Jess Zafaris

And the term was cemented in pop culture by the novel and film Nightmare Alley.

So we get a little bit from college culture, we get a little bit from pop culture, and they all come together as words that we can use for a variety of insults and purposes.

I would say the majority of those are probably...

in the same vein as those religious oaths.

Another one is zounds, which you'll see in Shakespeare.

Not all that naughty, but certainly not the most polite term, and it was short for by God's wounds.

And then there was also the term egad, which is probably a twisting of my God.

Mm-hmm.

These are other examples of minced oaths.

It can be as simple as shortening Jesus to G, or it could be, say, Great Scott, which is probably a minced oath of Great God.

And then in French, you have Sacré Bleu, which means Holy Blue, but the original term is Sacré Dieu.

Then you've got words like Jack Squat, which is a mincing of Jack...

the other kind of SH word we've been talking about.

And Jack often appears in personifications like Jack of all trades, Jack O' Lantern, Jack Frost.

And that's because for many years, it was a generic all purpose male name in the same way that we use average Joe or guy today.

So Jack would appear as something small or common, much like these terms describing a common person or, you know, to say something like,

I think the type of vulgarity that we see that people still avoid or try to avoid tends to come in the form of slurs these days.

And I think that that is fair because when you use your average swear word, the four-letter words we often think of, they're not used to hurt anyone.

They're

Well, they can be used to hurt people, but they're not targeted necessarily or specifically at anyone.