"Bad Words"

(this blog entry is mainly inspired by people repeatedly telling me "Look, I swear in real life and everything, but on a blog like this, you shouldn't swear. It will turn away readers. Your intended audience.)
 
Growing up, we didn't say "bad words" in our house.  Now, our house (and quite a few of the other Brethren houses) had no shortage of rudeness, coldness, nastiness, innuendo, character assassination, sarcasm and all manner of passive-aggressive, nasty crap.  But we wouldn't say a word like "crap." Too close to "shit."  We wouldn't even say "fart."  (we "passed gas," in our house)

   Another thing: I wasn't the only one in my culture who really wasn't terribly comfortable with compliments.  Giving or receiving.  Oh sure, there were a few Brethren people who were real charmers.  They stood out.   But most of us sucked. (and wouldn't say "sucked," because it was too colourful and might possibly sound like we were referring to fellatio). 

  There wasn't a lot of skilled flirting among us, or even a lot of guys casually and uncreepily complimenting women.  But there was a whole lot of sarcasm and mocking each other.  Often harmless.  Sometimes not. We were skewed to that bile-flavoured side of things.  If I got a new shirt and looked good, someone might give an odd smile and say "nice shirt..." and I could be pretty sure there was a double-sarcasm going on.  Or fake sarcasm. Genuine compliment hidden behind pretend sarcasm.  Levels of sarcasm.

   And it was the 90s, when I was in my 20s.  The 90s, in music, comics, film and television were nothing BUT sarcasm, grittiness, "darkness," post-modernism, deconstructionism, flawed anti-heroes, satire, parody, mockery and that kind of thing.  It was the time for a  new openness about mockery and a new awkwardness about "positivity" (which British Spell Check still does not accept as a real word.  I kind of approve of that).

Very Superstitious

My friend Curry and I would argue, when I was, oh, about twenty.  And he'd say "Mike, stop being an asshole."  

   Then I'd say "You are a complete and utter idiot" or call him a "moron" or "cretin" or something like that.
   He would often say "Complete and utter?" to tease me.  He was (correctly) saying I was being a jerk, in a quaint way.  He was saying I was being annoying, but I in turn was instead insulting his intelligence, because I was superstitious about certain words.

  I would NEVER, for example, have said "asshole."  At all.  Not when I was only twenty.  That was a bad word.  Like, really bad.  But I'd call my friend "stupid" more ways than he'd understand.  Would delight in using words he'd never heard before, which maybe I'd only read and was a bit shaky on the proNOUNCiation of.
  All of this meant he was dead-on about exactly what I was being.  Now that I have embraced the idea that I was being superstitious about "bad words," I have come to realize that there really is no other more suitable, accurate or appropriate word for what I was being than an "asshole."  A "jerk" comes close, but falls short.  Doesn't tell the whole story.

   But I was superstitious, back then, about these English words and many other things (playing boardgames (on Sunday).  Going into movie theatres (ever)).  If I wanted to repeat something someone else had said, and they'd used one of those words I was superstitious about, I'd spell it.  Superstitiously.  Because that somehow didn't count:  "He said 'I slipped and fell right on my A-S-S.' It was hilarious."
   Deep down, I felt like I was too good to swear.  My lips too pure. (Isaiah said he was man of "unclean lips."  Once he got them purified, oddly, God inspired him to use a great deal of sexual and poo imagery in what he then said on God's behalf. I wonder if he meant what we assume he meant?)

What Sayeth the Scriptures?

Sometimes Curry would say "Move your ass" just like his Mom would say to him when she was coming by with a laundry basket, or he was blocking the TV, and I'd be a bit offended by him saying it to me.  When his mom said it to him, he'd do a little hip-shimmying dance, to make her yell it louder.  Which was funny.  But when he said it to me, I was annoyed.
  You see, maybe he did, but I certainly didn't have an "ass." Oh, I had a backside, or a bottom, a posterior, a seat or a derrière, but I certainly didn't have anything near so vulgar as an "ass" anywhere about my person.  (There were other things I didn't have either, worded how Curry worded them.  I merely had a penis and scrotum.)
   Back then I really felt that way.  Too good to have an ass.  Too good to be talked about casually in that way by someone who meant no harm at all, and wasn't communicating anything corrupt when he said it.

