Unusual Euphemism - Television Tropes & Idioms

After one character in Gokujou Seitokai catches the Class President coming out of the new girl's dorm in the morning, she immediately and loudly assumes payapaya. This is helped by a visual gag of "patty-cake", but amusingly enough most of the flabbergasted cast doesn't actually know what the word is supposed to mean.
The Trigun fandom has adopted "Making Sandwiches" as their pet euphemism, after a scene where Milly and Wolfwood are discussing sharing Millie's freshly made lunch, then immediately following that up with a shirtless Wolfwood staring out a window, and an obviously naked Millie asleep in the background.
The Macross franchise features a multipurpose euphemism in "Deculture", borrowed from Zentraedi slang, generally meaning anything from "amazing!" to "disgusting".
One episode of Sailor Moon had Makoto (Sailor Jupiter) argue that she was best suited for the main role in a school play, because she had the largest breasts. When it was translated for American broadcasting, she instead claimed to have the greatest talent. Since then, SM fans enjoy using the word 'talent' and 'being talented' for... well, having large breasts.
- Predated by Joe-bob Briggs' use of the term (and probably long before that) to describe B-Movie actresses who were hired for their "two enormous talents".
- Another unusual euphemism for Sailor Moon: Haruka (Sailor Uranus) and Michiru (Sailor Neptune) were lesbians in the original Japanese anime and manga. But in Cloverway's English dub, they became "cousins."
  - Who kiss.
In episode 5 of Strike Witches, the seemingly innocent protagonist Yoshika has a very... interesting dream about her best friend in the Strike Witches. Her best friend misinterprets her trying to explain her dream as 'flying in formation with her'. Yoshika is about to correct her and basically say "No, 'perverted misconduct'" but quickly sees the writing on the wall and substitutes "Y... yeah, 'flying in formation'. That's it exactly." The pun being that the words Yoshika used to describe it can also be heard as 'flying in formation', and it took her a second to catch on.
The comical Nosebleed, a very common sight in anime and manga is in fact an Unusual Euphemism. See the entry for more details.
The title of FLCL. Throughout the series, these four (intentionally) ill-defined syllables are used throughout the series to refer to, among God only knows what, sexual acts. This has lead viewers to (falsely) believe it to be an onomatopoetic Japanese expression referring to breast fondling.
In Texhnolyze the euphemism for a gang-war is Matsuri, which is Japanese for "Festival", though the offical translation calls it a "Spectacle". Its purpose is mainly to demonstrate how people in the show feel about violence as a way to solve problems.
In the Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Rei water-park episode, Rena really wants to see Keichi's cute "sea bear".
Kikaider gave us "fixing your arm"...
In the Naruto censored/TV version dub, due to censoring they referred to Lee while in a drunken state as being "loopy", yet the "magical elixir" sounds similar to an euphemism.
Close Anime and Manga

In Marvel Comics' 2099 universe, the standard epithet is "shock".
- Which led to a hilarious adaptation in Italian where "razzo" (rocket), was used instead of "cazzo" (cock, an actual Italian interjection used in similar way to the English "crap!")...nobody was able to see Marvel 2099 characters ejaculating "Rocket!" in front of flabbergasting or intense situation with a straight face.
- Spider Man 2099 writer Peter David said he had considered introducing "shuck" as another futuristic epithet, on the grounds that it was a combination of "shit" and "fuck".
In Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, Johnny C. sometimes says "Fook!", though he usually just uses the plain ol' F-Bomb.
In the series PS 238 about a secret school for the super-powered offspring of heroes/villains, an aspiring young supervillain named Zodon has all his swear words replaced by random words, due to a chip implanted in his giant-brained head. Before that, his cussing was represented by the usual string of punctuation ($#&@!).
Zodon: What the Gumball did you do to me, you Windshield?!
Herschel: I just gave you what I call a "Barry Ween" chip. We can shut it off if you learn to tone down the cussing, and it'll dissolve completely when you turn 18.
Zodon: You Flower Garden, I'll Fox Trot all over your Drinking Fountain! Umbrella! Crunchberries! Cordless Telephone!
- And if he gets really upset and starts swearing non-stop, the chip causes him to sing show tunes.
Judge Dredd often shouts "Stom!", "Grud" and "Drokk!".
- "Grud" is a Mega-City corruption of 'God'. The Vatican, which is a police state equivalent to a Catholic Mega-City, sort-of worships him, although the majority of high-ranking members of the Vatican's establishment seem to not care either way.
- And from what I've read "Drokk" is the same as "Shit" In all its various forms.
Sinister Dexter, another 2000AD comic, presents "funt" as the curse of choice in the future pan-European city of Download. No definition is ever given, and, aside from the obvious variations such as "funting", several more unsual forms appear, such as "smugfunt" and "funtwipe", further enhancing the ambiguity of the word. Given the often tongue-in-cheek nature of the series, it is likely that this is, at least in part, a nod to similar practices in other sources, particularly earlier 2000AD strips.
The Legion Of Super Heroes comic had a variety of alternate swear words, including "Pain in the klordny", which an editor translated as "neck" when challenged on it. Why "pain in the neck" would need a euphemism was unanswered, and later usage included "get off your klordny"... Of course, there was also a completely unexplained "klordny week" holiday/festival... which is probably better not thought about much.
- Most of them are used inconsistently. "Sprock" usually means what it ends like, but "Sprock happens" once appeared. "Grife" appears to be the name of a deity - never used except as a curse. And on occasion, curses from other universes are used (Oh, frak.")
- At one point the frequency of futuristic swear words was lampshaded in a fictional interview with the Legion's police liaison, who commented that those kids had the filthiest mouths she'd ever heard.
Lobo's all-purpose curses are "frag" (a real term for killing with shrapnel) and "bastich".
- Bastich (or bastiche if you're feeling highbrow) is a combination of Bastard and Bitch generated out of necessity: When encountering as many alien species as The Main Man, one cannot always be sure of the gender of the person one is insulting.
Genis, the title character of Peter David's Captain Marvel series, used the expletive "grozit". This must be Peter David's personal favorite: it's also used by Catalina (who is from Saturn's moon Titan, just like Genis) in the kid's show Space Cases, which David co created, and by Mackenzie Calhoun from his Star Trek New Frontier book series.
- In a Peter David-penned Hulk series, "flark" was used as a Future Slang f-bomb; later, Genis's own circle of friends began using it in the present as alien slang.
Averted in Madman, in which the titular character is unable to curse due to an unknown issue.
Captain Haddock from Tintin used a variety of very creative oaths, mostly variations on "Blistering barnacles!" and "Thundering typhoons!" There's actually a list of them here. ("Bashi-bazouks!" "Lubberscum!" "Coelacanth!" "Diplodocus!") The ultimate would probably be "Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon!"
- or: -in ten thousand thundering typhoons!'
- Let's not forget Rastapopoulos, who would use curse words that generally looked like they were produced by bashing randomly on a keyboard. This Troper hasn't read any Tintin books in a while, but seems to recall the word "MDJRK!" appearing at one point.
  - This Troper always assumed that was supposed to be just a sound made in frustration.
Kl'lrt the Super-Skrull did, in his miniseries, use such expletives as "Son of a Sch'mag!"
The phenomenon of female robots aside, a truly Unusual Euphemism shows up in GI Joe vs. the Transformers: The Art of War, where Bumblebee races against Arcee.
Bumblebee: Hey Arcee, if I win, you owe me a kiss!
Arcee: Please. If you can beat me, I'll rotate your tires.
Bumblebee: ...WOOO-HOOO!
A brief conversation in Nextwave between Elsa Bloodstone and The Captain:
Elsa: What was your superhero name?
Captain: Captain ☠☠☠☠.
Elsa: You're kidding me.
Captain: Nope. I was Captain ☠☠☠☠.
Elsa: Why, for God's sake?
Captain: Hey, I'm from Brooklyn. I'm gonna call myself Mr. Friendly? Hell no. Captain ☠☠☠☠. I met Captain America once. He asked my what my name was.
Elsa: And you said Captain ☠☠☠☠.
Captain: Man he beat seven shades of it out of me. Left me in a dumpster with a bar of soap shoved in my mouth.
- Considering it's Nextwave, it's not likely to be self-censorship; it's just an odd word.
  - "☠☠☠☠" gets used a lot in the current version of Guardians of the Galaxy as well.
In some of Disney's Scamp comics, Scamp tends to use words relating to cats in place of expletives.
Tramp: For causing me all that trouble, you're going to sit in the corner while I nap!
Scamp: Oh, cat!
A faerie in Sandman mutters "Iron nails!" under his breath.
Another 2000AD example, Shakara, features 'frukk', as in "Oh, frukk!" and "Get that frukker!"

Close Comic Books

A commercial for Orbit gum features a woman walking in on her husband smooching his paramour - but because they're all chewing the gum that gives you a cleaner mouth, Unusual Euphemisms abound. Some of the insults slung between them are "son of a biscuit-eating bulldog!" and "you lint-licker!" In another Orbitz commerical, two male cheerleading teams have a spat, but the coach tells them to "lay off the pumpernickel!"
- Similarly, a commercial for another brand of gum has a woman and a man in a romantic situation. The woman purrs, "Talk dirty to me." Having just popped a stick of the gum into his mouth, he says, "Skinnamarinky-dinky-dink, skinnamarkiny-doo..." (This is a reference to the closing credits of Sharon Lois And Brams Elephant Show.)
Snickers candy bars in their "Not going anywhere for a while?" campaign. The old man had just painted the Kansas City endzone to read "Chefs", then said "Great Googley-Moogley."
- That particular line has its origins in the Jayhawks' (Cadets') novelty song "Stranded In The Jungle", when the narrator, recalling his near-boiling experience in a cannibal tribe's cooking pot, exclaims "Great Googley-Moogley, get me outta here!" Stranded is the best known.

Close Commercials

A recent and absolutely hilarious Stargate Atlantis fic came up with "ice farmer" as an Alien Euphemism for "gay," leading to a particularly wonderful example of Metaphorgotten.("If the ice wanted to be farmed...")

