Basic Trope: A work refuses to use swearing, preferring to use more childish workarounds.
- Straight: Bob is a full-grown adult, yet voices his displeasure with phrases like "gosh dang it!" and "oh, crud!"
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is a Mafia don who's just seen his entire mob gunned down by Inspector Javert and a squad of cops. It comes to the final showdown, and he comes out, guns blazing, screaming "DIE, YOU GOSH DANG MOTHERFRICKING POO-POO HEADS!"
- Bob uses formal sounding words that mean the exact same thing as the curse words, telling someone to "Consume excrement, matriarch fornicator".
- A group of neo-nazis use the phrase "racial slur" in lieu of actual racial slurs.
- Downplayed:
- Bob normally doesn't swear, but every now and then he'll use a Precision Dang Strike.
- "Oh crap!" is said instead of "Oh shit!"
- Justified:
- In the entire universe where the story takes place in, they are considered swear words. Fuck is the more toned down version of Fudge.
- Bob is around kids a lot, and prefers to use those variants on the words.
- Bob's religion frowns upon cussing, or even forbids it entirely. But, Bob is only human, and thus is prone to displeasure (and the need/desire to voice that displeasure) now and then, so he works around the "No cussing" rule this way.
- Bob personally finds swearing distasteful, but this is a deliberate character trait rather than a demand of the Moral Guardians.
- Serious swearing is concealed behind a Narrative Profanity Filter, but the milder ones are quoted verbatim. "Bob proceeded to call Charlie a git, a jerk, and several other things the author would blush to reproduce."
- Bob doesn't know any swear words.
- Bob thinks "Swearing is boring," if only because of how frequently he's heard it that he wishes not to take it up as a habit.
- Inverted:
- Cluster F-Bomb
- Sir Swears-a-Lot
- Little Bobby is known to say "Oh, motherfucking god damn twatdicks!" instead of "Oh, gosh dang it!" despite the PG rating.
- Sentences that wouldn't normally have curses do anyway to bump up the rating.
- "I'm going to damn a pair of socks."
- In a work where everyone says Gosh Dang It to Heck! type of phrases, Bob suddenly shouts "GOD DAMN ALL OF YOU TO HELL, YOU MOTHERFUCKING IDIOTS!". He then uses the normal Gosh Dang It to Heck! type of phrases later.
- Subverted:
- "What a gosh dang cunt!"
- Bob doesn't swear... in front of the Kid Hero. When something goes wrong and the kid isn't around... "MOTHERF-" [Smash Cut].
- Double Subverted:
- "What a gosh dang cunnn...try music fan!"
- Bob actually screamed "MOTHERFRICKER!".
- Parodied:
- Bob is a shock-jock down at the local radio station. What you'd expect to be a very profane show is instead very childish.
- Bob speaks Angrish when he gets mad, and no-one save God knows what he's actually saying, as it sounds like a slobbering dog mixed with mindless seething and dirty Japanese and Spanish words. However, anyone who overhears it is horrified.
- Bob says "Gosh dang it to heck!". A Cutaway Gag reveals that Gosh is a real god, and Heck is a real place.
- Bob says “Gosh dang it to heck!” but he actually hates the thing he is pointing out so much he wants God to to damn it so that it ends up in Hell.
- Bob is a soldier who has no problem swearing, especially in an active war zone. Nonetheless his furious salvo of curse words get cut off by gunfire and explosions but not his resigned "what the heck".
- Zig-Zagged:
- "Cheese and crackers, that guy's a god dang motherfucking poo-poo head."
- Sometimes the work uses mature swears, sometimes it uses childish swears.
- Averted:
- Bob swears at regular intervals, but nothing too insane.
- The show doesn't use phrases where swearing could logically go in the first place.
- Bob could swear in phrase that works, but doesn't, nor use any workarounds
- Enforced:
- "This work is generally a Cluster F-Bomb, so having that one guy never swear will make him stand out and be an early hint towards his being a Knight Templar."
- The work is aimed at children, so there is no way actual swear words can be used without incurring the wrath of the Moral Guardians. However, there are scenes where swearing would be expected, forcing the writers to come up with alternatives.
- Lampshaded: "Nice language. What are you, a kindergarten teacher?"
- Invoked: Bob prefers to tone down the foul language specifically so that when he does breaks it out, you know he REALLY means it.
- Exploited: Bob is in a rough crowd and stands out for using the least nasty language.
- Defied: "I may be around kids who don't know any better, but still... fucking hell, man!"
- Discussed: "You see, if everyone knows you never use serious curses normally, it has more impact when you really need it."
- Conversed: "God damn kid shows, what kind of Mafia don says 'motherfricking poo-poo heads'?"
- Deconstructed: Bob sees his refusing to swear as a mark of deep personal morality, balancing out his less salubrious qualities such as serial puppy murdering. He's contrasted with a foul-mouthed hero in a work with An Aesop about censorship being bad.
- Reconstructed: Bob actually knows how to swear... he just prefers not to.
- Played for Laughs: Bob curses all the time when he's calm but when he's in rage mode, he'll start using "Gosh dang it"-ish swears.
- Played for Drama: Bob is then bullied a lot for saying childish insults.
Push off back to Gosh Dang It to Heck!, sun on the beach.
