Some musings on expletives (and a question for the reader!)

I have always been a fan of Ursula Le Guin's writing, ever since reading the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy aged 13, and I love her recent rant about the ubiquity of "fuck" and "shit" as swearwords in modern writing (found via The F-Word Blog. It got me to thinking about swear words in general, about "fuck" in particular, and suchlike stuff. It turns out, I haven't written about "fuck" as a word yet, but I'll make that a later post. For now, I want to look at swearing, and in particular to consider Ms Le Guin's observation that, "It seems weird to me that only two words are now used as cusswords, and by many people used so constantly that they can’t talk or even write without them." I decided to stop and think of other words I use to cuss and swear.

My cursing lexicon has several influences. Some are the usual 4-letter words of Anglo-Saxon origin ("fuck" and "shit" included in that category, for example), and apparently similar in origin (Old English, at least), is "bollocks" (literal meaning: "testicles"). Linked in meaning to "bollocks" and "arse" but I'm not sure if it's similar in origin, is "bum" (same meaning as "arse"); linked in the same way to "shit" are "crap" and "crud". Of later origin is "bugger" (which I suppose technically when used as a swear word is homophobic language, in the same way as "that's so gay" is now, although for a lot of people the association is so far removed in the past that it doesn't register as such - Winston Churchill's K.B.O. motto "Keep Buggering On" attests to that!). Similar to that in its original meaning is "sod" (which always brought a snicker when "Good King Wenceslas" gets to the line "it was in the very sod..."!) I still use some of the religious curses (Oh, St Paul would be so disappointed in me!) I use "bloody", which is a violence term, and occasionally "ruddy" which literally means "red" but also I think is a more "polite" term for "bloody", like "darn" for "damn", used on the basis of the rhyme (it also seems to be a dialect term). Speaking of "polite" terms in cursing, I will often use "bother" or "rats", even to express quite strong emotion.

Then there are the more... individual... terms that have less obvious derivation. I know a couple of Klingon curses, although I rarely use them in anger, they do sometimes crop up (I'm never entirely sure I have the situations correct for the right ones). My parents gave me a couple of very unusual ones. "Chickadarditch", which they told me came from the failed alien translator device sketch on "Not The Nine O'Clock News". Somehow, that entered the family vocabulary as a swear word and may very well be passed on to a new generation if I have children. I also learned a term that I can't possibly spell. It's from (says Mother Dearest) Bavarian dialect German, and has something to do with the Devil. Phonetically, it might be rendered "Pfee-tie-fee" (the "tie-fee" bit being the rendering of "Teufel" from "standard" German into this dialect - MD says the "pfee" bit might be "blow" as in). Said with venom, the "Pf" is very expressive, and can be spat out as a great plosive. The other term that has entered my personal curse collection is "Plarrd", which I deduced is a curse word in the Sims language from the fact that my sims seemed to say it when they were doing badly at darts (another one was "Om, rack!" but that isn't as fun to say - I guess I like my plosives when I'm cross at something). Another good one for its plosive beginning is "penc", which is rot13 code for "crap" (see above).

There's probably a few others that I haven't been able to bring to mind while writing this post, but that's a fairly good rundown of the curses I use in everyday life.

My question for readers is this: in keeping with the "more individual" curses listed (such as "pfee-tie-fee" and chickadarditch), what are the most unusual or specific to your own usage curse words that you have? What curse terms that come from outside your first language, or that come from a local dialect (yours or, as in the Bavarian instance above, someone else's), do you love and have incorporated into your own swearing? What about made-up curses from literature (like my adoption of Klingon and Sims curses)? What about other sources I haven't thought of?

In short, what makes your curse lexicon different from everyone else's?

(Also, as an aside, what unusual curse words do you know but have not, for whatever reason, adopted as part of your own usage? Like my "Om, rack!" above.)