Close Fan Fiction

Often seen in TV broadcasts of regular movies (often the result of Bowdlerization):
- Repo Man, a cult movie which was broadcast on network TV with the expression "motherfucker" repeatedly dubbed as "melon farmer". The voices are done by the original cast member, and the choice of words was made by the director as a humorous commentary on censorship.
- The Big Lebowski contains a scene where an enraged John Goodman smashes up a car and repeatedly yells "Do you see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass?" On TV, it becomes "Do you see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?" and "...When you feed a soldier scrambled eggs?" This is quite funny, because it makes absolutely no sense story-wise, and leaves one wondering why they didn't simply bleep the offending words out.
  - That's because the Coens themselves apparently wrote the new lines for Goodman to read.
  - One that isn't added later on is when The Dude calls The Big Lebowski for a "human paraquat".
- The UK's ITV network was pretty infamous for this in the early 1990s. Probably the worst example was their dub of Robocop, though the film was shown late at night. Clarence threatens to shove a cocaine operation "so far up [the drug lord's] nose that he'll be sneezing snow for a week". It'd help if the two dubbed words sounded remotely like the original actor (or if cocaine wasn't supposed to go up one's nose to begin with). The immortal line near the end that "Dick Jones is wanted for murder" became "Dick Jones is an imposter" - this author had no idea of this until receiving the DVDs several years ago.
- The Eddie Murphy remake of The Nutty Professor is a strong example of this, including numerous instances of "face" replacing "ass".
- There is of course the infamous Die Hard censorship of John McClane's immortal line "yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker".
  - And Samuel L. Jackson calling him a "racist melonfarmer" in Die Hard 3.
  - Variations include the popular "yippee-ki-yay, Mr. Falcon," which makes very little sense, and "yippee-ki-yay, Kimosabe".
  - Thank goodness in Italian it still came off as "yippee-ki-yay, piece of shit".
- Ghostbusters: At the end of the Onionhead sequence, Venkman's "We came, we saw, we kicked its ass" inexplicably becomes "What a knockabout of pure fun that was!".
  - Feeling quite proud that in Italian that was if possible made more grating by having Venkman state triumphally: "We came, we saw, we totally raped its ass!".
  - According to commentary, that scene and others were ad-libbed several times in a row until they came up with something they liked; the replacements may be alternative takes.
  - And one in all versions that's either an overdub or a Last Second Word Swap, to avoid a higher rating—"Mother pusbucket!"
  - This is lampshaded in the audio commentary. But I believe it was in the script to begin with.
  - Also, in the scene where Stantz refers to Obstructive Bureaucrat Walter Peck as "Dickless" and Venkman follows it up with "It's true, your honor... this man has no dick", the lines were changed to "that weasel" and "It's true, your honor... this man is some kind of rodent," respectively.
  - Another dub of the same scene turns "Dickless" into "Wally Wick". Unusual to say the least. "It's true" cuts off there without a punchline.
  - In the Italian dub Stantz doesn't call Peck 'dickless' so Venkman's following remark (literally: "this man has no balls") comes off as another instance of his offbeat humour.
  - According to commentary and other sources (IMDB), they actually shot some scenes twice just in case they needed to be toned down for re-rating or whatnot. So they aren't re-dubs, they're alternate takes.
  - When this editor was a kid, being poor, our copy of Ghostbusters was taped off the TV, and when Venkman says "Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown." bitch is replaced with fish. For some reason, he thought that's what the line actually was. One day, he said it during recess, and some kid whose parents had money knew it to be bitch, and reported his ass for swearing, even though he really said fish.
- The Mask: "Son of a bitch" becomes "son of a pig" and "son of a witch".
- Earlier this evening, this editor was watching an edited-for-television movie (I didn't catch the title), where editing produced the following dialog:
  "And then I totally kicked his {inserted} butt. Sorry, ma'am, I mean, I totally kicked his butt."
- Who's The Man? had a TV Edit where Ed Lover calls someone a "Lousy motherLIAR!".
  - And another character utters the immortal, "Motherfunny please, motherfunny please."
- The DVD releases of Shaun Of The Dead and its follow-up Hot Fuzz have among their special features a compilation of clips where they were forced to replace words- the replacements are mostly nonsense, and very much played for laughs, especially when lampshaded by being brought together. They range from simple letter substitution (What the funk?) to the downright bizarre (You stupid barstool).
  - Not to mention the outright hilarious (peas and rice!).
  - The related "bar-steward" is a common humorous euphemism for bastard in the UK.
  - On the Hot Fuzz commentary, director Edgar Wright expresses his surprise that Timothy Dalton, even at sixty, can still cause "ladyquakes".
  - Another Hot Fuzz commentary has Edward Woodward talking about using "Baskets!" on a show he used to work on back in the day, and then continuing to use it through the rest of the commentary.
- Used with great success in the "Edited For TV" short by Loading Ready Run. It featured the characters' swear words blatantly dubbed over by the narrator.
  Ash: [GOSHDARNIT], I can't believe you guys are still arguing over that [BLOODY] piece of [POO] jacket!
  Morgan: This [MELON FARMER] thinks it's his [FRUITY] jacket! I had it way before [FREAKIN'] he did!
- Seen in the TV broadcast of The Matrix, where Neo's cry of "Jesus CHRIST, that thing's real?!" is toned down to the rather more comical "Jeepers creepers, that thing's real?!".
  - Alternatively, "Judas Priest, that thing's real?!".
  - Or how about when he offers to give Smith "the flipper"? Cutting out the gesture itself is understandable, but their renaming of it is... confusing.
  - And the security guard's reaction to seeing Neo armed to the teeth becomes "Holy smokes!"
- This troper saw a TV broadcast of The Usual Suspects which included the immortal line "Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother."
  - YouTube link. A commercial for Showcase (Canadian TV network) also had a Take That against movie censorship, turning it into "fuzzy socksucker".
- The for-all-ages trailer of Being John Malkovich, which can be found on the DVD, has a fairly glaring example of changing a seemingly innocuous word into something that makes the context weird. In the trailer, Maxine says to Craig -
  And fifty other lines to get into a girl's hands.
- The TV broadcast of Liar Liar cleaned one of Fletcher's rants quite adeptly by avoiding unusual euphemisms:
  Fletcher: ...so what I'm gonna do is [piss becomes whine] and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and [take it up the tailpipe becomes take it like a grown man].
  - Earlier on, twice even, "Son of a BITCH!" becomes "I'm such a SNOT!", which sorta cancels out the well-handled rant.
- In the censored version of The Faculty, every use of the word fuck is replaced by "fooey." The hilarity of Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett hopping up and down over aliens with the stream of dialogue "Fooey fooey fooey! What the fooey just happened? Fooey you!" had me in fits.
- One of the funniest is the censorship of network broadcasts of Scarface, the two best being "This city is like a big pussy waiting to be fucked" changed to "This city is like a big chicken waiting to be plucked", and "Where'd you get that scar? Eating pussy?" to "Where'd you get that scar? Eating pineapple?"
  - There's even an entire DVD featurette about this censorship.
- In Forrest Gump, the scene where he invents "shit happens" is edited in an unintentionally funny way ("Whoa, whoa, you just ran through a big dogpile right there!" "It happens" "What? It!") The bumper sticker gets censored too.
- The VH-1 broadcast of Ferris Bueller's Day Off changes the line "Pardon my French, but you're an asshole!" to "Pardon my French, but you're an idiot!" (Since when was "idiot" a cuss word?) Likewise, in the AMC version it cuts to the next scene before Cameron can finish his sentence.
- An NBC broadcast of The 40-Year-Old Virgin dubbed over the term "fuck buddy" with "sex buddy," though the character's lips made it obvious she originally said "fuck buddy." Most other profanity not suitable for over-the-air broadcasts was simply muted.
- "Did you shampoo my wife?"
- "I've had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-Friday plane!"
- "What do you say I take you home and we watch I Love Lucy ?"
- And what about the scene in Galaxy Quest just before Jason and Gwen are forced to go through the Chompers? She says "screw", but it's obvious she's saying something else...
- Scorcese's Casino gets a great many of these. See just about any line of Joe Pesci's dialogue, and this great one from Sharon Stone: "Oh, freak you! Freak you, Sam Rothstein, Freeeak youuuu!"
- When Fast Times at Ridgemont High is broadcast, a cashier at a fast-food restaurant is mad at the customer who has become somewhat demanding because the meal is supposed to be "100% guaranteed", so he says, "If you don't shut up I'm going to kick 100% of your ass!" When the film is broadcast, it's changed to "100% of your face," and the customer complains because of his comments. Later his boss asks him "Did you use profanity or threaten this customer?" Since he didn't use profanity, they should have deleted that line from the manager's comments.
- When aired on ABC Family, Better Off Dead gets an edit that results in making no sense at all. In the scene where French-speaker Monique says "testicles" when she means "tentacles," the offending "testicles" is overdubbed with "tentacles." So it's very strange that she says, "tentacles," and Lane corrects her, "No, you mean 'tentacles.'"
- The DVD version of Crank has a "Family Friendly Audio" feature that replaces all the spoken swears (even minor ones like "damn") with tame versions. However, the full unedited video is still present, so the movie starts by showing a DVD with the words "FUCK YOU" written on it, in which the villain talks about how he "just freakin' killed you" with "synthetic Chinese stuff".
- In Kill Bill Vol. 1 the 'Pussy Wagon' was turned into the 'Party Wagon' for the edited-for-TV version with the word pussy digitally altered to read party on the back of the truck.
- In a TV edit, one of the best lines from Back To The Future was edited with... very poor enunciation. Poor Doc Brown goes from "excited" to "hyperactive teenage girl".
  Doc Brown: When this baby hits 88 miles an hour, you're gonna see some serious STUFF!!
- In The Ninth Gate, a woman who just slept with Johnny Depp's character tells him "don't fuck with me," to which he responds, "I thought I just did." The TV Edit changes "fuck" to "mess" making Johnny Depp's response unintentionally bizarre.
- When the Hallmark Channel aired The Breakfast Club, Bender's line "Eat my shorts" was inexplicably changed to "Eat my socks". One wonders how the channel would handle Bart Simpson.
  - Not to mention, any "Fuck you!"s were replaced with "Forget you!"
  - Another network's version had them dubbed with "Thank you!"
- The network TV airings of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? contain several instances of this. Most notably, when one of the weasels reaches down Jessica Rabbit's dress and gets his arm caught in a bear trap, Eddie Valiant's line "Nice booby trap" was re-dubbed as "Nice going, Jess".
  - Despite it being, unquestionably, an actual booby trap? That is one uncrapgetpastable network...
In Alien Nation, the aliens use the term "sykes", which is later revealed to literally translate as "excrement cranium". Coincidentally, the main human character is named Sykes...
Annie Wilkes, the insane villain from the film (and novel) Misery, replaces all swear words in her vocabulary with childishly bizarre words or phrases such as 'cock-a-doodie' or 'dirty birdie.'
Seen early on in Almost Famous: Anita tells her mother to "Feck off"; when their mother reacts as to the actual swear, William (eleven years old at this point) comments that she said "feck". "What's the difference?" "The letter "U".
One of Sam Jackson's earlier roles with a gun was also for language edited on the BBC. In Coming To America, Mr Jackson is heard to say "Why me, why me!" as he rushed out of an aborted robbery. However, you don't have to be a versed lip reader to tell exactly what he said instead of "why".
In One Fine Day, George Clooney's character does this in order to discuss romance with his psychiatrist in front of his young daughter, leading to lines like, "I just want to find a fish who isn't afraid of my dark chocolate layer... and of course she'd have to love my cookie too."
- Perhaps lampshaded when it doesn't work. When talking about a woman in whom he is not really interested, the daughter later explains to the love interest that "He wants a fish who'll love his cookie, and she's not the type."
W.C. Fields movies. Fields was the grandfather of this trope, since he wrote his own movie screenplays under bizarre pseudonyms. Phrases like "Godfrey Daniels!" littered his movies so that he could get around the censors of the day.
In Splash, the tour guide who first sees the naked Madison shouts "Bocce Balls!"
Johnny Dangerously. Romon Maroni does this several times.
Moroni: I would like to direct this to the distinguished members of the panel: You lousy cork-soakers. You have violated my farging rights. Dis somanumbatching country was founded so that the liberties of common patriotic citizens like me could not be taken away by a bunch of fargin iceholes... like yourselves.
Moroni: You fargin sneaky bastage. I'm gonna take your dwork. I'm gonna nail it to the wall. I'm gonna crush your boils in a meat grinder. I'm gonna cut off your arms. I'm gonna shove 'em up your icehole. Dirty son-a-ma-batches.
In the first Spy Kids movie, Carmen reacts in dismay in one scene with "Oh shiiiiiiiiiitake mushrooms."
Idiocracy. Since most businesses have been converted into brothels, whatever their previous product was, is now used as a euphemism for sexual acts. For example, in Starbucks lattes are really handjobs and H&R Block now has "adult" tax returns.
In one of the more famous examples that has since passed into common usage, the king of Swamp Castle in Monty Python And The Holy Grail makes repeated reference to his son's fiance's "huge...tracts of land". Amusingly enough, he meant it literally at first (this being the reason he arranged the marriage in the first place), then began using the phrase euphemistically while expounding on her other...*ahem*...assets.
Sex Drive has "visiting my grandma" as a euphemism for having sex.
In the clean, nice Utopia of 2032 in Demolition Man, you get a 1 credit fine for swearing, so people use 50s era euphemisms like "Jeese louise" and "jeepers"; the main character uses this to his advantage — when he's unable to figure out how to operate the 'modern' toilets of 2032, he stands beside the nearest microphone and swears a blue streak at it until he has enough swearing tickets to use in the washroom.
Somewhat averted in Baron Munchhausen when the group are on the moon, and the queen (just her floating head) comes to save the Baron and friends from the cage. All the while, she is moaning and making odd noises. The girl (Sally?) asks what's wrong with her, to which the Baron replies "the king is...tickling her feet". Strangely enough, it soon cuts to the king and the queen, in bed, under the covers...and it turns out he IS in fact tickling her feet...
Pineapple Express, though not the result of censorship:
Dale: I'm sorry, that sounded really mean... just to hear that, that sounded really mean.
Saul: No, I see. The monkey's out of the bottle now!
Dale: What? That's not even... a figure of speech.
Saul: Pandora can't go back into the box - she only comes out.
In Om Shanti Om Om Kapoor frequently yells "Fish!" instead of the more obvious alternative.
The original version of Bullet Proof Monk was rated R, when they revised the film to PG 13, they were forced to rename the character to Mr.FUN Ktastic as opposed to his original, more obscene moniker. The other result of this is that to avoid makeup costs, they simply glued a large gold chain to his chest to cover up his now un-PC tattoo.
In a rather amusing TV edit of Adam Sandler's movie Mr. Deeds, every instance of "shit" or "bullshit" was dubbed over with "spit" or "bullspit", resptively. It's rather amusing when a raging football player screams that he wants to renegotiate his "bullspit contract", and Adam Sandler's character immediately tells him to watch his language in the presence of ladies.
- Unfortunately, one of the most hilarious lines in the movie, where Sandler exclaims "Buh-buh-buh-BULLSHIT!!!", was changed to "Buh-buh-buh-bullspit". It wouldn't have been so bad had the dubbing over not toned down the intensity at which Sandler had said the final word. Originally he was nearly screaming the last word in rage, but in the edit it seemed like he was just using the word dismissively, which sort of ruined the hilarity for this Troper...
Cats And Dogs had one of the canines exclaim "Son of my Mother!" for a Parental Bonus.
Used for an Overly Long Gag in Carry On Dick (1974) where the others are repeatedly trying to explain to a reverend that the only known fact about highwayman Dick Turpin is that he has a big (bleep). The Reverend's reply would indicate that an Unusual Euphemism had been used, and that he was Completely Missing The Point; e.g. "I cannot believe it's Jake the Woodcutter, for he's the only one around here with a big chopper!"
- To be fair; the Reverend's replies were probably a case of Obfuscating Stupidity since he was Dick Turpin.
The antagonist of the Marx Brothers movie Room Service is fond of "jumping butterballs".

Close Film

Jabberwocky is practically a Trope Maker.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Well they aren't euphemisms as much as nonce-words, but it is a masterclass in the art.

