This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing.
This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing. Most languages employ euphemism (from the Greek, meaning “to speak well of”) in some measure. Germans say the meaningless Potz blitz rather than Gottes Blitz and the French say par bleu for par Dieu and Ventre Saint Gris instead of Ventre Saint Christ. But no other language approaches English for the number of delicate expletives of the sort that you could safely say in front of a maiden aunt: darn, durn, drat, gosh, golly, goodness gracious, gee whiz, jeepers, shucks, and so on. We have scores, if not hundreds, of these terms. However, sometimes even these words are regarded as exceptionable, particularly when they are new. Blooming and blasted, originally devised as mild epithets, were in nineteenth-century England considered nearly as offensive as the more venerable expletives they were meant to replace.
