A minced oath is an expression based on a profanity or a taboo term that has been altered to reduce the objectionable characteristics.
Many languages have such expressions. In the English language, nearly all profanities have minced variants.
Examples include darn or dang instead of damn; shoot or shucks instead of shit; heck instead of hell; flipping, freaking, fluffing, frigging, effing, fricking, farging, frakking, fecking, or funking/phunking instead of fucking; beotch, beach, biatch or beech for bitch;goodness, golly, gosh, or gad instead of God; gee, geesh, geez, geeze, or jeez instead of Jesus; and crikey or cripes instead of Christ. Profanity-containing or otherwise objectionable phrases may also be minced: Criminy or crimony is an alteration of Christ’s money, the thirty pieces of silver in exchange for which Judas betrayed Jesus; gadzooks literally means God’s hooks and refers to Jesus being nailed to the cross; and zounds is an alteration of God’s wounds, the injuries that Jesus suffered while being crucified.
Go read the whole entry. Interesting.
(Source: Wikipedia)
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talix18 said:
Criminy!
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