In the radio play version of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and the American version of Life, the Universe, and Everything, the word "Belgium" is recognized everywhere in the Universe except on a certain Insignificant Little Blue Planet as such a rude word that it's only used in serious screenplays (one character has an award for Most Gratuitous Use of "Belgium" in a Serious Screenplay). The UK version of the book simply used "Fuck", but the "Belgium" joke seems to be more popular with many readers. For the same reason, the American edition of Life, the Universe, and Everything borrowed "swut" from the radio series, and changed an insult for Arthur Dent from "arsehole" to "kneebiter" (again, some readers prefer the latter).
- This is referenced in The Movie, with Ford exclaiming "Oh Belgium!" at one point while under fire from the Vogons.
  - Also played with when Zaphod is running around, yelling "Hummakavula!" Once the group meets the character, Arthur says, "So that's Hummakavula. I thought [Zaphod] was just swearing."
  - Conversely, one character's name was deliberately coined to be as close to spectacularly obscene as Adams could come and still have it broadcastable. (He started with "Phartiphucborlz" and tweaked it a little.) The end result was Slartibartfast.
- The name of The Great Prophet Zarquon is also taken in vain occasionally. The term "zark", used in similar contexts as "fuck" (e.g. "zarking", "zark off"), was said by Douglas Adams to have been derived from this.
- "Photon" and "dingo's kidneys" (occasionally "flying dingo's kidneys" were also used for swearing, mostly by Zaphod in the radio series.
The Warhammer 40000 Gaunt's Ghosts novels have Tanith characters use the terms "feth" and "fething". The word Feth actually refers to a tree spirit, but is used in all contexts exactly like another four-letter word beginning with F, even to the point that anti-tank rocket launchers are nicknamed "tread-fethers" - although, as Gaunt tells an Inquisitor in Ghostmaker, apparently not the sexual connotations. The newer recruits from Verghast use "gak", and it's said that Gaunt knows the regiment has knit together when the two groups start using each others' swearwords. Other novels include such gems as "kec" and "nink", along with appropriated terms such as "frag" and "frakk". It seems that every world in the Imperium has its own unique curse of choice.
- "Frak" is used in the Ciaphas Cain books, as a deliberate shoutout.
- The Imperium as a whole has a variety of other phrases, largely replacing religiously-inclined curses, Including oaths such as "Emperor on Earth", a variety involving the word "Throne" ("Throne Damn It", "Golden Throne!" and so on), and This Troper's personal favourite: "Emperor's Bowels!"
The use of UnusualEuphemisms in Science Fiction dates back at least as far as the 1930s, where the galaxy-spanning heroes of E.E. Smith's Lensman saga were prone to swearing by the iridium intestines, carballoy claws, and other metallic body-parts of the "spaceman's god", Klono - making this Older Than Television, and an integral part of the Space Opera subgenre since its genesis.
- Indeed, Klono is popular among spacemen because of his plethora of adjectival bodyparts, making it easy to swear by him.
The Doctor Who Virgin Publishing Expanded Universe novels had the term "cruk". In one book a character from the mid-21st century claims it's from a kids' TV series and means "tired", but the Doctor says that by the 24th century (where his companions picked it up) it means "something very rude indeed".
- The novels were also fond of using "spack" as a multi-purpose cussword. It actually derived from a fluffed line in the original series story "Destiny of the Daleks" where, trying to say "Stay back" or "Back off", the Doctor ends up shouting "Spack off!" to some Daleks. In the early days of the novels series, real-life words were used. Repeatedly. To the point where the BBC stepped in and told them they weren't allowed to use the F-bomb any more, or they'd lose their license. (Later on, they did lose it.)
Star Wars mostly stuck to "damn" and "hell", at least from the human characters, but the Star Wars Expanded Universe features a wide variety of made-up profanity. Some of it is a thinly disguised substitute for real-world swearing, such as "shavit" in which the middle two letters might as well not be there. The word "kriff" (invented by Timothy Zahn in one of the better EU novels) seems to be used as a substitute for "fuck" in all its contexts, especially on some of the stricter Star Wars fan forums that don't allow Earth-based expletives. One site doesn't even allow initialisms that suggest the word "fuck", as a result of which such terms as WTK, KUBAR and SNAKU are widely used and understood. Unfortunately, which words each character uses is one of the many things authors don't share with each other, so there are a lot which only come up in a particular book or series, which implies that specific swear words spread, meme-like, and are replaced over a very short period of time.
- His more recent story Allegiance, by virtue of being about a bunch of navy men and pirates, is littered with all kinds of krinking swears. It's a bit strange to hear Han Solo "swearing" in front of Leia like that. Zahn also uses "fusst," and on a different note has a stormtrooper wondering "What in the worlds?"
- Let's not forget Leia famously calling Han Solo a 'scruffy looking nerf herder'. Wookiepedia explains it. They are unpleasant beasts indeed.
- In the X Wing Series in particular, various uses of the word "sith" are popular as well, sithspit, sithspawn, son of a Sith, the whole sithing gamut. Made more confusing because "Sithspawn" also applies to various monsters created by the Force. Weirdly, it never gets applied to Luke or Leia, although it would be entirely appropriate.
- "Spast" is a fun one, of course, but "stang" is one of the oldest ones, showing up VERY early on, as a popular Alderaanian swear word. "Mudcrutch" is popular too, for "bastard" or such words, and "Kath hound", a Star Wars-universe animal, works for "bitch". "Kark" seems to be another substitute for various curses, and was notably used more in the Old Republic. e.g.: "Kark on you, Jedi," and "We're karked!" We've also got "scragged" and the rather inexplicable modifier "milking", as in "We're milking scragged!"
  - The Huttese term "E chu ta" was invented for the Star Wars universe, and is actually used by a protocol droid on Cloud City at C-3P0, who responds aghast "How rude!" I think it was Ben Burtt who created it, but I may be wrong. Considering the context it is used in, and the way it is described by the creator, the most likely translation for it would be "Fuck you".
- Perhaps inevitably, "frak" has made its way into the Star Wars universe, apparently courtesy of Michael Kube-McDowell who uses it in the Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy.
- There's also "rodder" (Kriffin' rodders!), and the decidedly hilarious "lube" (He got lubbed!). There was also another that escapes this troper's memory from the Dark Nest books which was an obvious stand-in for "fuck", since there was a whole "Mommy, what does mean?" bit between Mara and young Ben.
- Karen Traviss once condemned about half of the existing swear words - all the ones that get said as an expression of surprise - including "Stang" and "Bloah", claiming that all real profanities had to be sharp-sounding and easy to say! Like "fierfek" and "di'kut". ...People paid about as much attention as you'd expect.
- In the Star Wars Legacy comics, scribe John Ostrander had a torrent of Unusual Euphemisms coming from the mouths of Cade Skywalker and his bounty hunter crew — including "Noi Jitat", and posibly other Shout Outs to Pirates Of Dark Water.
- Then there are the HILARIOUS euphemisms for sex. In The Courtship Of Princess Leia, Han says how in Luke's position, he'd have those girls riding his rancor. Which is all well and good, and typical Han, but one of them just used the Force to rape Luke. Surprisingly, this is one of the protagonists
- For the complete list, see here.
- Troy Denning is apparently slowly trying to insert real-life profanity into the EU; "bugslut", anyone?
In Bruce Coville's My Teacher... science fiction series, one of the characters is implanted with a universal translator that can interpret every word, gesture or inflection that the various alien characters use to communicate. However, an alien named Kreeblim is known to use the word "plevit", which his translator has no English equivalent for, and which is implied to be incredibly rude.
In some Larry Niven stories, the characters use "TANJ", which stands for "There Ain't No Justice". There may also be an occasional TANSTAAFL.
- Tanj is very frequently used in situations where the context makes no sense, thus making the word very distracting and detracting from the text.
- In others, the characters curse - and mean it! - by using the literal words censored and bleep. Apparently, the media of his universe had never relaxed the censorship that ours started with, and the replacement words stuck.
- His characters have also invoked Finagle in their curses fairly frequently. Also, in his Ringworld series of novels, the denizens of said ring have "flup" as a curse, which actually refers to seabottom ooze.
Literary/film example: The first time we ever see Hermione in the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, she says "Holy cricket, you're Harry Potter!" A more direct example would be the insult "Mudblood", relating to pureness of blood, which seems to be analogous to a racial slur and is considered very offensive in the Wizarding World. Another way this is avoided is to have a character's dialog stated indirectly in the narrator's voice - as in, "Ron cursed loudly."
- The online fanseries "Potter Puppet Pals" plays on this trope.
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has Hermione shouting the wonderful expletive "Merlin's Pants!". It's a lampshade on one of the more common Unusual Euphemisms, Merlin's beard.
  - "Merlin's saggy left—", on the other hand...
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix gives us "galloping gargoyles!"
Robert Anton Wilson, in his late-1980s Schrödinger's Cat novels, used the names of the then-current political figures and feminists in place of various more explicit words, turning what might have been seen as dirty language for the sake of dirty language into a masterful piece of political satire. Thus, breasts are referred to as (Susan) Brownmillers, orgasm as (Kate) Millett, and excrement as (Warren) Burger (this last is particularly hilarious in a gag involving a chain letter about fertilizing your lawn by getting strangers to Burger on it).
- This one originated with Gore Vidal's Myron. In the original version of the book, Vidal replaces all the swear words with the names of Supreme Court Justices who had just voted in favour of some pro-censorship measure or other. So we have Burger = bugger, Father Hill = tit, Rehnquist = dick and so on.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels have several of these. Some examples:
- "Seamstress" has become an Unusual Euphemism for "prostitute" in Ankh-Morpork ("They call themselves 'seamstresses'... hem-hem!"). This often leads to confusion, and as such actual seamstresses are in short supply in the city.
  - Well, in Dutch, 'naaien' (sewing) is a quite well-known verb for riding the broomstick.
  - According to the Seattle Underground Tour, this occurred in real life in Seattle, Washington, USA. During the 1897 gold rush, a large number of single women lived in Seattle without a visible income source, listing their profession as 'seamstresses'.
  - Similarly to Pratchett's 'seamstresses', 'massage parlors' and the 'coffee houses' of Amsterdam are examples of euphemisms gaining such prominence that the innocent meaning of a term disappears.
  - Another euphemism for a prostitute in Ankh-Morpork is 'lady of negotiable affection'.
  - Leading to some amount of confusion when naive bachelors and widowers would knock on Miss Rosie Palm's door with a bundle of old socks. Rosie, pragmatist that she is, quickly hired a seamstress. (Some efficient customers get their socks darned while "getting their socks darned.")
  - In David Copperfield, when Emily returns to London following her disgrace and exile, she's almost lured to something "worse than death" (i.e. prostitution, which Dickens couldn't mention explicitly in his day) by a woman who promises to provide her with "needle-work".
- In Guards! Guards!, a nervous Fred Colon remarks "I'll be mogadored!" when he spots Errol the swamp dragon and thinks Captain Vimes has captured the noble dragon that's been terrorizing the city. Said phrase is later used in Maskerade, when Nanny Ogg is so flabbergasted at the sight of Granny Weatherwax dolled up for the opera, "I'll be mogadored!" is the only oath she can think of.
  - Particularly hilarious to read for those tropers (if This Troper is not the only one) who actually grew up in the village named Mogadore.
- The Truth contains an example which is also a Running Gag complete with its own Lampshade. The thug Mr Tulip uses the swearword "—ing" pretty much in every sentence. As in, "A —ing werewolf? Are you —ing crazy?" At one point, this prompts another character to wonder how he manages to pronounce the dash. Later in the book, the very prim and proper Sacharissa ends up threatening a character with a gun and the words, "Let us use your 'ing' presses or I'll 'ing' shoot your 'ing' head 'ing' off!" - adding, "I think that's how you're supposed to say it, isn't it?" (Followed on the next page by, "What a silly girl I am. 'Ing'. I feel so much better for saying that, you know? 'Ing'. 'Inginginginginginging'. I wonder what it means?")
  - But there is one time someone hears it as the whole swearword:
  Mr. Tulip: It's not a —ing harpsichord! It's a virginal! So called because it was intended for —ing young women!
  (a person): Oh, really? I thought it was just an old sort of piano.
  Mr. Pin: Intended to be played by young women.
  - In the earlier book Mort, a character says "——ing" and is described as "effortlessly pronouncing a string of dashes."
  - This troper recalls a novel written in the seventies that had a farmer swearing so: '-that king tractor is in the king ditch again!' Perhaps Pratchett heard of it.
- In some of the early City Watch books, when Carrot is driven to swear, he only does so in asterisks, ("Oh, s***!" or "D*mn!"), which is said to be difficult to pronounce.
- Combining "Plonker" with "todger", of course, gives us the term "tonker", originally supposed to be dwarfish, but now firmly entrenched in Morporkian, much as certain Yiddish terms found their way into Cockney.
  - "Tonker" also has a resonance with "tonk", meaning to strike vigorously. The word "fuck" derives from an Anglo-Saxon word with a similar meaning.
- A similar joke occurs with the repeated threat of being 'strung up by one's figgin in town square'. A figgin is revealed to be a small bun with currants in it, leaving people to wonder what's so horrifying about being strung up next to this comestible.
  - The ultimate example is in Guards! Guards! where the Watch have rescued a survivor of a cult (whose threatened punishments involve said figgin being placed upon a spike) from the scene of a dragon attack. They call into the bakery and ask the ex-cultist if he wants his figgin toasted, and he runs off.
  - 'Figgin' is a rather archaic word, fallen into disuse. When given very little context, well ...
- A somewhat weird example occurs in The Last Continent, where the Chair of Indefinite Studies expresses the opinion that bridge would work better for procreation than sex. When reminded that this would need at least four people, he suggests croquet instead, and states that he has indeed "enjoyed a quiet knock-about all by [him]self." Cue slow edging away from the Chair and a later conversation between the Dean and Ridcully has the two discussing the Chair's possession of croquet books with color illustrations in a way that suggests this is utterly scandalous.
  - While the UU Wizards mostly have as much practical experience with sex as a duck does with power tools, they are at least aware of the theory and should be knowledgeable enough to know that usually there are no croquet mallets involved. Most of them anyway.
