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Expletive infixation is a process by which an expletive or profanity is inserted into a word, usually for intensification. It is similar to tmesis, but not all instances are covered by the usual definition of tmesis because the words are not necessarily compounds.
Writers sometimes face the problem of portraying characters who swear and often include minced oaths instead of profanity in their writing so that they will not offend audiences or incur censorship. One example is The Naked and the Dead , where publishers required author Norman Mailer to use the minced oath "fug" over his objections. [ 24 ]
The phrase expletive deleted indicates that profanity has been censored from a text by the author or by a subsequent censor, usually appearing in place of the profanity. The phrase has been used for this purpose since at least the 1930s, [1] but became more widely used in the United States after the Watergate scandal.
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Swearing on stage was officially banned by the Act to Restraine Abuses of Players in 1606, and a general ban on swearing followed in 1623. In some cases the original meanings of these minced oaths were forgotten; 'struth (By God's truth) came to be spelled 'strewth and zounds changed pronunciation so that it no longer sounded like By God's wounds.
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Expletive comes from the Latin verb explere, meaning "to fill", via expletivus, "filling out".It was introduced into English in the 17th century for various kinds of padding—the padding out of a book with peripheral material, the addition of syllables to a line of poetry for metrical purposes, and so forth.
A poster in a WBAI broadcast booth which warns radio broadcasters against using the words. The seven dirty words are seven English language profanity words that American comedian George Carlin first listed in his 1972 "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue. [1]