Euphemisms

Eff, frig, fudge and frak

English has been inventing polite ways to say rude words for at least five hundred years. The technical name is the minced oath, and the F-word has more of them than any other.

Where the habit comes from

When the worst words were religious oaths, people minced those. Zounds (God's wounds), 'sblood (God's blood), gadzooks (God's hooks, the nails of the cross), egad, gosh, golly, jeepers, cripes, crikey and by Jove are all ways of swearing by God or Christ without saying the name, from a period when saying it was a sin. The pattern, keep the opening sound and replace the rest, has been applied to every taboo word since. See Religion and oaths.

The F-word's substitutes

• eff / effingThe letter alone. "Effing and blinding", British, 1940s.
• the F-word1950s. Now also a Ramsay programme and a headline pun.
• F-bombUS, 1980s. "Dropped an F-bomb."
• frig / friggingA separate word (to masturbate, 1780s) recruited as a substitute.
• freakingUS, 1920s; the standard American mince.
• fricking / frick1930s; softer still.
• flipping / flipBritish, early 20th century; the children's-TV version.
• fudge19th-century "nonsense", later a mince. A Christmas Story (1983).
• flamingBritish, Victorian; "flaming heck".
• feckIrish. A different word entirely; see Across the Englishes.
• fugMailer's publisher, 1948. The Fugs, 1964.
• frak / frackBattlestar Galactica, 1978 and 2003.
• frellFarscape, 1999.
• smegRed Dwarf, 1988. Also, awkwardly, a fridge brand.
• forkThe Good Place, 2016: "forking" and "bullshirt".
• forget youCee Lo Green's radio edit, 2010.
• fuhText and speech; the first sound only.
• fk / f*ck / f–Print and screen devices; see The press.

Why they work, and why they don't

A minced oath gives the speaker most of the release and the listener most of the meaning while letting both pretend nothing happened. The 2022 Royal Holloway study on the sound of swearing found that mincing usually adds a soft consonant (the r in frigging, the l in flipping) or changes the ending, which listeners across languages read as a signal of reduced force. The trick fails when the substitute becomes too familiar: frigging is now rated medium by some British audiences, and Ofcom lists feck as medium, which is exactly the fate that awaits flipping if enough people use it in anger.

The invented ones

Science fiction has a particular need: characters who swear, on networks that will not allow it. Battlestar Galactica's frak is the most successful, used on screen with the full grammar of the original (frak you, frakking, motherfrakker) and now in the Oxford English Dictionary. Farscape's frell, Firefly's Mandarin, Red Dwarf's smeg and The Good Place's fork all do the same job. They are a reminder that what audiences want is the shape of the word, not the word.

A note on asterisks

f*** is not a euphemism, it is a costume. Every reader supplies the missing letters, and a 2019 Advertising Standards Authority ruling against a poster spelled with a symbol made the point official: the audience reads the word, so the word has been used.