- In Monstrous Regiment, the protagonist's use of a pair of rolled-up socks to give her the appearance of a "package" leads to a Running Gag of various sock-related euphemisms for the male groin.
  - And later on:
    Clogston: And in the tavern in Plün, you really kneed Prince Heinrich in the fracas?
    Polly: In or about the fracas, sir.
- The Tiffany Aching books are usually preluded by a short glossary of Nac Mac Feegle terms, compiled by a rather prim and proper witch. As a result, the entry for "pished" reads: "I am assured that this means tired." Interestingly, the entry for "privy" isn't censored.
  - Possibly because everyone uses a privy (and therefore would probably need to use the word) but proper witches don't get 'pished'. Except Nanny Ogg.
  - Ahem, in Scotland (particulary Glasgow, almost certainly the inspiration for the Nac Mac Feegle), 'pished' is not really a euphemism - it is a dialect word meaning drunk, equivalent the word 'pissed' used further south.
  - Also, at one point in the prequel to the book the glossary is found in, Rob Anybody is spinning a tale of woe about how the Queen threw the Feegles out of Fairyland for refusing to commit immoral acts. Daft Wullie cheerfully throws in "Aye, and because we were totally pished-" Cue Rob slamming his hand across Wullie's mouth and insisting to the six-year-old protagonist that 'pished' means 'tired.'
- Terry Pratchett seems to absolutely love Unusual Euphemisms. They show up in Thief of Time too, where one of the Auditors starts out using curse words like "Discord!" and "Confusion!", but feels the need for something... coarser. Hence: "Do as I say, you organic organ!"
- The Watch kicks a...er, prods buttock.
- Interesting Times uses "complicated pictogram".
- Making Money has "post-mortem communications" as a euphemism for "necromancy."
- The Assassin's Guild prefers to use the word "inhume" to describe the job they do, it being the opposite of exhuming someone.
Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings schoolboys swear very politely. "Fossilized Fish-hooks!" and the like.
- This was done to avoid the language in the stories becoming outdated. Nice try, anyway.
Finn's Mister God, This Is Anna includes a tough Cockney demanding to know which of the "Sodden Baskets" in the pub has nicked his bangers and being told to "Mind yer language, there's a nipper 'ere."
The baddies in C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength use "buck" and "bucking" way too often (which makes it rather startling when someone says "infernal bitch").
The old Wizard in Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule swore, "Bags!". The interesting thing about this is that to an American reader that's almost a nonsense word. But to a reader from the UK, the word "bags" is synonymous with the word "bollocks."
- It really isn't... it's the UK equivalent of "shotgun!" and it's entirely clean, unless that's some regional variation I'm not aware of.
  - Nor is bags the equivalent of "Shotgun", unless its some regional variation. That would be to baggsy or bagsy something.
All of KA Applegate's series (Animorphs and Everworld, for the benefit of nonfans) use the "indirect quotation" route. Things like "Jake sat up straight and said a word you really shouldn't say in class," or merely referring to "words I won't repeat." It actually seems like a good way of compromising between actual cussing on the one hand, and the Gosh Dang It To Heck style on the other.
- Remnants, Applegate's third junior scifi series, gets to say "jackass" and "damndest" once each, but that's it. Considering the fact that the world blew up and there's a giant sentient spaceship trying to kill them, you'd think there'd be more of this at least, but unlike the previous series, this one isn't written in the first person.
- Similarly, this is how Bertie talks about his boisterous Aunt Dahlia's more uncouth hunting language in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster stories.
Frank Herbert's Dune, at least on one occasion, replaced the f-bomb with "floggin'". The author was perfectly happy to use other cuss words through the series, but even "flog", if this troper remembers properly, isn't used again for the series.
- "Beefswelling" is used as a rather... unfortunate euphemism for "erection" in Children of Dune.
Characters in Isaac Asimov stories will often exclaim words such as "Space!" and "Galaxy!". Ebling Mis from Foundation and Empire was quite fond of calling things "unprintable".
- In the novels about Elijah Baley, he uses the expletive "Jehoshaphat!"
Arthur Herzog's Make Us Happy is set in a computer-run utopia where the computers merged all the important swear words for simplicity. They ended up with "fusb".
Toward the climax of Watership Down, Bigwig tells the Efrafrans to "Silflay hrakka", which, if the reader has been paying any attention to the Lapine used thus far, will be readily decipherable as "Eat shit."
- Considering the characters are rabbits, this troper isn't sure why that would be an insult to them, since ... well.
  - Rabbits lack the multiple stomachs that ruminants use to fully digest plant matter. To get past that problem, they... well, reingest it for a second run through the digestive tract. In Lapine, they use the term 'pellets' to refer to that, and hraka only for actual second-time-through waste.
Orson Scott Card's novella Dogwalker is full of cyberpunk-style slang, and has a character use the word "pope" to mean "penis." Later a character is described as being "smart enough to put his hands in his pockets without seeking an audience with the pope."
- Given that Card is a member of the LDS Church, this could be seen as a Take That to Catholicism...
  - I dunno, he seems to respect the Catholics (or used to): The Lusitanians in the Speaker cycle are all Catholic, and when Ender grows up, gets married, and formally joins a religion, he becomes Catholic (or more precisely, he starts going to church, as he had been baptized Catholic at his father's insistence 3,000 years earlier).
- In Britain at any rate, "bishop" can be used as a euphemism for "penis" ("bashing the bishop" being one slang term for jerking off) since the bishop in a chess set looks vaguely like the organ in question. There is also at least one example of "cardinal" being used (in Aleister Crowley's ''Not The Life of Roger Bloxam.'') Presumably Orson just took the idea to its logical conclusion...
The outdoor humorist Patrick McManus sometimes details adventures with his (fictional) neighbor, who calls people he dislikes "crude anatomical names." Like "elbow", or "kneecap". McManus also sometimes uses "bleep" in a humorous fashion, as in this example from his (again, fictionalized) childhood: "'Bleeping bleep of bleep!' he screamed, introducing me to that quaint phrase for the first time."
In the Dream Park novels by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, "drown" is now a swear-word in a California that has suffered through a particularly massive earthquake.
Grignr from The Eye Of Argon occasionally uses "Mrifk!" as a swear word, which doesn't seem to have an English- (or any-) language equivalent. He also liberally throws around the word "Slut!" with both men and women alike, for whatever reason.
- "Mrifk" is evidently a being of some sort, given that Grignr swears "by the surly beard of Mrifk" near the beginning. Beyond that, it's unclear who or what it is.
The Gripping Hand (The sequel to A Mote in God's Eye) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle uses an Unusual Euphemism as a plot point. In order to prove they haven't been replaced by master-psychologist aliens (who haven't been in contact with humans in years) some characters use the recently invented curse "rape my lizard!", with the justification that profanity-evolution is essentially random, and won't be predicted by the aliens.
In the Artemis Fowl books, a common expletive is D'Arvit, which is revealed to be a curse that is untranslated from the fictional fairy language in order to avoid censorship.
In John Ringo's Council Wars series, the word "fisk" makes the obvious replacement, though it's legitimized by the fact that the series takes place roughly 2000 years in the future.
- Given Ringo's Anvilicious use of politics in a lot of his books, that's probably as much a shot at Robert Fisk as it is an Unusual Euphemism.
- His Into The Looking Glass series uses "maulk" for shit and "grap" for fuck, which are loan words from some friendly aliens, though the accuracy of their use is never gone into.
  - Just for the sake of completeness (and, yes, be an annoying smarty-pants showoff), those words were originally from the Prince Roger series he co-authored with David Weber. He ported them, and one of the characters, into the Into The Looking Glass series.
Tanya Huff's space marine novels Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor have Fuk.
- Her "quarter" books use "butchering" instead of the F-word, if memory serves.
Many of Dave Barry's newspaper columns noted that certain words in quotes were replaced with euphemisms to avoid offending family audiences. These euphemisms could be Inherently Funny Words or proper names from context, but usually they were obvious soundalikes, such as "duck shoe." Dave Barry's novels Big Trouble and Tricky Business use actual dirty words, as the author warns at the beginning of both.
- After a column he did on Beano was left out by a couple of newspapers, he did a column on circumcision. He explained it as someone "taking hold of a guy's Oregonian and snipping his Post-Dispatch right off."
Used in some Magic The Gathering novels. Most notably, one minor character in The Eternal Ice uses the phrase "What the phrex?", obviously short for Phyrexia. Unlike most Unusual Euphemisms, this one was only used once. Sometimes other curses are used that refer to Phyrexia, such as "the nine hells."
- Also, characters in Clayton Emery's novels tend to use names of cards and characters, such as "Eye of Orms-by-Gore!"
An amusing example in the Ripliad book Ripley Under Water. Earlier in the novel, he is looking at travel advertisements and is amused by the actual Thai island, Phuket. Later, when really angry, he thinks out loud Phuket!
- This is actually used incorrectly in the story. It is actually pronounced 'Poo-ket', rather than like the profanity it resembles. Whether this falls in to Aversion or Subversion is up to others, and may depend on if the author knew how to pronounce it.
In L. Frank Baum's Ozma of Oz, the Nome King exclaims "Rocketty-ricketts!". When further vexed, "he screamed in a fury, 'Hippikaloric!' which must be a dreadful word because we don't know what it means."
Anne McCaffrey seems to be fond of the word "Fardling". This troper found it both in The Ship who Sang and some incarnations of "The Fleet"
- Not to mention the common use of "shards" in her Pern novels. Short for "Shards of the first (dragon) egg" if I recall correctly.
- Or for the shards of one's own dragon's shell. Or was that "shells"? Ah here we go, from The Dragonlover's Guide:
  - By the first shell: The first Hatching is of noteworthy importance to those who revere dragonkind. They swear by the beasts and men who protect them from danger of Threadfall. Many Pernese oaths are of a similar character, in which a rider will pledge his behavior (or his disbelief) by the first Egg of Faranth's clutch (the first of the fertile queens) or by the egg of his own dragon. Expletives in the same vein depict broken or damaged eggs ("shards," "scorch the shell and sear the skin," or "shells").
  - "Through Fog, Fall, and Fire" is reminiscent of the vow of the American postman, who promises to deliver the mail "through rain and sleet and dark of night." Like a good Celtic triad, it names three disasters or trials through which one must pass to prove faith.
Gregory Maguire named his second Wicked book "Son of a Witch". And let us not forget Shiz University, a very clever incarnation of this trope.
Letty Chubb suffers panic attacks upon merely seeing the word "de-", oops, "the word about dying that rhymes with breath" written down, and in her diaries she always uses "banana" instead. She mentions that she tries to find creative ways to avoid it in essays, but "phrases like 'hurtling into the chasm of doom' not appropriate for life cycle of tadpole".
The Wheel of Time has quite a few, most commonly used by Mat, including "Light", "Burn me", and "Blood and ashes".
Peter David gave his Xenexian Star Trek captain the curse word "grozit", which is about what you'd expect.
- Also, David is one of quite a few to use "Kolker" as a swear word on par with "Jesus Christ" or "God". Apparently a lot of writers revere Robert Kolker.
The publisher of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead famously persuaded him to replace all occurrences of the f-word with "fug." In an apocryphal story, Dorothy Parker (or Tallulah Bankhead, in some versions) introduced herself to Mailer later with, "So you're the young man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy uses "vulk", as in 'vulcanism' - since volcanic activity can stir up the planet's fairly unpleasant magic.
A Clockwork Orange. The book was written almost entirely in unusual euphemisma, even for ordinary, every day words. (Well, it was more like butchered Russian.)
- Nadsat, a language invented by the author, which based many words on Russian.
In one really weird subversion or inversion, Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye simply avoids the euphemism altogether as characters just flat-out use the word "rape" in places one would expect an entirely different four-letter word that starts with f.
Madeleine L'Engle's book A Wind in the Door (a sequel to her better-known A Wrinkle in Time) uses "fewmets" (dragon droppings) as a swear word.
In the third Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Rodrick and Greg have several to get around their mother's swear jar rules. Greg forgets where he is at one point and calls another kid a "raspberry plastic ticklebar".
Best synonym for "penis" ever: Jakko.
In Ysabeau Wilce's second novel of the Flora series, Flora's Dare, it becomes clear that the Republic of Califa's preferred four-letter word is "fike". This is a disappointment after the first book's more imaginative exclamations, such as "Pigface Psychopomp!"
Jane Yolen's Pit Dragons trilogy uses "fewmets" as a swear word.
The Dresden Files has a few of these; Harry typically uses "Stars and stones" when exasperated/surprised/frustrated, and the incubi and succubi of the White Court tend to use, "Empty night..." in the same context.
H. Beam Piper showed one way this could come about in the short story Naudsonce. It features an exploratory team of humans landing on an inhabited planet to find that the inhabitants seemed to have four different words for "me" - fwoonk, pwink, tweelt, and kroosh. A fair amount of time later, they were no closer to translating the local language, and the expedition's military contingent had begun using those four words as profanities. It turns out the aliens had a unique "nonauditory sonic sense", or naudsonce, that essentially let them feel sound.
In some of Tamora Pierce's young-adult fantasy novels, including the recent Bloodhound, characters use "swive" and "swiving" in place of "fuck" and "fucking." Bloodhound is full of made-up slang, but "swive" is a real medieval English word (used frequently and with glee by Geoffrey Chaucer, among others). It is possible that Pierce managed to get this word past the censors simply by virtue of using so many other actual Unusual Euphemisms in the book.
At least one Star Trek novel has a rather amusing case of this trope: to the Ferengi, "Charity" is the equivalant of dropping an F-Bomb.
Rone Leah from Terry Brooks' Shannara series frequently says "For cat's sake!".
Several of Spider Robinson's stories have "slot" as an insulting epithet for a woman, often in the phrase "taken slot" (substituting for "fuckin' slut").
In the novelization of Starship Titanic, The Journalist tends to use the word "Pangelin" (sometimes "Purple Pangelin"), which is the Blerontinian equivalent of "shit", we're assured in the footnotes.