    Because it came down to that; I justified my superstition, my superiority about language, my prissy fastidiousness, with two bible verses, really:

But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool

and

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good

(you can Google those if you want to read the full context. It's worth doing.)

So, I would never say "move your ass," and I felt that to do so would sink me down to 'their' level. The lower level of vulgar, unChristian people. If I spoke just as 'bad' as they did, people might (heaven forfend) mistake me for being merely one of them. Might not notice I was freakishly superior. A True Christian, who acted like one, and said "bottom."

   But when I had a look at those two verses, they really just didn't support my language superstitions the way I really needed them to.  The first one clearly referred to "swearing" in the sense of vowing.  Promising. As in "I swear by my honour/my mother's grave/on a stack of bibles/my country/by Crom, that I will surely deliver this package safely to Asgard.  By Odin's beard, it shall be so."  It refers to an affirmation.

  I think it is more of the bible telling Christians "let your yea (yes) be yea, and your nay (no) be nay," like it does in one of these bits about not "swearing by" anything.  If you say something, people should know you're not the kind of person who lies.  If you say you will do something, you shouldn't have to swear it.  You shouldn't have to act like normally, you might be just talking out your...backside... but THIS time, you're going to swear by Odin's Beard, or upon a stack of bibles, or your mother's grave or something like that, so you can be trusted as being honest.  This time.  Because you're stuck being true to your word.  After all, you pinky-swore... 

   This is why I hate the modern expression "I'm not gunna LIE..."  It sounds like you normally would lie.  Like you seriously considered it, but then decided against it at the last minute.  Else why bring  up lying to begin with?  "I'm not gunna stab you in the NECK and dispose of your body in a quarry...I think you're okay."
  And all of that "I swear" and "Honestly" and "To tell the truth" and "to be really honest here" stuff leaves me cold for the same reason.  I think habitual liars talk like that far more than regular folk do. I try not to talk that way. I don't want to sound like a liar, (I swear).

   So I am very supportive of that bible idea, of yea meaning yes and nay meaning no. I want to be the kind of person who, when I say something, no one's ever going to make me swear or vow or promise.  I like to think they know they can trust me to mean what I say.  In fact, when someone makes me promise after I already said something, I get a bit peeved at them.  Because I mean things.  I'm known for it.

   And yet?  I don't think saying "move your ass" to my friend, who knows I love him, yet is for some reason blocking my path for an inexplicable amount of time, is going to make my yea and nay anything other than yea and nay, nor is saying "move your ass" swearing/vowing/promising/affirming.  It's not even close.  It's being colourful.  Fondly vulgar.

Vulgar

And what's "vulgar" mean?  Colourfully middle-class. The regular folk.  The opposite is "patrician." The lordly folk.  Princesses who get bruised by sleeping with a pea hidden under the twentieth mattress and so on.  It's a class thing.  The idea is that royalty and nobility would not use colourful language like us commoners, who'd do well not to put on airs, or speak above our station.

   Not only is all that no longer the world we live in, I think we know exactly what the bible folks thought of rich people and their ways.  And we know that many bible people, including Jesus, purposely chose vulgar wording on occasion, when they felt it appropriate.  And it was recorded in the actual bible and everything.
   Much becomes clear in the Greek.  I had to read a different translation to learn that Jesus and John the Baptist both called Pharisees, not sons of bitches, but sons of vipers, which isn't, I don't think, less rude. And that Elijah was mocking the god Baal to his knife-wielding prophets, saying "Call for him again.  Maybe he's taking a dump...."

   And I figured out early on that in my Christian circles, it wasn't solely about simply not saying the "bad words." It was about remaining carefully colourless.  Even our fashion, hairdos, singing and movements, as well as our speech patterns, were (unintentionally?) encouraged by grownups to be muted.  Toned down.  Colourless and unemphatic.  Lacking individual expression.  To do otherwise was vain and attention-seeking.  You know?  Like wearing a red sweater would be.  (But somehow dressing twenty years out of fashion, to look seriously pious/like George McFly without having seen Back to the Future, wasn't.)

