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minced oath
A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo term to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. Some examples include ''gosh'', ''darn'', ''dang'', and ''heck''.
Many languages have such expressions. In the English language, nearly all profanities have minced variants.〔Hughes, 12.〕
==Formation==
Common methods of forming a minced oath are rhyme and alliteration. Thus the word ''bloody'' (which itself may be an ''elision'' of "By Our Lady"—referring to ''the Virgin Mary'') can become ''blooming'', or ''ruddy''.〔 Alliterative minced oaths such as ''darn'' for ''damn'' allow a speaker to begin to say the prohibited word and then change to a more acceptable expression.〔Hughes, 7.〕 In rhyming slang, rhyming euphemisms are often truncated so that the rhyme is eliminated; ''prick'' became ''Hampton Wick'' and then simply ''Hampton''. Another well-known example is "cunt" rhyming with "Berkeley Hunt", which was subsequently abbreviated to "berk". Alliteration can be combined with metrical equivalence, as in the pseudo-blasphemous "Judas Priest", substituted for the blasphemous use of "Jesus Christ".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=What does "Judas Priest" mean? )〕
Minced oaths can also be formed by shortening: e.g., ''b'' for ''bloody'' or ''f'' for ''fuck''〔 (though in "He's a b. f." the minced expression is "bloody fool"). Sometimes words borrowed from other languages become minced oaths; for example, ''poppycock'' comes from the Low Dutch ''pappe kak'', meaning "soft dung".〔Hughes, 16–17.〕 The minced oath ''blank'' is an ironic reference to the dashes that are sometimes used to replace profanities in print.〔 It goes back at least to 1854, when Cuthbert Bede wrote "I wouldn't give a blank for such a blank blank. I'm blank, if he doesn't look as if he'd swallowed a blank codfish." By the 1880s, it had given rise to the derived forms ''blanked'' and ''blankety'',〔 definition 12b for ''blank''〕 which combined together gave the name of the long running and popular British TV show ''Blankety Blank''. In the same way, ''bleep'' arose from the use of a tone to mask profanities on radio.〔Hughes, 18–19.〕
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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