Close Literature

Farscape used many made-up expletives and insults, such as "frell" (fuck), "dren" (shit), "mivonks" (balls), etc. This was parodied in the Stargate SG-1 episode "200", in which a scene inspired by Farscape featured dialogue consisting of little more than a string of made-up profanity. It should also be noted that the two shows share two common actors - Ben Browder and Claudia Black.
- In addition to the usual cursing, colloquial usages, there was at least one instance where Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) used "frell" literally, to refer to actual sexual intercourse.
- Frell was also used on The Invisible Man, which at the time was airing on the same night and channel.
Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica (the original series) was fond of words like "frak" and "felgercarb". (On the new series, Adama père has a "Frack" shaving mirror from IKEA in his quarters, a deliberate reference to the goofy fake swear word they inherited. "Frak" is still used regularly in the new series as a substitute for the mother of all swear words, in all its possible contexts. And we mean all, including "clusterfrak" and "motherfrakker". And since it still begins with F, they can get away with saying "FUBAR".)
- Spoofed in a Robot Chicken episode, lampooning clueless FCC censors.
- Rather hilariously, someone at Kentucky Fried Chicken really didn't get the point, and created a BSG tie-in promotion involving a "Frak Pak" of chicken.
Babylon 5 used the word "frag" in the same context, as does DC's Lobo, Batman Beyond, and the RPG Shadowrun - this is a bit odd, as the term is also an Unusual Euphemism for killing someone on your own side of the conflict, generally with a fragmentation grenade, which is where "frag" originated.
- "Frak" also appears in some Babylon 5 Expanded Universe material, almost certainly a Shout Out.
Red Dwarf was an unusual case, in that the writers found out later that their made-up word ("smeg") did, in fact, have a borderline-naughty meaning.
- Later on, this led to awkwardness.
- Of course the phrase "Gazpacho soup" was worse than any smeg based insult for Rimmer.
El Chavo Del Ocho, El Chapulin Colorado and basically all Chespirito's works including "Chanfle" (Scurl) as any kind of profanity becoming so famous that this use is spread more, over its original soccer meaning .
The most celebrated Unusual Euphemism is the "Master of your Domain" episode of Seinfeld, where the characters have a masturbation contest (who can go the longest without) without once using the word "masturbation".
Chandler from Friends once came up with the most brilliant example of an unsual euphenism, to describe a character who unknowingly has shorts so short that everyone in the room can see his penis - "The man is showing brain!"
- Not too sure if its a widely used slang, but where im from "brain" can mean scrotum? (im assuming due to slight visual similarities) I just thought the guy's bag was showing...
- It's a common euphemism where I'm from, too. Another instance of an unusual euphemism comes from Joey, when Phoebe acts on Days of Our Lives. The director can be kind of rough, so Joey replaced one of the words he used a lot with a nicer one, like, "puppy", as in, "If your puppy friend doesn't get her puppy act together, I'm gonna fire her mother-puppy ass."
- The Ross fist-bump. Nothing more need be said.
The X Files episode "Blood" has a hilarious example: A bus driver recounts the behavior of a passenger (a character being driven mad by chemicals and secret messages delivered by electronic devices):
Bus Driver: Yeah, I picked him up. Drove four feet, then he went apewire.
- The X Files also played with this trope in the episode "Jose Chung's from Outer Space":
  Dana Scully: Well, of course he didn't actually say 'bleeped', he said -
  Jose Chung: I'm familiar with Detective Manners' colourful... phraseology.
  and
  Detective Manners: Oh, you bet your blankety-blank bleep I am!
  as well as the mother of all quotes from that ep:
  Dana Scully: He says he's found your bleeping UFO.
A sketch on The State parodied this, in which a vulgar play was modified for broadcast tv, causing the dramatic tension to be lost in phrases like "Let's get milk faced and hum like rabbits!"
In Firefly, the characters would swear in (poorly pronounced) Mandarin, despite usually speaking English. Though, since more mundane phrases and some signs are also said/written in Mandarin, it's implied that the two share status as the official languages of humanity. The show also employed the real-but-obscure English curse words "gorram" (an out-of-use variation of "goddamn"), "rutting" (another word for "the deed," used adjectivally in the same manner as the most famous word you can't say on TV), and "humped" (ditto).
- In a network that almost certainly wouldn't let them call someone a pussy, nor drop the c bomb, a rogue cop managed to happily call a a post office employee a quim. Archaic words rule!
  - It's possible that they would have gotten away with it, but the episode in question ("The Message") was only included on the DVD and didn't actually air on TV.
On Peachdale, the young characters frequently use terms like "eff", "dee", and "waugh" to stand in for common expletives.
Elliot on Scrubs refers to female genitalia as "bajingo", and related secretions as "icky-sticky". And then tries to become a gynecologist.
- Elliot is also fond of the word "frick" (close to "fick", German for the F-Word), which she uses with great creativity. ("Frick on a stick with a brick!"; "Just put the motherfricking ring on the motherfricking finger! Frick, frick, frick!")
  - In Real Life it may be related to "frig", which is like "wank" except Oop North.
  - Specifically, "frig" is usually the female version of "wank"
  - Frick and Frig (commonly used as Fricken and Friggen, which is a less offensive version) are both common Australian swear words, especially for older people.
In The Tenth Kingdom, the Trolls humorously use the phrase "Suck an Elf!" as an obscenity.
- And later, "Sniff a sandal!" For some reason, they have quite the fascination with shoes...
In Greys Anatomy, Media Watchdogs have forced the writers to try to avoid using the word "vagina" in a non-medical context; because of this, it has been referred to as "Va-jay-jay" and "my good girl". In a hospital, of all places.
- Curiously enough, "vajayjay" is becoming mainstream!
  - It's actually older than the show—this troper remembers seeing it on Metaquotes when he was in college. (class of 2003)
In the modern-age Fairy Tale Sit Com, The Charmings, Eric Charming gets Snow White a car for her birthday, although neither of them really understands how it works. One scene has their children running up to Snow after having watched their father work on the car. One of the children says to Snow that Eric became angry working on the car and yelled out "Fiddlesticks", whereupon Snow covers his mouth and admonishes, "The F-Word!"
In the 1980s Degrassi Junior High, the kids use the phrase "broomhead" as if it was an incredibly vile expletive, only dished out when somebody is really, truly angry. There was a reason for the characters to use it as in insult (it's based on something that happens in the first few episodes), but this didn't stop it from sounding silly.
How come it's taken so long for the British contributors to this site to include Only Fools And Horses, you plonkers?
- Probably Only Fools And Horses didn't invent the word. However its meaning did change after staring on the show.
Father Ted got away with tossing the f-bomb all over the place by simply changing the word to "feck". That was enough to make its liberal usage completely okay.
- The ironic thing is that, other than a minced vow for the obvious, it's also Irish slang that simply means "to throw", and coincidentally Esperanto for shit.
- This Troper prefers to use the word feck instead of the f-word because not only does it sounds cool but also because you can keep your teeth clenched when you say 'feck off' its way more intimidating Or So I Heard.
- Another episode featured a public area with a no-cursing rule in place, so a group of people are forced to use substitutions to curse at Ted.
  - People with keen ears can also hear quite a few unedited curses in Father Ted, said by crowds. One notable example that always gets me rolling is about 20mins into Season 3, Episode 2 "Chirpy Chirpy Cheap Sheep" (Right after Father Ted says "Hud Hastings". I'll let you listen to it and tell me if im crazy or not.
'Frank: Fup off, you grasshole!
- The f-word is considered pretty grave in the Father Ted universe. As Mrs. Doyle commented with regards to the works of a visiting novelist, "And of course the F-word father, the bad F-word. Worse then Feck. You know the one I mean." Also, wall-to-wall bastards.
- According to this troper's Scrabble dictionary, 'feck' means 'value', hence the derivative 'feckless', or 'worthless'. Therefore, I can use it as a swearword and say, 'it means value!'
30 Rock with "Blurgh" and "By the hammer of Thor!" The writers have tried to develop these terms as Catch Phrases as well.
Doug Heffernan on The King Of Queens occasionally says things like "Son of a mother!" and "Mother of ass!"
Cheers has plenty of this. One example:
Diane: (to Sam) YOU are a sand flea!
This editor recalls trying to watch Wonderfalls with the Spanish subtitles on and discovering the following:
- Apparently the phrase "my ass" (used as a more-vulgar variant of "yeah right, bitch...", basically) is either untranslatable, or "too vulgar" to be translated directly, as it was replaced by what translates literally as "to the devil with you".
- "Bitch" (as in "poor bitch" in reference to a Butt Monkey) is apparently either too weird to translate directly, or "too vulgar" as well, and
- The translators were so obsessed with avoiding the suggestion of profanity, that Jaye's dad's deliberately ridiculously innocent "those sons of biscuits!" gets translated as, "those lazy loafers!", even though the direct translation would have been funnier and more in-character.
  - Probably because Spanish doesn't really use the phrase "Son of a bitch". The closest expression idiomatically is "Hijo de puta", or "Son of a whore". Not a phrase they really throw around the same way.
  - Yes it does. The direct translation "Hijo de perra" does exist in Spanish, but it's still too strong a swear frase to use lightly. Similarly, calling a woman perra is closer in degree to calling her the c-word, even if the literal translation is bitch.
How I Met Your Mother justified the use of the word "grinch" as an Unusual Euphemism for bitch because The Narrator is simply retelling the story to his kids. In a different episode, we even see a Visual Euphemism: all references to (we assume) marijuana were replaced with sandwiches, so we see the characters getting high off of large subs. Another Unusual Euphemism is replacing "going to the bathroom to poop" with "reading a magazine". Lampshaded later in the episode when Barney uses the euphemism, taking a guess at what it means:
Barney: For the record, "reading a magazine" means masturbating, right?
- Not to mention "I'm too old for this shit." being replaced by "I'm too old for this stuff."
- Ted's annoyingly loud neighbours play the bagpipes rather too often. (And we do hear bagpipes.)
A character from Neighbours used "Belgium" as an expletive, an obvious Shout Out to Hitchhikers Guide (see below).
- The same character had an entire library of Unusual Euphemisms.
On early episodes of Full House, D.J. calls Stephanie, "nerdbomber", "geekburger", and "double geekburger with cheese".
The "Chemist Shop" sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus included a list of slang words, mostly anatomical, that the censors who interrupt the sketch request not to be repeated. The last word on the list is "Semprini". What's a Semprini? If it isn't this dude, nobody knows just what, except that the (fictional) censors don't want to hear about it.
- It is that dude. Semprini had a radio program of "light music" whose last years overlapped with Monty Python's run, and also wrote a lot of it. By the time of Monty Python, "light music" was a Dead Horse Genre. It would be like using "Lawrence Welk" as a swearword - or, for more modern swearwords, "Yanni" or "Kenny G."
- Several euphemisms are also used in the Monty Python skit "Nudge Nudge".
The Goa'uld of Stargate SG 1 consider Jack O'Neill a "pain in the mikta":
O'Neill: Neck?
Teal'c: No.
Whose Line Is It Anyway featured a game called "If You Know What I Mean" where the players spoke entirely in Unusual Euphemisms, usually meant to be sexual. Usually nonsensical.
- Lampshaded in that Colin once responded with "No, I don't know what you mean."
- Another has Colin ending the game with a deadpan "I'm going to go to the bathroom."
On one episode of Murphy Brown, Corky had to read her diary in court. On one entry she uses the word "blank", and the judge advises her to read the entry as written. Corky then points out that she indeed wrote "blank" in the diary.
There's an episode of House where a young girl discovers masturbation, and her mother thinks she's having seizures and brings her in. House uses several movie titles as euphemisms, apparently just to annoy the mother:
House: You know, ya-ya-ing the sisterhood? Finding Nemo?
The Middleman uses "Code 86" for sex, named for the protocol a Middleman has to invoke to get even a moment of privacy from their round-the-clock surveillance. The Middleman himself uses a wide variety of creative replacement words and expressions for swearing (while other characters swear quite frequently, with the audio removed and a black rectangle covering their mouths).
- In one episode, the Middleman exclaims "Ghosts of the living!" Considering that the case of the episode involved the presence of the departed spirits of people who seemed to still be alive and walking about, Wendy questions whether he's using a colorful phrase or describing the situation.
- In one episode, a previous Middleman questions the current Middleman's unsual euphemisms, to which Wendy explains that "it's just a friendly way of saying (her word is bleeped and blocked with a black rectangle)".
- Part of what made the show epic, this Troper feels.
  - The show was cancelled, get over it.
The Armstrong And Miller Show had an entire sketch dedicated to this, featuring two men who decide on the words for the dictionary of a predictive text message dictionary. A notable inclusion: pigt (the abbreviation of the human gene coding for phosphatidylinositol).
On an episode of Ellen, Paige Clark (Joelly Fisher) used "go camping" as a euphemism for "have sex", as in "I want to go camping!"
Colonel Potter of M*A*S*H fame is known for having a wide range of these.
- Among the long, LONG list: "What in the name of Sam Hill?", "Bull Hockey!", "Great Ceasar's Ghost" (which is probably a nod to Superman's Perry White)
Gossip Girl has come up with a few quite creative ones, like "fustercluck," "Bass-hole," and "Oh my effing god."
- Don't forget "Motherchucker."
One of the earliest examples is 1970s British sit-com Porridge. Being set in a prison, the writers invented the word "Naff" so thet the prisoners could swear on a family show. They also invented the word "Nerk" to be used as a personal slur - as in "Naff off, you nerk !"
Since Royalty tend not to swear in real life, Princess Anne once famously had to resort to using "Naff Off!" herself. This made headlines at the time.
- "Naff off" may have originated with Porridge, but "naff" did not—it was well-established in the theatrical and gay argot Polari long before, meaning "un-stylish" or "pathetic".
- The Two Ronnies, from which Porridge's lead actor was best known, was famed for its unusual euphemisms. Not least because in spite of not having heard them before you can tell what they're meant to refer to.
Another British sit-com, Allo Allo, inverted this quite creatively. The show was set in France and had a convention whereby they simulated French dialogue by having the actors speak English with thick French accents.
One character was a British spy who couldn't speak French very well at all. They had him speak English, in a thick French accent, but get the English words slightly wrong in order to simulate mangled French (if you can follow that).
Sometimes the writers chose mispronounced words that - if played straight - were actually outright swearing that would never have made it on to an early evening family show.
Examples such as "I was pissing by the door when I heard two shats." were common.
- Doesn't "pissing" mean "drinking" in old Britannia?
  - Nah, you're thinking of "getting pissed" (getting drunk) or "going on the piss" (being in the process of getting drunk). The extra word changes everything. Kind of like how "it's bollocks" or "it's shit" is bad, but "it's the dog's bollocks" or "it's the shit" is good.
  - -and 'pissing it away' means to waste something. The song 'pissing the night away' by Chumbawumba manages to conflate a couple of these usages: gettng drunk and wasting time.
"If your Colbert Report lasts more than half an hour, consult your physician." Thank you, Stephen Colbert - I am so using that.
Joel from TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000 would often use "telling secrets" as a stand-in for sexual activity.
In an episode of That 70s Show, Eric and Hyde use creative metaphors to refer Kelso's impotence: "the rabbit wouldn't come out of his hat", "the weasel wouldn't pop out" and "there's a lot of Amish people, but they never raised a barn".
On Top Gear, various harm has come to the presenters' "wedding vegetables". The "plums" and "gentleman's area" have likewise been endangered, and buying a flashy car is advertisement that one has a small "vegetable"
- James May commented that it was difficult to help the buxom Madison Welsh with her racing harness without touching "the work of the good Potter"
Shaun Micallef has taken the use of the word "freak" (and just about every conceivable variation upon) to something of an art form. When combined with the deliberately bad acting of his David McGhan sketches, this results in lines like this:
"You call that justice? I call it freakin' of someone, entirely!"
In an episode of Life, Reese goes to interview a dentist/cover band rocker who has tallied off every single woman he's slept with (a lot) on his office wall. He asks her if he should "uncap the Sharpie." Her response: "No. You may not uncap the Sharpie." She continues to be horrified every time she sees or has to mention a Sharpie for the rest of the episode.
- I think he actually meant a Sharpie as in a pen- he was probably tallying the numbers with said Sharpie.
- It's still a pretty blatant Double Entendre that could easily be translated as a euphemism if that's how he keeps track of how often he gets to "Uncap his Sharpie", If You Know What I Mean...
A one-shot sketch on Mad TV featured an office worker talking to his coworker about a third employee, using bizarre euphamisms such as "He's a midnight golfer" and "He has a bowl of magic markers in his garage". The second man joins in, attempting to form his own nonsense euphamisms, which the third man overhears; he approaches the two and responds angrily to what was, according to the first and third workers, an insinuation that he was gay. It soon becomes apparent that the first man's euphamisms were intended — and understood by the third man — to be general compliments. The second man is utterly confounded by his coworkers' mutual understanding.
During the 1990s, Sports Center anchor Keith Olbermann would use the name "Gianluca Pagliuca" over video of an athlete or coach swearing. The basis was from ESPN's 1994 World Cup coverage where colleague Gary Miller kept tripping up over the Italian goalkeeper's name and blurted an expletive in disgust. "We'll spare you WHICH expletive".
Several different ones were used throughout the Xena series, such as Xena calling Joxer a "son of a Bacchae."
Latka Gravas from Taxi. "yachtabe," ibida", "nik-nik"...
In the Bones episode "The Double Death of the Dearly Departed", they replace they word 'murder' with 'translate' in order to disguise the meaning of their conversation. This leads to some hilarious quotes.
"This man was translated!"
"No evidence of translation."
- Also, an earlier episode's use of "take to the airport".
And going back a bit further, Mork and Mindy with "Shazbot".
Or Sanford and Son, with Redd Foxx's usual colorful language replaced by phrases such as "mother-father".
A Running Gag on The League Of Gentlemen is Harvey's ever-horrifying collection of euphemisms for masturbation.
...shaking frothy white coconuts from the veiny love-tree.
The Suite Life On Deck with Bailey's "What the feathers?"
In Student Bodies the guys begin talking about all the girls they've "Been to Wonderland" with.
Doctor Who spent most of an episode with Rose asking whether on not The Doctor ever "dances." At the end of the episode he then "dances" with both Rose and Jack. In a later episode he leaves Rose and Mickey alone while he goes off to "dance" with Madame De Pompadour.

