Basic Trope: Implying that a character used profanity without getting into specifics.
- Straight: Neil the Narrator claims that Alice told Bob "where he could stick it".
- Exaggerated: Neil uses Expospeak Gag to all-but actually say that Alice used a very long string of profanity towards Bob.
- Downplayed: Neil says that Alice called Bob a "goddamn idiot", but claims that she said something a little stronger than "goddamn".
- Justified:
- Neil was telling the story to a young child.
- Neil's deeply-rooted religious beliefs prohibit him from using any profanity, even when the fictional characters are doing it. Bonus points if he's the author of the story, and to him, having his characters explicitly use foul language would be just as bad as saying them in real life, even when it's done for the sake of "realism".
- Inverted: Alice said no swear words whatsoever, but Neil peppers in some random swears to his story.
- Subverted: When Neil quotes Alice, he often hesitates and says some rather Gosh Dang It to Heck! words. When we actually meet Alice, we find that she really does swear like that.
- Double Subverted: Then Neil tries to quote Sir Swears-a-Lot Charlie, and substitutes his swear words for different words.
- Parodied:
- Whenever Neil tries to quote Alice's more foul language, he emits a Sound-Effect Bleep instead.
- Euphemism Buster; Neil tells the young Dylan, "Alice told Bob where he could stick it." Dylan responds, "Oh, she told him to shove it in his ass!"
- Zig-Zagged: Sometimes Neil bowdlerizes profanity when telling a story, but sometimes he leaves it in.
- Averted: No swear words are implied in a story.
- Enforced:
- Can be a way to add some Demographically Inappropriate Humour if it's a work for younger audiences.
- It's just funnier to have Expospeak Gag implying a character swore instead of it actually happening.
- Lampshaded: "I'm pretty sure Alice didn't really say "Gosh Darn It to Heck!" when she got mad, but it's not like you should know what she really said anyway."
- Invoked: "How do I go about telling Dylan what the characters in this story said if they swear too much?" "Just substitute the swearing for something else, or say something like "She said many bad words"."
- Exploited: Neil's version of the story becomes the official censored version.
- Defied: Neil decides that he will quote Alice directly.
- Discussed: "And then he told me, 'You're out of your freaking mind!', only he said something a little stronger than "freaking"." "Oh, come on, I can handle that word!"
- Conversed: "I wonder why this narrator just says that a character "used bad words" instead of actually implying what those words were."
- Implied: How this trope is generally played, due to it being an implication by definition.
- However, it can be an implication if Neil simply uses more Gosh Dang It to Heck! words when he quotes Alice, even though Alice seems like the kind of person who swears frequently.
- Another implication can be if it's not entirely clear if the phrase is meant to be a euphemism or not.
Neil: "Back to the [freaking] Narrative Profanity Filter."