   We used a lot of body function humour, but we avoided "those words."  We said infantile stuff like "You see, he'd gone to the washroom in his pants" or "so she kicked him you-know-where" as the punchlines of jokes.  When we were older teens.  Sounding infantile.  To avoid being more colourful, while still being, really, straight-up vulgar anyway, as to joke content.
  Which we rightly had no problem with.  Because there's nothing wrong with a bit of body function imagery, even for laughs.  The bible is packed with that imagery, particularly in the prophets, though only used humorously a couple of times.  And I don't think that this biblical vulgarity somehow makes it not okay for us.  I've never understood that opinion.

Corrupt Communication

And the second verse:   

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.  

People at our church would suggest or hint that teenagers were feeling each other up behind the boathouse/barn (carefully avoiding vulgar expressions like "feeling each other up," because it was too colourful or graphic) though they'd communicate the same idea anyway.

  And as I said above, if Curry said something like "Mike, move your ass," I would be superstitious about that word "ass."  But if I made any attempt at honestly looking at what the bible itself was trying to say, instead of using it like a puppeteer with his hand rammed up a puppet's...posterior,  I was forced to admit that really, nothing corrupt was in any way being communicated by Curry.  He was asking me to move out of his way.
  He wasn't, for example, suggesting euphemistically that Todd and Maryanne were having it off behind the potting shed, or that single Mr. Black was gay with married Mr. Chronos, or that Mr. Steel was embezzling funds, or any of the other stuff that we Brethren people were constantly hinting might be going on.

   Upon reading this verse more carefully, I decided that yes, we should probably stop communicating corrupt things in this way.  (the "saying something bad, but avoiding 'bad words' we are superstitious about" way) We should stop sneering and laughing and joking about people possibly doing dubious things we have no real evidence of, and whom we have no intention of ever speaking to about any of it personally.  We should not communicate corrupt stuff like that, just to gossip and feel superior.  It stinks up the room.  One oughtn't to go to the bathroom where one eats, nor do number two in someone's Cornflakes.
  I suppose then, that saying something truly horrible and untrue like (skip to the next paragraph now if faint of heart) "My great aunt is no doubt the sort of perverse person who gets very aroused by going to the bathroom in the right ear of an unwilling, or perhaps recently deceased, physically-challenged woman, both of them with bare backsides, crotches and bosoms" would be a very corrupt communication.  Needlessly so, unless being used as an example.

   Not just vulgar, and though it carefully avoided saying even ONE of those "bad words" I was raised to be superstitious about, it is, I think, a thoroughly inappropriate, disgusting, corrupt and horrible thing to say.  (I think that, because I designed it to be.  I felt I needed to really make a point.  And not subtly.  I trust it's been made.)

   And I think that when God inspired His prophets to say things with that very sort of imagery (whole lot of fecal imagery in the Old Testament, along with the bloody hills of foreign foreskins and other gross stuff), He knew what He was doing, and felt it needed to be said like that.  God felt Ezekiel ought to say that the Jewish nation "lusted after lovers with genitals as large as a donkey's and emissions like those of a horse." I guess God needed to have His feelings worded that way so His they'd be felt accurately. And I imagined it sounded ruder than that in the original Hebrew.  I do think that making one's own language unnecessarily overcolourful is tacky, but:

   I don't feel I can be prissy and superstitious about words like "ass" or "shit" anymore.  So, when it comes down to "Stop talking shit" or "The people in the Trenton assembly are probably being inappropriate with their daughters!" I think I know which one is a corrupt thing to casually say, without much behind it.  The second one only pretends to be "good manners."  There is a frankness in the first one that I find hard to argue with. (In fact, if someone responded with the first comment, to someone who had made the second comment, I think I'd really support that.)

Why Do Normal People Use Those Words?

Why would normal, nonBrethren people say things like "Move your ass!" or "That's bullshit" (where instead we'd use gluten-free substitutes like "boloney" or "bull roar" or "horse feathers" or, under extreme duress, "B.S.")?  Three main reasons, none of which seems terribly harmful, to me, are:

a) to ensure the vehemence of their feelings are adequately understood,

b) to be funny,

   and
c) to add colour to their sentence in a way that even a large vocabulary which painstakingly sidesteps these words cannot.

People with large vocabularies do not use the "bad words" less.  I've been paying attention, and have decided that that idea is sheer poppycock.  Purest rhubarb.  "People who swear have small vocabularies."  Bull dust!  Balderdash.  People with large vocabularies have many words to choose from, including our "bad words."  They use whichever ones they feel do the job.  And sometimes, for a), b) and/or c), they reach for those good old honest Anglo Saxon terms which have been in use for centuries, accepting no substitutes, and not snipping the you-know-whats off their sentences.  Not any more than God did, when having Ezekiel write stuff.  And the whole "God can be vulgar, but you can't, because you're not God" thing?  Never made any sense to me.

