Expletives

The term now refers generally to swearwords, profanity, or foul language, without actually mentioning the terms in question. It thus has the characteristic of a euphemism, as does ejaculation in its old nonsexual meaning. The original meaning, dating from the sixteenth century, was a word used simply to make up a sentence or supply a metrical gap in a poem, without adding anything to the sense. (A modern example is the slightly pompous phrase “at this moment in time” used in preference to plain now .)

Early in the nineteenth century the term started to acquire its modern sense, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “applied to a profane oath or other meaningless exclamation.” An example from 1891 runs: “‘Confound him!’ or some stronger expletive exploded from the Earl’s lips.” The OED definition is revealing in its assumption that expletives should not be taken literally, an attitude common now, but unusual at the time of publication, since the literal meaning of most expletives was precisely what caused offense. More obvious examples would be meaningless curiosities such as pish!, tush! , and pshaw!

Although the term has become formal and obsolescent over recent decades, it was given an unexpected new lease of life in the phrase expletive deleted , used in the editing of the sensational White House tapes recording the surprisingly frank language used by President Richard Nixon and his associates at the time of the Watergate scandal in 1972. When the full transcript of the tapes was published, the phrase expletive deleted was used to cover up such banal presidential expressions as asshole, bullshit, crap, I don’t give a shit , and the idiom it’s just a bunch of crap . The language itself was not especially shocking: Harry S Truman was famous for worse. It was the status of the speaker, his apparent propriety, his furtiveness, and the locale of the utterance that made it so.