Minced Oaths

This designation refers to a specific kind of euphemism or disguise mechanism, whereby an offending term or taboo phrase is distorted or “minced” so that it no longer offends. (We still have the idiom “not to mince one’s words” meaning to speak frankly.) The first specific reference is in Jonathan Swift’s “A Letter of Advice for a Young Poet” (1720): “My young Master, who at first minced an Oath, is taught there to mouth it gracefully and to swear, as he reads French, Ore rotundo [in a declamatory style].” The classic early examples are found in oaths like God’s wounds! becoming plain zounds!, God’s truth becoming strewth!, by God! becoming egad or plain Gad !, and by Mary becoming marry . In similar fashion we find Jee whiz for Jesus, Crickey for Christ, Lummey! for Lord love me!, tarnation for damnation, heck for Hell, Deuce for the Devil, shoot! for shit! , and eff off! for fuck off!

As can be seen, minced oaths cover the full range available topics, from religion (which historically supplies the greatest variety) to excretion and copulation. Some terms are so thoroughly minced that they are no longer recognizable: thus Gor blimey! (often reduced to plain blimey! ) is a minced form of God blind me! Others are fairly obvious: as H.L. Mencken observed, bullshit is often partially minced to bullsh or bull (1963, 364). Furthermore, minced oaths are found over a great historical range, mainly from the sixteenth century to the present, although gog and cokk are recorded as euphemisms for God two centuries earlier. By contrast, minced forms of Jesus, Christ, Lord , and shit show no such concentrations.

As with evolution of euphemisms, the seminal question is whether the generation of minced oaths occurs spontaneously out of a sense of decorum, or in response to some threat. When Chaucer used the phrase by cokkes bones! (instead of by Godes bones! ) in his Canterbury Tales , he was probably doing so for various motives: out of politeness, out of respect for the moral character of the teller, or in deference to the notional audience, since there were no official pressures. In his text Chaucer exploited the whole range of sacred names, both seriously and sacrilegiously. However, as the entry for Renaissance shows, in the late sixteenth century there were increasing Puritan injunctions against the use of profanity on the stage, so that there is no doubt that the response was the great number of minced oaths. Consequently, the name of God was either distorted to gad or abbreviated to od , producing curious forms like ’od’s my will for “as God is my will” and ’od’s me for “God save me.” Similarly, older euphemistic forms like cock and gog were resuscitated, and foreign forms like perdy (from French par Dieu ) were introduced. Alternatively, the name of God was omitted. About a dozen of these forms sprang up within a few years, between 1598 and 1602, all of them significantly first recorded in dramatic contexts:

These technical evasions of sacred names may seem strange now, but would have had fairly obvious meanings for the contemporary audience. The fact that they anticipated the legislation of 1606 suggests that active policing was already being carried out. The plays of both the major dramatists, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, were revised for publication several years after their first stage performances, and both texts show widespread expurgation of religious oaths.

The new Restoration drama was both a rebellion against Puritanism and a mirror of the decadence and open sexuality of the Court. Thomas Otway’s play The Soldier’s Fortune (1679) opens with a curse, “A pox o’ Fortune!” and keeps up a steady stream of minced forms, such as Igad, ‘sdeath, Odd, Odd’s life, Odd’s fish, Odd’s so , and two euphemisms for Jesus , namely Criminy and Gemini , a variant of Jiminy , first recorded about 1660. The second part of the play (1684) shows more daring in the title, The Atheist , and in its oaths, which include Ah dear damnation! and Hell and the devil! It also makes swearing part of its content, and contains a scene where a character called Daredevil casually dismisses the oath Dam’me as “mere Words of course.”