Close Live Action TV

Roy Zimmerman's song "Firing the Surgeon General" established the title phrase as a euphemism for masturbation (by paralleling it to a number of other such euphemisms) to satirize the controversy that resulted in the 1994 dismissal of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders.
Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water.
When Emilie Autumn performed her song "Misery Loves Company" on a morning news show, she replaced the line "pray for me you fucker, if you fucking dare" with "pray for me you muffin, if you muffin dare".
Bloodhound Gang's "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" is just full of these.
- That's all the song is. Try and find one line that doesn't have an Unusual Euphemism in it.
- Almost EVERY one of BHG's songs are like this. The most obvious being "Uhn-Tiss Uhn-Tiss Uhn-Tiss" "Bad Touch" and The Aforementioned "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo"
The Decemberists' "The Chimbley Sweep":
"Oh lonely urchin," the widow cried
"I've not been swept since the day my husband died."
- Oh, God, ew.
  - Yeah, this troper was always pretty sure that "Chimbley Sweep" was actually an Unusual Euphemism for an at-least-somewhat-too-young male prostitute.
"Sugalumps" by Flight Of The Conchords is filled with euphamisms for testicles, including the titular "sugalumps."
Played with in the music video for "Laid" by the band James. One line originally goes "But she only comes when she's on top." The version used in the music video replaces "comes" with "sings" - but that part of the video has a close shot of the lead singer, who is obviously singing the original lyric.
Originally composed for the alt.games.nintendo.pokemon.hentai newsgroup, the song "I Wanna Slowpoke Your Cloyster ('Till My Bulbasaur)" introduced the title phrase, as well as "jiggling the Jigglypuff", Or So I Heard.
"The Fez" by Steely Dan isn't about a hat. It's a (made up?) euphemism for a condom.
- But then "Steely Dan" is a euphemism for an erection, so that's hardly surprising.
Viktor Vaughn's song "Mister Clean" has little to do with cleaning supplies; the title refers to Vik's insistance that his barber "Give me a Mister Clean", or shave his head completely, at the end.
- Vik has a lot of strange or unique words or phrases. At one point he reminisces about something that happened "six degrees ago", etc.
- The same artist does something similar in his Kind Geedorah persona; Geedorah is a space monster who doesn't truly understand humanity, and his alien perspective is partially represented by some seriously idiosyncratic speech quirks.
In the Meat Loaf song I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That), "that" is a reference to a previous line where the singer names a thing he would never do ("forget the way you feel", "stop dreaming of you", etc.) Due in no small part to the complexity of the lyrical construction, it's also assumed by many listeners to be a euphemism for something else, to the point where Meat Loaf says "What is that?" is the most frequent question he's asked by his fans.
Spinal Tap: Big Bottom.
Lady Gaga gives us "I wanna take a ride on your disco stick!"
- "Don't think too much, just bust that stick."
Countless P-Funk songs use the word "funk" not only to refer to the music style, but also as a substitute for a similar-sounding word.
- As do the Black-Eyed Peas in "Don't Phunk With My Heart". The first time this troper heard it was at a school-sanctioned event, and he did a double-take.
  - As a result, some radio stations played "edited" versions replacing "phunk" with "mess", as in "Don't Mess With My Heart". This Troper recalls a DJ lampshading this, saying something along the lines of, "You can't say 'phunk', it'll get eveyrone crazy".
Jack Ingram did this with "Love You", replacing "fuck" with "love" (e.g. "Love you, love this town / Love this mother-lovin' truck that keeps breakin' lovin' down").
Madness' House of Fun is all about a kid on his 16th birthday trying to buy "party hats" at a pharmacy, for the celebration thereof. You know, A box of balloons. Party poppers? That pop in the night?
American Ride by Toby Keith has "The fit's gonna hit the shan"
Subverted in "Big Dumb Sex" by Soundgarden, the verses are full of unusual euphemisms, but the chorus is "I know what to do. I'm gonna fuck (fuck) (fuck) (fuck) you.

Close Music

For Better Or For Worse used "boxcar" to represent swearing (for asphasic Grandpa Jim), and "going roadside" to indicate having sex.
- Don't forget "foob."
Pearls Before Swine had Pig crying out in pain "Ohhhhhhhh my Oompa Loompas" after taking a hit to the groin
Calvin And Hobbes:
Calvin's Dad: "Slippin'-rippin'-dang-fang-rotten-zarg-barg-a-ding-dong!"
In Fox Trot, Paige once told Peter to "eat spit and die".
Baby Blues had at least one in the form of "child-safe cuss words".
''Daryll"": "Dingy-dangy dog-gone heck to phooey!"

Close Newspaper Comics

Ancient BBC radio comedy Round The Horne features Rambling ~~Sid~~ Syd Rumpo (Kenneth Williams), a parodic folk-singer who sang such things as "Vain she was and like a grusset / Though her gander parts were fine, / But she sneered at his cordwangle / As it hung upon the line".
- Round the Horne also had two camp characters who revived gay slang "Polari."
One of the weekly assignments on internet radio show 2 Sense was to invent a new swear word, that didn't mean anything but sounded really offensive. The hosts had great fun stringing together the better responses:
2: Spung your derp, you slutterpuck!
"Belgium!"
A Fibber Mc Gee And Molly episode had McGee exclaim, "Well, I'll be an old Hemingway expression."

Close Radio

In Shadowrun, the vulgar lingo of the streets required a number of less offensive stand-ins for common curses. Most commonly, you would "kick hoop" because that "fragger" fed you a line of "bulldrek". This has mainly been discarded in Fourth Edition in favor of more traditional forms of swearing.
If you get enough Dungeons And Dragons nerds together they will begin taking the names of fictional deities in vain. This troper has personally heard "By Vecna's dental filling!", "Pelor preserve us!", and "Moradin!" shouted at dice which stubbornly insist on rolling 1's. When the swear involving Vecna was uttered (by this troper as a Cleric of Vecna) roleplaying Xp was awarded.
- Most D&D players consider 'Lolth!'and related exclamations the worst/most serious of this variety. Players also swear 'By the Beard of Gygax!' and more recently 'By the Ghost of Gygax' or 'Great Gygax's Ghost!'.
  - (Garry Gygax was co-creator of D&D and one of the founders of the entire hobby).

Close Tabletop Games

The "Jet Song" from West Side Story uses "buggin'" and "mother-lovin'", as well as the phrase "when the spit hits the fan." Though the writers also used sanitized street language at the end of "Gee, Officer Krupke" ("Krup you!"), they must have forgotten about "schmuck" earlier in the song, which had to be censored on the original Broadway cast recording, even before it was (differently) censored in the movie - without breaking the rhyme in either case.
At the first act of Angels In America: Perestroika, Prior refers to his ejaculate as "spooj", a term even Belize seems not to have heard before.
The off-Broadway play Altar Boyz had a character claim he had just come out of rehab for "exhaustion". Thereafter, the play makes a Running Gag of using "exhausted" as a euphemism for "drunk", leading to such lines as (to the best of this troper's memory) "Don't blame me, I was incredibly exhausted at the time!"
The Tennessee Williams play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was fairly loose with profanity for The Fifties, but it still avoided using a certain four-letter word, as shown by lines like "Rut the goddamn preacher!" and "Frig Mae and Gooper, frig all dirty lies and liars!"

Close Theatre

Interestingly, in the Next Generation BionicCommando two tidbits go on the opposite direction. Once, prior to facing a boss, Super Joe tells you that "There's no way around [the boss], you'll just have to fight.", to which Spencer replies "My pleasure". However, if you die and try again, Super Joe tells "you'll just have to fuck it", leaving us with a puzzled "Hmmmm...?" response.
- Then, later, on a less humorous stance, Spencer is mumblimb about how the last boss 'shouldn't have messed' with him. Again, if you die, it becomes 'shouldn't have fucked ' with him.
How about the word "Kupo" said by the moogles from Final Fantasy? An early cutscene in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has Monteblanc, a moogle, utters the line "That's the most Kupo thing I've ever heard!"
- There's also a moogle in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings that spouts out a long string of 'kupo'. Not entirely coincidentally, said moogle has the name "Foul-mouthed Moogle".
- The fact that it colloquially means "excrement" in Polish is probably a coincidence. The name of the perennial Super Mario Bros villains caused a certain amount of hilarity in that part of the world for the same reason.
- Jarringly averted in Final Fantasy IX, where, upon breaking a moogle out of a iceblock with a fire spell, he says "You bastards!"
- Seems more like a multi-use word, like "Those smurfing smurfs smurfed Smurfette!" and "This tea is smurfingly smurfy!" ...Only with kupo.
- You spoony bard! This line has gotten so iconic that it's been lampooned countless times and always included in every remake of FF 4 even when the entire script has been rewritten (so far it's happened twice).
  - Funny thing was that much later on, spoony turned out to be a real word that accurately described the character.
- Son of a submariner! One of the few times where the euphemism makes more sense than the word it's replacing.
- Final Fantasy VII is strangely inconsistent about this, often replacing dialogue with a string of !@#$% but leaving the word "shit" uncensored.
  - I'm not sure that it's so inconsistent - they print everything but the word "Fuck" in that game, so the strings of %#$@$^#$!^^ could be construed as long-winded rants rife with F-words that would've been too time-consuming to differentially censor, and possibly less funny as well.
In a probably unintentional example - being a game targetted to a younger audience - within the game Mechquest, there was a holiday event in which you could go into a house where a randomized NPC would say a rumor about your character. One included: "I heard that *your character name* does somersaults with Nurse Helia!" Nurse Helia is female, if you were wondering. Or maybe Freud Was Right in just my case.
In the MMORPG Puzzle Pirates, the game client allowed three settings for filtering swear words: Leave them unfiltered, turn them into %*$#@! and the like, or "Pirate-ize" them, making them acceptable terms. This generated such phrases as, "We're all scuppered." Even the simple acronym "wtf" would be translated into "Blistering blue barnacles!" - a Shout Out to Tintin.
- For certain sexual terms, the "Pirate-ize" filter will substitute "John Thomas" and "harmonica lesson". The full list is available here.
Internet humorist Seanbaby did this in this article about adult video games, replacing sexual terms with the names of vehicles (NOTE: Link is definitely NSFW).
Miscreants like Garrett are called "taffers" in the world of Thief. Lower-class citizens use variants on this word, making sure nobody is "taffing about", "taffing with me", or "giving me taff". Though fans of the series speculated that "taffer" was derived from some real word from a European culture the universe resembled, the creators assures us the word was made up.
In the Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic games, "space" is frequently used. Examples include "Space off," and "Go space yourself".
- The term 'space' (as a verb) is sometimes used in Sci-fi as shorthand for the act of ejecting something from an airlock, e.g. in one episode of Babylon 5 wherein an alien ship is said to have 'spaced' the captives held on board.
- Another term from the same games is "Schutta." If the Exile asks Atton what it means, he replies, "Ask a Twi'lek. It's not flattering."
- There are some other fun ones for the sex act. "If you think I'm going to go 'charging up her boarding ramp', or whatever..." "You look like you and Visas/Atton (gender-dependent) just hooked up a power coupling" (for that last one, you can ask "What do you mean?", and Mira replies "You know! Hooked up a power coupling?" A more obscure example referencing the previous game is "Pulling a Bindo," which apparently means leaving the Jedi. The expression is a Shout Out to the first KOTOR game, when NPC Jolee Bindo did just that.
  - Specifically : leaving the Jedi to be with a woman (since Jedi are Shaolin monks IN SPACE, and thus supposed to be celibate)
- In Republic Commando, Boss likes to demand "What in Death's name?", and when telling his squad to blow stuff up he says things like "Let's rearrange some architecture, Deltas," and "Initiate radical restructuring, Commando." He also once says "By the Force!" and "BLAST!" After that last one, his most rulebound squadmate asks "What's that, sir? I didn't copy" and is told "Uh, just some interference on the comlink."
The original Wing Commander used "slag off" as an Unusual Euphemism for less Media Watchdog-friendly terms ending in "off". Unfortunately, as to slag someone off means to insult them, "slag off!" is equivalent to shouting "insult!"
Marcia of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance has used the following words as expletives: crackers, chestnuts, mutton chops, horsemeat, jerky, and barnacles. She's just as colorful when coming up with an insulting term for someone.
- In fact, Fire Emblem is full of this stuff. "Moldy onions" and "hornet hairs" in particular stand out to this troper.
The word "Frag" is used to mean a kill in an online FPS. See Live Action TV examples below.
In Zork Grand Inquisitor, Yoruk is an ancient and powerful wizard, so powerful in fact that wars have been fought over the possession of his skull. (And yes, this is a Shout Out to Hamlet.) As such, people use the term "Sweet Yoruk!" in the same way people in real life use "Sweet Jesus!" (though they say "Sweet Yoruk" more than people in real life say "Sweet Jesus". When was the last time you heard someone say "Sweet Jesus"?)
- Also, the people in Zork get milk from Hunguses instead of cows, so "Holy Cow!" becomes "Holy Hungus!"
Math-obsessed Minamimoto in The World Ends With You flings mathematical terms instead of profanity, most commonly "hectopascals" and "you zetta sons of digits". This is most obvious near the end, when he clearly replaces the F-word with "factor" (especially since "factoring hectopascals" makes no sense as it's a measurement of pressure).
- Eiji Oji, an in-game celebrity, has a blog called "F everything," and its title may you to believe it's a stereotypical angst-filled blog...until you discover that the F stands for "fabulous."
The Sims 2 has pairs of Sims "Woohoo", rather than have sex. Used consistently, though the original The Sims would only have "Play" in similar contexts.
- Fans of the game has since adopted it as their own euphemism.
In Days of Ruin an unnamed IDS agent uses terms such as "Oh good gravy" and "Sweet corn casserole!". This and her other funny dialog (such as being the only one to care that the plane they are on is crashing) is key in framing the theme of the breather chapter she appears in.
- Her dialog is completely straight faced and purely expository in Dark Conflict
One of the Naughty Sorceress' attacks in Kingdom Of Loathing refers to cooking you up "a nice spaghetti breakfast." This is an euphemism one of the game staff uses for tentacle rape.
- This euphemism was originally shared with the founders of the game 1000BlankWhiteCards.
Grim Fandango, a game based on Latino themes (amongst others) has the protagonist use Spanish swear words at some points (including \'cabron\', a highly offensive word) but is otherwise inoffensive, allowing it to retain an ELSPA +11 rating.
- Wouldn't this be a case of Getting Crap Past The Radar?
In Reality Breakdown: Kel's War, the third game in the Reality Breakdown series and the first to happen chronologically, protagonist Kel's home dimension seems a bit different from most other dimensions, in that they use energy from the sun to perform their "magic", and have "frap" as a swear word. The word is versatile, too, as one NPC is seen running into town yelling "One frapping huge army is coming!", while another time Kel wakes up and asks a party member how long he was out. When hearing how many days he was unconscious, he says "frap, I missed the weekend". Amusingly, Kel uses the word in another dimension later in the game, and naturally no one knows what he's talking about. The word is likely a combination of "fuck" and "crap".
- Interesting combination, as "fuck" and "crap" are two words on opposite sides of the swear scale (with "shit" being about between them, but leaning slightly more to the "fuck" side of the scale).
  - Of the five most common expletives, they rank fuck, shit, crap, damn, ass. Just check most TV programs. Censorship seems to only allow swears up to a certain level of the scale depending on the program, and likely the time it's on. Futurama will allow crap, damn, and ass (lots of ass), but not shit or fuck. They say "bastard" a few times, though, but this Troper can only think of two instances.

