How To Swear Without Actually Swearing: A Lesson From The Movies

Fond of a good swear word? Aren’t we all. There’s nothing quite as cathartic as unleashing a diatribe of the most offensive four-letter words in your vocabulary when the going gets tough or someone is vexing you hard with their intolerable dimwittery.

Plus, science says swearing a lot is a sign of intelligence. Take that, politeness police.

But sometimes circumstances call for us to turn our talk PG. To clean up our chit chat and make it suitable for grandma’s house, so to speak.

Maybe, like Cate Blanchett’s ‘fff-ing’ character in Life Aquatic you’re soon to be spending more time with impressionable children who you’d rather not sully with your potty mouth. This is thoughtful.

Perhaps your usual go-to swear words are loosing their shine, so overused they no longer pack the venomous power of yore.

But if that leaves you stumped as to how to express your distress, we have just the thing. A new supercut of film clips has spliced together some of the most memorable instances in movies where characters swear without technically swearing. They watch their language and come up with some remarkably creative alternatives to having a big ol’ curse.

Let this YouTube clip by Burger Fiction school you in the art of crafting sentences that express distress, but only use words they teach you in school. And of editing existing swears with bombastic but PG language that’s pleasing punchy to say.

Try the Ron Burgandy endorsed ‘son of a bee-sting’, for instance. A solid alternative to the phrase’s more offensive cousin.

And if you want to insult someone without being thoroughly obscene, try 'you're a neo-maxi-zoom dweebie' from The Breakfast Club.

Or borrow Christopher Walken’s line from True Romance: ‘you’re a cantelope’. Thrown out in response to Dennis Hopper’s ‘you’re part eggplant’. Lesson learnt: if in doubt, be vicious with vegetables.

Ready to be inspired? The clip features creative swearing alternatives from Napoleon Dynamite, The Breakfast Club, Star Trek, Elf, Hook and A Clockwork Orange