaced-profanity.
Web Original
Webcomics
Other
- The sketch at about 4 minutes into this video
 puts a twist on this trope, by merely changing the target of the racist slurs uttered.
Real Life
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