Close Video Games

Homestar Runner characters are notorious for made-up swears:
- In the Show Within A Show Teen Girl Squad, Tompkins often uses the expression "Aw peas!".
- Strong Bad has used "bulltonk" and "bullhonkey", the latter later being turned into the name of an energy drink (a parody of Red Bull).
- "What the pfargtl?!" is used once and referenced within the same episode as the acronym "WTPF."
- Homestar Runner himself refers to his butt as his "tweese", even though he's actually said "butt" before (apparently it's a shortened form of "buttweesimo"). He has also said, "Sweet genius, that hurt!"
- Marzipan then later calls Strong Bad a horse's tweese.
- Strong Sad has peculiar elephant feet. Of all things, he calls them "soolnds".
- In the DVD commentary for the sbemail "technology", Matt says "parg" when Mike tells him to swear.

Close Web Animation

Piro and Largo from Megatokyo say "Fsck!", which is literally a UNIX command that scans the hard drives for errors and fixes them. Since its usage is common in hacker culture, this insult makes sense, since Megatokyo features a lot of influence from the hacker culture.
- The legend behind the fsck command is that it was originally more colorfully named, being what one types when the disk is broken, but that the name had to be changed to satisfy lawyers in an early release; filesystem consistency check is thus a backronym.
  - Or, as the Unix Haters Handbook puts better, "think of a good English word to describe what you want to do, then think of an obscure near- or partial-synonym, throw away all the vowels, arbitrarily shorten what's left, and then, finally, as a sop to the literate programmer, maybe reinsert one of the missing vowels."
In the Jenniverse, starting with Unicorn Jelly, odd runes were used where the offending words were used, but a more common and understandable version was the multi-purpose 'Farg'. Since the language they spoke was supposed to be a compromise of mostly english and some other languages, this makes sense.
- Specifically: Hebrew, Greek, and Japanese. But those were the lesser-used (in-universe) Alpabe runes, whereas the glyphs that replaced most other offending words were Talcryl script.
- An example of a Talcryl symbol with a pretty obvious meaning.
In Adventurers! one strip plays with the censorship on RPG curse words, using various ways of covering up the words themselves, eventually using "Spoony", a play on a famous scene from Final Fantasy IV. After that, the word "spoony" became a running joke in the strip, with characters spouting it all the time in place of curse words. Other utensil-related words were used, such as "spoon" on its own, "Fork you", or even "utensil", but "spoony" was the most widely used.
In Erfworld, Parson finds that any cussword he attempts to utter (and he attempts to utter several immediately after being summoned) comes out as "boop". Apparently, the "game mechanics" that govern Erfworld include a profanity filter.
- Parson thus likes it when he finds a curse not covered by the filter, and in the meantime has begun to use some unusual language of his own.
- Some of the peculiarities of Erfworld language also fit this trope, e.g. "uncroaked" (undead) and "Croakamancy" (necromancy).
"Butt-noses" in this Loserz strip. Almost adorable, isn't it?
College Roomies From Hell!!! has used, among others, "xlempaphroggin'" and "spiroratstar." Real ones are used sometimes, though; they're just scribbled out.
Achewood features Philippe, a five year old otter, who obviously can't be allowed to swear like everyone else in the comic can (and does), on account of being five forever. For example, when Philippe comes across straight man Teodor watching gay porn and is informed that it's really Superman helping another man out of the shower: "Superman wouldn't wear a police hat in the shower! Applesauce!"
- This usage of "applesauce" is actually vintage 1920s slang. It's used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, among other places.
For a while, Everything Jake had "Quck" which even the other characters were unsure of.
The characters from Bob And George often use, "Nutbunnies!"
- Which originates from Freakazoid!.
Save Hiatus has a strip where Ven goes on a Cluster F Bomb rant without using any actual swear words, just various sci-fi and fantasy Unusual Euphemisms.
The comic 1/0 lifted its first character, "Barnacle" Jones, from the comic Absolute Tripe, which introduced him as "the first man in history to seal a fart in a mason jar". The jar came along with Jones, though 1/0 never shows it in-panel. Later in the strip, characters begin using "Jar Breeze" as profanity.
This is the sole purpose of one character from Sexy Losers who is only called Touro's friend (swearing). The creator acknowledged that his speech kind of makes sense but really doesn't it's just meant to sound insulting and use a lot of swearing. He's given us such gems as "Yeah spooge mouth. You fuck cows in retrospect" and "Yeah fuckwit you shit for sale."
Various couples in Namir Deiter have expressed fondness for "Cookies and Pudding".
The Wotch. Anne Onymous often says "fish sticks!" instead of a more objectionable expletive.
David Gonterman censors his own work relentlessly, so he's come up with quite a few of these. Phrack (guess what it's a substitute for) is a particularly common one, but there's also the infamous "Clinton Jobs".
The Cyantian Chronicles has "Squid", which is used as a catch-all curse word for cyantians. Normal curse words get censored. The origin of "Squid" as a swear word comes from the period where the whole of Cyantia was enslaved by the Moulin Phedra, who happened to look a lot like Squid.
- "Squid on a Stick" is my favorite occurrence of this.
- "Dratsad", which is used instead of "Bastard!".
"Your pop up thermometers just went active."
Thinkin Lincoln has the occasional use of lines such as "What the crumpet" and "Son of a birch."
Junior from 1/0 decides to use the author's name (Tailsteak) as a curse word because he reasons that the author can't bleep out his own name. Yes, One Over Zero has No Fourth Wall.
Within the much-maligned "Oceans Unmoving" plotline of Sluggy Freelance, scientist Kada frequently uses the interjection "splat" and euphemism for generic curses. After the Carib "Honest" Stu gets shot and is dying, Kada swear revenge, referring to the attackers as "splats" and Stu interrupts her to tell her that "splat" is actually a derogatory term for Caribs themselves, derived from the sound they made when being run over. Cue Kada's horrified backpedaling followed a beat panel, then Stu saying "Now I know why you guys lie all the time. It's funny!" before dying.
- She also uses "freg" to stand in for the f-word—generally at least once per comic she appears in. Yeah, she's pretty foulmouthed.
Badly Drawn Webcomic takes this to the logical extreme in this strip.
Terinu makes frequent use of "Frell" (borrowed from Farscape) and "Fragg", both standing in for the usual F-word. Word Of God reports that "Fragg" came from her husband's attempt to not swear in front of their children, instead substituting Fraggle Rock!
Cardinal in Finder's Keepers uses "Compass and Cross!" as an exclamation of shock and frustration in lieu of swearing. Cailyn, on the other hand, drops regular old-fashioned F-bombs when she's stressed.
PolkOut example: [1]◊
Leslie from Friendly Hostility uses *swear* as the author does not know a word strong enough for him to say.
In one strip of El Goonish Shive Grace and Sarah are talking about Sarah and Elliot "getting a room". The title of the strip "clarifies" that they are referring to "playing boardgames". "Playing boardgames" has now become a euphemism used by the EGS fandom.
- Considering how EGS has also mentioned at various points "Strip Scrabble", naked games of Twister, and the "Best. Card. Ever!", this euphemism is not unjustified.
- Another one in an April Fools strip has a cat use "What The MEOW?" in a Crowning Moment Of Funny. Seen here.
The titular Dominic Deegan refers to large breasts as "lower back problems" — a joke that dates back to Strip #2. Which might also be Truth In Television as well.
DMFA uses the word "frig" a lot (especially Dan).
- Which is also a real-world euphemism. Mab, on the other hand, yells "Friggernaffy!"
We get the amusing "poofers" in the better than it sounds/appears webcomic Hamsta Powah. The idea behind the word is that, due to the fall of humanity and small creatures artificially evolving as the new intelligent race (so far, hamster, mice, rat, squirrel, and rabbit furries have been seen), new swear words have popped up. "Poofers" basically translates to "crap" or "shit" when used in conjunction with disapointment at something happening. A notable example is when Sam said "Oh, poofers" before being hit with the tornado from Hiate's Sky's Fury summon.
- Author and artist Sam Boyd says the word is really just because, quote "hamster profanity is fun".
- Possibly Averted/Subverted/Funny Anyeurism/Did Not Do the Research in that 'poof' is a British slur against a homosexual man; particularly one that exhibits effemenate mannerisms. Calling someone a 'poofer' (particularly in the 1960's, as in modern parlance it becomes 'poofter') is a distinctly nasty thing to do, but not particularly unusual.
Subverted in this comic of Order Of The Stick, where Celia catches her boyfriend "slipping the wood" to some dryad hussy.
Durkon: Those leafy wankers have broken many homes.

Close Webcomics

How many of you had heard "fark" before Drew Curtis launched the eponymous website in 1999?
Played with in Tales Of MU, with actual swearing rendered in the familiar English, but local variants exist to replace such things as "gee" and "gosh."
A variation appears in ''Survival Of The Fittest' which otherwise averts the trope entirely. When making evalutations of the student files (in-character versions of the student profiles handlers write for the characters, basically), Danya tends to use "motivate" as a euphamism for playing the game/killing. For example "has potential to be a motivator" or "could motivate if given the right incentive."
When talking on image boards, be aware that safe driving means breasts that straddle the line of being sent to an alternative board for their immense size.
In Stupid Mario Brothers, Ash often says things like "Son of a Bulbasaur".
After someone used it in the Fetish Fuel: Doctor Who trope, the phrase "squiggly feelings" has become popular on TV Tropes.
This Troper knows of a You Tube ROM Hack reviewer who has used "Ferjuckers" as a minced oath several times. In one instance, he even left a comment explaining that he uses this word whenever something doesn't quite call for a WTF.
The Gaming in the Clinton Years review of Tomb Raider 2 refers to Lara Croft's breasts as "front-loaded anvils."
The Euphemismator
The Protectors Of The Plot Continuum say things like "Flaming Denethor" or "Jadis in a block of ice", and use "Glaurung" as a substitute for the F-word.