   

...Foiled Again

Americans sometimes refer to using these "bad words" as "cursing" (or, if you are Southern "cussin'").  Now, Jesus literally cursed people and random objects like fig trees, as did prophets, apostles and God Himself.  Cursing is wishing ill upon someone or something.  Jesus cursed a fig tree so hard it died.  But is saying "Ah, lizardshit!" when you kick an end table in the dark "cursing?"  Clearly, no.

   If you said "God damn that end table!" you would no doubt be taking the Lord's name in vain (using it in an empty, pointless way), and also speaking nonsense.  God doesn't damn living room furniture to eternal torment in hell, after all.  Not even for having pointy corners.  But yes, I think that latter ejaculation would be an example of cursing.  In fact, to say "I hope your company goes out of business" or "May your kid fail all her courses this year and get mono" would be cursing too.  Even with carefully avoiding all those "bad words." 
   Man tends to look on outward, superficial things like language, while God looks on the heart.  And out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. And you can read a lot more than "Oh, she used a bad word" from someone's language.  Bad words or not, you can read a lot.  When people say horrible things in a mock-loving, or coldly bureaucratic, or carefully pious way, a lot of the heart is being seen. And very few people can help but taste what kind of heart is wielding language in that underhanded way.

   So, nowadays, I retain a fastidiousness about using the name of God in an empty, vain way.  Because I take God seriously.  I don't feel terribly obligated to be reverent about hell, though, and will sometimes be heard to say "what the hell?!" because I don't see the point of reverence to hell.  I owe it no allegiance, do not need to fear going there, and don't think that a Christian saying the word will "make unbelievers less afraid to go there themselves," nor cause them to mistake me for an atheist/Satanist.  I think being plainspoken and direct is quintessentially Christian. I think Jesus himself was the very model of it, in fact.  Not politically correct/indirect.  He said things outright, vehemently, or didn't say them at all, I believe.

    So I want my yeas to be yea and my nays to be nay.  I want to use plain speech I clearly mean, with enough colour to make sure I'm not only being honest about my feelings, but might even be communicating them slightly.  Demonstrating that I mean what I say, and feel it.  And so I'm not into doing anything weak like hiding passive-aggressive sliminess behind formality. I don't want to be anyone's frenemy.
  I'm more than capable of that latter vice, of course.  Rusty razor blade hidden in cotton batting.  I grew up that way.  Nowadays, though, I want to say what I mean, and be understood and felt and have people know I mean it.  If I have a problem with someone, I want them to know. I want to admit it and convey it.

Minced
One thing I try to avoid is what Wikipedia refers to as "minced oaths."  These were words we church folk all used when we really wanted to swear, but weren't at liberty to.  We were fastidious and superstitious about the precise "bad words," so we scrambled a couple of the letter sounds so as to be (technically) not really quite saying those bad words.  Superstitious.  Thought saying those words would be unlucky in our week/would make God stop blessing us.  Like stepping over a crack, or saying "the Scottish Play" instead of Macbeth, tossing salt over one's shoulder, or avoiding black cats.  Sugar, it sure was darn stupid baloney!  Gosh.  (Does a Christian really talk like that, all superstitious about honest talk/feelings, seeing them as common or unclean?)

   Not only do I not feel remotely like a genuine 21st century man with any you-know-whats if I say "Dang it" or "Oh my gosh!" or "I fell on my tush" or "Frick off!", but I actively try to avoid doing that.  I think it reveals me to be someone superstitious, who wants to eat his cake and have it too, swearing, pretty much, but not really, but yeah, kinda.
  If there is anything my upbringing taught me instead of straightup, cross-bought Christian liberty, it was "Want to.  So can't, of course.  But kinda did, anyway.  But only technically, so it doesn't count.  Not really."

   Fuck all that, I say.  And in having said that, I really don't feel like I cursed anyone, communicated something horrible and corrupt, nor swore anything at all. I think a trained superstitious temptation to want to cross one's self or spit when a Christian uses that word, sounding no better than a dirty "rank unbeliever," is often seen.  And I wish that would die with the twentieth century, along with dayglo,  white afros, Segregation, disco and KJV-only.

