Admitting defeat

Topics/tags: Miscellaneous, language, short.

Yesterday, I wrote about my experience telling students not to use the term Jeez (or Geez [1]) because it is a reference to someone that many identify as Lord.

After reading that musing, my friends provided a wide variety of followup comments [2].

Does that mean I can’t use Gee either?

Out go criminy, golly, jeepers, gee whiz, cripes, and holy cow.

My Aunt always said, Oh, my Word. Same thing, right? [3] Or Oh, my goodness?

Also darn, golly, heck, by gum, dang, zounds, goodness (as an exclamation), other uses of good (as in good night!, good grief!), egad. But the greatest of these is zounds [4].

They missed Jiminy Cricket [5] and a bunch of others.

Damn. There are just too many. Perhaps I’m being too persnickety. I give up. I’ll have to learn to accept these various forms of slang profanity as they are and not treat them as swears.

But I’m still teaching students about the etymology of Jeez.

Postscript: Yes, the use of Damn was intentional.

[i] I’m starting to wonder what I should think about the title of a collection of short stories by one of my favorite authors.

[2] Some of which I’ve edited.

[3] My quick search of the Interweb suggests that Oh my word is intended as a way to avoid saying Oh my G-d. Since the intent is to avoid profanity, I have trouble thinking of it as the same thing.

[4] Wikipedia tells me that zounds is an abbreviation of G-d’s wounds.

[5] And variants thereof, such as Jiminy Christmas.

Version 1.0 of 2018-05-29.