Here's the thing about fictional curse words that has always perplexed me. Allow me to use the word "frell" from Farscape to illustrate. "Frell" obviously means "fuck" in the context of the show. Why, then, it it not just as offensive as "fuck", inspiring moral outrage, heated letters to the FCC and prayer meetings? Isn't what people mean by what they say at least as important as which words they use to express it?
This was almost a whole episdoe of Bullshit with Penn & Teller. There was this one nutcase woman* who was saying people should replace god and jesus with "Buddha" because she thought that wasn't offensive. They talked about this for a while and I think could've devoted an entire season just to her.
For 2 years I had a German colleague who always casually swore in English. Because to her "shit" was basically a nonsense word. But when things went really wrong then she'd swear in German.
My favorite was in HS when our plays were heavily censored. So we'd try replace the "offensive" dialog with things that were worse but wouldn't get caught by our dipshit principal. "What the hell" was replaced with "what the Purgatory" because we knew the audience would hear the emotion behind the line not the words. One time we changed a line to "that makes about as much sense as women drivers" and the administration thought that was much better than the original. It boggles the mind.
And why the hell are exclamations "better" than bodily fuctions? Why can you yell "fuck it!" in a PG-13 movie but not say "they were fuck*ng"? Why can network TV say "oh shit I have to poop" but not "holy crap I have to shit"?
*she was from Texas. As if you couldn't tell.
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Topic: Fictional Curse Words (Read 2632 times)