   And some will say that I'm just constructing solipsistic arguments so I can be free from any responsibility to meekly bind myself to the various expectations we've been trained to feel are normal for Christians. Well, I like being free. I make no apologies for that.  I think Jesus cared enough about my freedom to die for me. 
  And besides, I didn't used to "swear," and my change regarding it is maturity and a matter of conscience, rather than merely slipping in my resolve.  I have a bad conscience about saying "baloney."  I feel it's dishonest and isn't yea = yea and nay=nay.  And I don't like how non-swearers curse and impugn each other instead.  I don't like it one bit.  It can so easily hide behind a screen of sanctimonious piety.  "I love you, George, but with the disgusting language you just felt at liberty to use, I can't but wonder if you are really even a Christian, and I certainly don't feel comfortable inviting someone like you to our not-Christmas party, given your obvious low spiritual state and rebellious walk. You need Jesus.  Repent of your path of independency and rebellion."

Idol Meat

But I can say that kind of thing (that I prefer people to give it to me straight), and then with boring regularity that old Destroyer of Christian Freedom inevitably comes out: 

the bible says that if eating meat offered to idols causes my brother to offend, I will eat no meat.

But that verse clearly is not actually about making my brother claim to have had his feelings hurt due to my liberty.  It's not about people in charge, playing the old game of "He who is offended by more things isn't weak, but is actually The Boss."  If it were, that would make it inevitable that any legalist who claims to be feel offended about anything at all, would have carte blanche to demand the immediate limiting of enjoying whatever that thing was.  Making any freedom we might claim to have, purely theoretical freedom.  Not to be used.  For show.  No, it's about this, near as I can say:

Some early Christians used to believe in idols.  Really believe.  Like, ones erected to gods they depended upon to make the month turn out well.  And there aren't any gods, and idols are just wood and stone, the bible teaches.
  But I think Paul's saying that, if you buy meat that had been part of a idol ceremony, and you don't know it, there's no harm in it.  But if your eating it will make a new Christian lose sight of the fact that the idols aren't alive, and will tempt him or her to eat it as a sacrifice or ritual in honour of them, really starting to lean on that idol again to try to make his week go better, this is bad for him, spiritually. 
  So, if eating the meat puts people at risk of sliding back into bad behaviour like worshipping idols (and that's mostly bad because idols aren't real anyway, besides it being cheating on God), then of course you shouldn't do it.  Just like you shouldn't drink whiskey with an alcoholic.  Because there is harm in alcoholism.

  But someone recently said online that he won't celebrate Christmas because he's afraid of "stumbling" his nonChristian neighbours.  It sounded like me like he was worried he'd tempt his neighbours to slip back into human sacrifice to bring about the advent of spring during a worrisomely chill winter, or start to believe in Santa Claus, or become druids or something.  I couldn't see the actual danger, the demonstrable, likely, not-entirely-imaginary harm.

Untheoretical Harm
And I think if we're going to be asked to actually give up the freedom Christ died to give us, and which some of us sacrificed membership in our entire birth culture to reclaim, then there needs to be Real Danger we're being irresponsible about.  Some actual harm that runs deeper than a control freak claiming we're not being traditional.

   Someone this week asked me to not say "effing" on an online forum, because although I already was self-censoring (in a Facebook group called "Brethren Believers Uncensored" of all places) he publicly requested that I not stumble him by feeling free to just say things like effing.  (Well, type it.) It might tempt him.  Into thinking or saying things like "effing." (Or maybe even "fecking.")  What a pain in the you-know-what to even try to think that way.  Goshdangit.

   I had to ask myself "If I truly believe there's no actual harm in him saying "effing," and I do think there's actual harm in legalism, in him going around limiting all kinds of people's freedoms simply on whims, and not understanding about Christian liberty, I might just have a problem with helping this guy do what he's doing.  If eating meat offered to idols might make someone start to worship idols, of course I will eat no meat offered to idols. But if wearing a Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt might make someone want to listen to "Us and Them," I think I'll wear that shirt.  Until someone explains the concrete, purely untheoretical havoc that my t-shirt is truly capable of and demonstrably likely to wreak.