Close Web Original

Perhaps the best known use of such is in the animated series The Smurfs, in which the word "smurf" is applied to just about anything the writers feel would be funny, but especially as a rather transparent substitute for expletives; in some cases, they are then upbraided by another character for using "such language."
- Likewise The Snorks and "snork." Only they don't do it quite as much but there have been allusions to the "F-Word", with them saying "Snork off!".
- Family Guy once parodied this by having Stewie watching an episode of the Smurfs where one was describing to another his date with Smurfette, using "smurf" to stand in for a lot of naughty words.
- South Park once parodied this trope in the episode "Starvin' Marvin in Space", where the boys encounter a race of aliens known as Marklar. The word "marklar" is the only noun in the language, and is used for everything.
Transformers is famous for this, particularly Beast Wars. Various permutations of the word "Slag" are the most popular, but are others, including the perennially popular "kiss my skid plate" (though "skidplate" is used similarly in Animated)
- Slag, of course is molten gunk cast off during various metallurgical processes, so it is an obvious stand-in for excrement when dealing with robots. Less fortunate is the Generation One Transformer named Slag, who has retroactively received a very foul name. Some feel that this fits Slag's character a little too well, and the whole thing's an infrequently used running gag among the fandom. They were even going to call his counterpart in Animated Slag, but decided against it.
  - Perhaps slightly Older Than They Think, with Galvatron in the 1987 season of the first cartoon shouting "Die, you worthless piece of slag!" Given that in Australian and British English, this word means "slut" (or sometimes, in Australia, "spit"), that probably wasn't the best choice, and is why they changed the name in Animated.
  - Indeed, someone at ITV took so much offence at the term "slag", that all references to it were more or less edited out of Beast Wars when it was aired in the UK.
  - In one episode of Animated they make a lampshading of this. After Sari expresses surprise that Scrapper has named said counterpart 'Snarl' (taken from another G1 Dinobot), Scrapper replies "Well I was gonna name him 'Slag', but he seemed to take offense at it."
  - Of course, that's kinda closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. They didn't seem to consider that when they named him back in '85, and it's certainly not a new use of the term.
- Animated gave us a couple, such as "glitch-head". They're actually seeing how far they could go (they had to cut the line "What the forklift was that"; in the finished episode, the line largely survives, but "forklift" had to be replaced with "front-end loader"), as they weren't allowed to use many initially. However, during the second season, some of the bots (especially Bumblebee) got surprisingly rust-mouthed.
- In fact, Transformers wiki has several pages on this, which includes a list of Anatomic Euphemisms. Gold star if you guessed "tailpipe" was on the list.
For a while, this spread to other children's action series, such as Batman Beyond.
Parodied on Futurama, where Amy uses made-up equivalents for very mild oaths indeed (such as "Gleesh" for "Gosh", probably a direct parody of "frack" and the like). As well, one episode had the planet of Amazonia, where "snuu-snuu" is used to refer to sex.
- Also, Bender frequently yells things like "Cheese it!" and "We're boned."
  - This may lean more toward simply being anachronistic slang, at least in the case of "cheese it," which was common slang in the 1950's, generally meaning "stop it" or "run away," as a warning when an authority figure was coming near.
- Futurama also has Leela using Band names as curses, such as "This Toads the Wet Sprocket!" and "This Wangs Chung!"
  - "So musicians really Roger your Hammerstein, eh?"
  - Heehee... Roger!
- One episode in which the gang thwarts Richard Nixon, Nixon shouts out the exact words, "Oh expletive deleted!"
Recess used a fictional curse-word "whomp", which seemed to mean "suck" from context. This was lampshaded in an episode when the teachers banned the word, insisting that it must have some kind of hidden offensive meaning. The kids eventually ended up in court in their quest to prove that it was just a word they'd invented.
- Incidentally, this troper read somewhere that they intended to use that word for the name of One Saturday Morning's weekday afternoon counterpart, which they were originally naming Whomptastic. But perhaps because using a word that apparently meant "suck" didn't make much sense in that context, they replaced it with the more fitting name of One Too.
In Pepper Ann, "Fuzzy" (the name of a cartoon character within the show's world) was used as a catch-all euphemism ("What the Fuzzy?" "For the love of Fuzzy..." etc.)
Pirates Of Dark Water used a set of fictional curse-words, such as "noi jitat" and "jungo-lungo", to bypass the censors, as well as to enrich the sense of an alternate universe. This allowed the characters to retain their foul-mouthed pirate personalities (though most of the protagonists weren't actually pirates) while keeping the show safe for children.
"Rassin-frassin" is used as a derogatory adjective in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons The Flintstones and The Jetsons, as well as by Yosemite Sam in various Looney Tunes shorts. Or maybe rassle-frassle.
Sponge Bob Square Pants and his friend Patrick use "Tartar Sauce", "Fish Sticks", "Fish Paste", and "Barnacles" as their favored exclamations. One would guess that, to a fish, tartar sauce would be pretty shocking. "What the shell" and "What the halibut" crop up occasionally, too.
- The word barnacles seems to be their equivalent of sh*t or bull sh*t as it's sometimes used like "this is a load of barnacles" and "you're full of barnacles", in another example Mr. Krabs had given on ever being able to do something and Spongebob says "Barnacles Mr. Krabs!" and Mr. Krabs says "Spongebob!" as if he said a very bad word and Spongebob says "Pardon the language".
  - This euphemism is actually directly lampshaded by the song "Barnacles" in the music CD "Spongebob On The High Seas," in which Spongebob, Patrick, Sandy, Mr. Krabs, and Plankton flat-out state that it's a euphemism for curse words. This goes so far as to break the fourth wall and may even count as a Take That at censorship in general. However, the fact that it encourages censorship by use of this euphemism suggests otherwise. Still, I can't help but feel the chorus is poking fun at it.
Chorus:"Barnacles is the way we say what they say we can't say."
- Plankton has the habit of saying "What the Davy...?" since "Davy Jones' Locker" is portrayed as the series' equivalent of Hell.
- Mr. Krabs is fond of saying "Mother of pearl!"
  - Interestingly enough, he's the father of Pearl. Possibly Mrs. Krabs and Slag (see above) should form a support group for people who have become Unusual Euphemisms.
- They also use "Captain's Quarters" to refer to butts on ocassion.
- Brilliantly lampshaded/parodied in the episode where Sponge Bob finds an apparently horrific obscenity written on a trash bin, but has no idea what it means. When he first uses the phrase, it is obscured by dolphin noises—which turn out to (a) be the actual obscenity, and (b) to be unimaginably offensive to all who hear it.
- This in itself is lampshaded later on when other offensive phrases get used and are covered up by different sound effects. Then it turns out that one of those sound effects, a car horn, was actually being made by a car.
  - Which means that Old Man Jenkins drives around in a jalopy whose horn is a loud broadcast of a horrible obscenity.
In the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series, the turtles often barked, "What the shell?!" (On at least one occasion, Donatello comes pretty close to the real thing: "Aw, sssshhhh-ell!") It's even in the Theme Song - It's a Shell of a town!
- In one episode in the "Fast Forward" season, Splinter sees that Raphael entered into a professional wrestling match. When confronted, Raph says, "Aww fish-sicles!"
In Danny Phantom, Mr. Lancer constantly uses book titles as expletives of shock. Ex.: "Moby Dick!", "Gulliver's Travels, I'm losing my mind - and my pants!", and "Lord of the Flies! They're slipping right through my hands!" "War of the Worlds, creature, get away from my youthful charges!" "Chicken Soup for the Soul!" "Hunt for Red October!", when the faculty's steak dinners are stolen, "Paradise Lost!" and, beautifully, when locked in a closet, "Cask of Amontillado!"
- And let's not forget the other bizarre expletive user, Vlad Masters. Unlike Mr. Lancer, however, Vlad uses food items such as "butter biscuits", "cheese logs", "butter brickle", etc.
The Angry Beavers make frequent use of the word "Spoot." In one episode, Scientist Number One actually shouts "Oh... expletive!" in shock.
Warmonga, in Kim Possible, uses "frakkle", although she says it so casually it may be the equivalent of "darn" or "whoops" rather than anything else.
- Mr. Barkin, also from Kim Possible, has several of these, including "cheese and crackers", from which it's not hard to deduce a prime suspect inspiration.
Mandy from The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy once threatened to "open up a can of powerpuff" on Billy and Grim. Note that before they were a show, the Power Puff Girls were called "The Whupass Girls".
There's a kind of variation in the 1970s British animated puppet show The Clangers. None of the title characters had any actual dialogue. They all "spoke" in echoing slide-whistle notes that had the cadence of English speech, so that it was often possible to work out what they were saying from the context of the story - for instance, "Whee-oo, woo-oo woo-oo" could be interpreted as "Hello, Tiny Clanger". On one occasion it was claimed that one of the character's whistles meant "Sod it! The bloody thing's stuck!" although of course this could never be proven.
- As a matter of fact, the offending phrase was used in the voice-box for the Clanger toys, and is "Oh sod it! The bloody thing's stuck again".
In the latest version of the Care Bears franchise, Grumpy frequently uses "grumbly" expletives such as "Bumbling bittlebots!" and "Galloping gearbox!"
Tek Jansen, eponymous hero of the animated Show Within A Show on The Colbert Report, has a new curse every episode - usually space-themed puns ranging from "Venus Flytrap!" to "Space Mountain!" "Solar Plexus!" has been used repeatedly to the point where it's almost a Catch Phrase.
Fij Fij of Maryoku Yummy always says "Yumpin' Doodlebumps!" when something bad happens.
Justice League usually just cut off almost swears, but they also gave of this priceless line:
Green Lantern:Judas Priest!
- Which is actually a really old euphemism for just what you thought.
- It turns up in Sunset Boulevard, of all places.
One Berenstein Bears cartoon has an episode about how cursing is wrong. The curse word? Furball. It's apparently treated as an ethnic slur in Bear Country. Despite being a largely homogenous society.
- In the original book, it is never stated what the word is. It is implied, however, that it is the F-word (and I don't mean "furball"). The TV writers couldn't find a way to hide the word, chickened out, and went with the Unusual Euphemism.
- This troper must add that an episode of Arthur, dealing with the same subject matter, did have the guts to use a bleep, as in actually showing that, yes, D.W. was actually swearing.
On Rocky And Bullwinkle, Boris Badenov often shouts "Raskolnikov!", which is the name of the protagonist in Crime And Punishment. Bullwinkle has "Jumpin' G. Horstat!"
- Boris spouting words with good connotations in succession such as "Purity" and "Innocence" when enraged has also been treated as if he was spewing expletives in context.
Freakazoid uses "Aw, nut bunnies!"
On The Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog, Dr. Robotnik often calls his robots "nincombots" or "metal morons" when they fail him. In one Youtube video, this is parodied.
Butters, one of few South Park characters who rarely swear, often uses "Aw hamburgers" and "Son of biscuit!"
Inevitable Avatar: The Last Airbender example: Aang expresses frustration by exclaiming "Horsefeathers!" Of course, this is Avatar, where the horses do have feathers.
- ...Well it was "monkey feathers" actually, but monkeys probably have feathers too. (This show brought us platypus-bears, rabbiroos and penguins with four flippers; pigs really do fly.)
- Even earlier, a pirate yells "Bleeding hogmonkeys!"
Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! character Daizy uses "lavender lollipops" as an expletive.
In Goodfeathers shorts of Animaniacs, pigeons use the word "Coo" in dirty ways, such as "Coo you" and "Coo off".
- In one episode where one of their girlfriends leaves them for another Pesto I believe it was says to the new boyfriend says "have you been cooing my girl?"
Principal Skinner will use this on occasion, the most memorable being the exclamation "GM Chrysler!" Similarly, Mr Burns is fond of this: most apparent is '22 Short Films About Springfield' where he motivates a bee-stung and quickly-dying Smithers to continue powering their bicycle-built-for-two in completely accurate 19th century slang insults—calling him (among other things) a "stuporous funker." The Other Wiki has a breakdown here.
In the PJ Sparkles pilot cartoon, after seeing that his evil plot has failed, the villain cries out "Oh, spit!"
The Brothers Flub and Dave The Barbarian both used "Bejabbers!".
Elisa in Gargoyles occasionally uses "Jalapeños!" as a general-purpose curse.
- Actually, Goliath and Broadway started that trend(Goliath first shouted "Jalapeño!" appropriately enough, the first time he ever ate a jalepeno), and Eliza picked it up due to her hanging with the Gargoyles.
According to Penny Arcade, "ham doctor" will soon be a horrifically offensive swear. This Troper, for one, is doing his best to make it happen.
Family Guy needed an Unusual Euphemism to get past the network censors, so they invented the word "Clemen". They noted that it would soon gain some obscene meaning and they wouldn't be allowed to use it again.
- They also had an episode where they sung the song "Shipoopi" from the 1957 musical The Music Man. People wondered if it was some kind of Unusual Euphemism even though the song itself explains that it means "The girl who's hard to get".
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In the WWE, Kurt Angle and Booker T once had a Shout Out to Die Hard when Booker asked Angle, "You really think you have a chance, Mr. Cowboy?" Angle's response: "Yippie-kai-yay, Mother Hubbard."
The independent wrestling company CHIKARA promotes itself as family-friendly and discourages foul language. This led to fans chanting "Holy Poop" after impressive moves or dives.

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A request from the commissioner of an independent wrestling promotion requested that foul language be avoided. This spawned chants of (literally) "HOLY BEEP".
English slander laws make it unwise to describe someone as "drunk" unless you've got medical evidence of an elevated blood-alcohol level to back it up. Hence the euphemism "tired and emotional". This is doubtless the source of the "tired" for "drunk" references elsewhere.
- A similar one is "unwell", from the note Jeffery Bernard Is Unwell. It appeared in The Spectator whenever he was too drunk to write his column in that magazine, and was later used as the title for a play about Bernard's life.
  - Though arguably if someone's drinking is effecting their commitments to this extent, they might be an alcoholic, which is regarded less as a moral failing and more as an illness nowadays.
Likewise, rather than directly accuse people of having sex while on official duty, the satirical magazine Private Eye coined the term "Ugandan discussions", after a journalist accused of having an affair with a politician claim she was merely "discussing Uganda with him".
- The magazine also uses "the reply given to the plaintiff in the case Arkell v. Pressdram" instead of "fuck off", after the magazine famously responded to a libel allegation by Mr Arkell with the response "We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: Fuck off".
- The recent disappearance of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has led a number of people to push "hiking the Appalachian Trail" as a similar euphemism.
The US military uses the term blue falcon, or the phonetic bravo foxtrot as polite versions of the epithet "Buddy F-cker".
- Also Charlie Foxtrot for Cluster F-ck.
- The phonetic alphabet also gives us Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
  - And "Foxtrot Uniform" (which is the title of a level of Half Life: Opposing Force, in which some HECU soldiers find out just how badly their own side wants them dead).
  - Not to mention "Foxtrot Oscar".
The name of the famed Japanese store "Violence Jack Off" was supposedly intended to be an anti-violence slogan on the mistaken basis that "jack off" was a euphemism for other "off" phrases.
Swearing in Quebecois French has elements of this. The vast majority of curses are the names of religious items. Suffice it to say, unless you are actually in a church, if someone is talking about hostie (Communion wafers), calice (chalice), or tabernac (tabernacle), they are not in a good mood.
- And there are unusual euphemistic versions of those same words, used more publically when one doesn't wish to offend; these are based on the original words, but with serious alterations to make them into nonsensical words: Calvace or Calvaire for Calice, taboire or tabaslak, and so on. Calvaire might be the only exception, since it's also the french word for Ordeal.
- Interestingly, this contrasts with French (the country) or English (the language) curses, where most swear words are related to sex, the f-bomb being the most obvious english example.
  - Nothing special about it. Swearing in any language will fit one of these 4 categories: Scatologic (Shit), Sexual (Fuck), Parental (Bastard, Son of a Bitch) or Religious (Holy Christ). The French use more of the first two, while the Quebecois use a lot - a LOT - of Religious words: furniture, sacramental events and important figures.
  - What about Japanese? Although they have "shit" ("kuso", somewhat milder in impact than the English equivalent), most Japanese vulgarity is based on altered word forms or synonyms with no difference of literal meaning (don't use "temee" for "you" in polite company!), and the most common terms of abuse literally mean "fool" ("baka") and "beast" ("chikushou", also used as an exclamation).
  - The Japanese have very little actual profanity. Due to the highly complex nature of courtesy encoded in the language, with multiple levels of politeness and propriety depending on the context the usage; insults and expletives are most often accomplished by varying the usage of words and phrases to something other than what would normally be appropriate for the context. The farther outside of normal usage, the more serious the language. Metaphor and comparisons are also common. For example, referring to someone as a "tiger" means that he's a drunkard. Modifying that to "little tiger" or "great tiger" alters the severity of the insult (the former being more of a playful jab; the latter a scathing insult). Even more commonly used terms of profanity also depend greatly on context. "Baka", for example, can be used to refer to someone as "silly" in an affection manner, or as the equivalent of "fucktard", depending on the situation and how it's used. And, of course, there are plenty of regional variants; with those typical of the Kansai province the most well-known.
  - Most idiots who swear in German take the Scatologic route. This troper for one finds it rather funny, as it's really not even a very dirty word. Besides "Scheisse" doesn't roll off the tounge the same way a good emphatic "SHIT" does.
Some from an earlier generation: my father used many euphemisms for 'I'm going out to take a pee', some of which still turn up in comedy shows. Examples include: 'I'm going to see a man about a dog', 'I'm going to wet the tiles', and my favourite, 'I'm going to turn my bike around.'
Rik Mayall, after fluffing a line as Alan B'Stard: "Oh - bum - buttocks! Oh, big hairy testicles... OF DOOM!"
Some of the more hardcore Twilight fans say OME (Oh my Edward!) instead of OMG. Head, meet desk. (Also, OMC for "Oh my Carlisle!/Cullen!" I am ashamed.)
- Similar thinking led to "Oh my Stephen!"
The blog Go Fug Yourself has many euphemisms for what might be seen if a celebrity's dress is too skimpy: ladyparts, the world is your gynecologist, assets, the girls, puppies...
The whole unusual euphemism trope is played with in this loltastic video about Star Trek Voyager. It has to be watched to be believed...
I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.
One of the more humorous things about Madlibs is the unusual euphemisms you infer from common words when put into an unusual context
Mormonism is famous for the level to which practitioners avoid swearing, which has led to a bunch of perfectly straight playing of this trope. Maybe it violates the spirit of the thing, but swearing is not completely disallowed so much as generally discouraged.
Personal anecdote? Take it to Troper Tales, you fusking clothpunker.

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