   And guys like that effing Facebook guy are invariably very rude to a lot of people online, in ways I do not approve of, the yeas not being yea, nays not being nay, and eff offs definitely not being eff off (but more commonly sounding more like "I must admit I find it sad, dear brother, that you feel free to engage in this sort of uneducated, unscriptural, shameful twaddle. How dishonouring to the Lord! I guess I should have known not to expect anything better from someone such as yourself, who feels free to use profanity!  Makes me wonder if you're even truly the Lord's...")  I think it would be more honest of him to flat out say "eff off." (But then it would be hard for him to be superior about insulting someone.)

  And something else?  The very worst things, the very worst things that have ever been said to or about me in my whole life?  Have all been said by guys who fastidiously avoided "those words." Who talked just like that (effing) Facebook guy.  And wore ties and shark-like smiles when they tore me to shreds.   And quoted scripture as readily as Satan does, on occasion.  They'd never call me an "asshole." But they would write letters which publicly describe me as a wicked person, with bible verses about vile, profane and unclean persons, to be consigned unto Satan for destruction of the flesh.

   That's what I really think on this subject.  And it matters to me.  (Of course, I might just be being an asshole, who likes to do whatever he wants, loves to stir up trouble so he can enjoy being socially ostracised, alienated and insulted, and just generally be a malvivant.  You be the judge.)

   
Note-for those still wishing to use gluten-free substitutes, here is a helpful list:

Begorrah --> By God
Bejabbers --> By Jesus 
Blankety blank --> [expletives of your choice] 
Blazes --> hell 
Bleeding heck --> Bloody Hell 
Bleeping --> [expletive of your choice]
Blimey --> Blind me
Blinking heck --> Bloody Hell
By George --> By God
By golly --> By God's body
By gosh --> By God
By gum --> By God
By Jove --> By God
Cheese and Rice --> Jesus Christ
Cheese it --> Jesus
Chrissakes --> For Christ's sake
Christmas --> Christ
Cor blimey --> God blind me 
Crap --> shit
Crikey --> Christ
Criminy --> Christ
Cripes --> Christ
Crivvens --> Christ defend us
Dad gum --> God damn
Dagnabbit --> God damn it
Dagnammit --> God damn it
Dang --> Damn
Dangnabbit --> God damn it
Dangnation --> Damnation
Darn --> Damn
Darnation --> Damnation
Doggone --> God damn
Drat --> God rot it
Egad --> A God
Feck --> Fuck
Flip --> Fuck 
Fig --> Fuck
Fink --> Fuck
Flaming heck --> Fucking Hell
Flipping heck --> Fucking Hell
For crying out loud --> For Christ's sake
For Pete's sake --> For St. Peter's sake
For the love of Mike --> For St. Michael's sake
Freaking --> fucking 
Flipping --> fucking
Frig --> Fuck
Frigging --> fucking
Fudge --> fuck
Fire truck -->  fuck
Gadzooks --> God's hooks
Gat Dangit --> God damn it
Gee --> Jesus
Gee whizz --> Jesus
Gee willikers --> Jesus
Godfrey Daniel --> God
Golly Gee willikers --> Jesus
Good garden party --> Good God
Good grief --> Good God
Goodness gracious --> Good God
Gorblimey --> God blind me
Gosh --> God
Gosh darned --> God damned
Heck --> Hell
Holy spit --> Holy shit
Jason Crisp --> Jesus Christ
Jebus --> Jesus
Jeepers Creepers --> Jesus Christ
Jeez --> Jesus
Jeezy Creezy --> Jesus Christ
Jehosaphat --> Jesus
Jiminy Christmas --> Jesus Christ
Jiminy Cricket --> Jesus Christ
Judas Priest --> Jesus Christ
Land sakes --> For the Lord's sake
Lawks a' mercy --> Lord have mercy
My goodness --> My God
My gosh --> My God
Odds-bodkins --> God's sweet body
Sacré bleu --> Sang de Dieu (God's blood)
Sam Hill --> Hell
Shoot --> shit
Shucks --> shit
Shut the front door --> shut the fuck up
Strewth  --> God's Truth
Suffering succotash --> Suffering Saviour
Sugar --> shit
Tarnation --> Damnation
What in Sam Hill? --> What in damn Hell?
Wish to goodness --> Wish to God
Zounds --> God's wounds