As a result of these typographical disguises, a number of euphemistic replacements for swear words alluded to the physical act of deleting or disguising letters on the printed page. And they sometimes became mild curses in themselves. The word blank (also blanky, blankety-blank, and other variants) dates to the middle of the nineteenth century, frequently substituting for bloody. Others in use included dash, dashed, and asterisked. There was also the use of words such as adjectival and adjectival substantive to replace swear words, again often substituting for bloody and bloody bastard.

The nineteenth century saw a burst of creativity when it came to finding euphemisms and mild curses to replace swear words. Ensanguined was used as a euphemism for bloody, and sheol was popular in the late nineteenth century as a substitute for hell; the latter was famously used by Joseph Furphy in Such Is Life (1903). Bloody and Christ produced perhaps the greatest number of euphemistic replacements. Substitutes for Christ include cripes, crimey, crikey, crikie jack, and cricker. Bloody could be substituted with bally, bleeding, blessed, blimey, blinding, blooming, blurry, bully, or ruddy. Strewth, popular in Australia, had its origins in God’s truth, although this history was probably well forgotten by the late nineteenth century when many of these words found their way into print.

Creative euphemisms could help bring colour to a story. One entertaining example I came across in my research was an 1890 Australian story about a man looking for work who is trying to convince his boss that he can swear, a quality deemed necessary for getting a job working on the land. He says to the boss:

‘Why, you tallow-chopped, pudding-faced, pumpkin-headed son of a salt sea cook, can I swear? Why you cord-jammed, dod-gasted, rotten-livered, blankety-blanked, ram-jammed, rotterdammed, amsterdammed, cramjammed, sanguinary ruddy, gore-blistered –’

None of these, except for the final, disguised one, are real swear words, and some are euphemisms. As a string of words, however, they convey the sense of a string of expletives.

Using bad language in print could inspire creativity; it also required some thoughtful editing. This became evident when I compared the expurgated World War I novel of Frederic Manning, Her Privates We (1930), with the unexpurgated version, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). We might not usually give any thought to how an author or editor might go about the substitution of swear words or other objectionable material in a novel. But a close comparison of these two texts revealed some of the interesting ways in which Manning (or more likely his editor, fellow war veteran Peter Davies) revised the novel for more general publication. The many instances of fuck and fucking were often substituted with muck and mucking (in themselves rather thin disguises); but not always – sometimes they were replaced with bloody, bleeding, or blasted. Replacements appear to have been carefully selected: on the whole, it is much more common for muck and mucking to be used in instances of greater significance, such as in the context of battle, than in the more everyday activities depicted in the novel. These editorial choices tell us something about how the reader should translate the language being replaced.

The use of the term four-letter word to refer to a swear word can be found in Australian newspapers as early as 1894 (‘he used a four-letter word instead of a “tinker’s malediction”’), but it rose steadily in usage through the twentieth century. This reflected the shift in the taboo language people were concerned about from the religious to the sexual and excretory. Most of the ‘four-letter words’ are of the latter kind: shit, fuck, and cunt. F-word (first recorded in 1956) and c-word (first recorded in 1979) also became popular substitutes. But taboos around the use of such words were slowly crumbling. As Patrick Mullins ably demonstrates in his recent book on the demise of literary censorship in Australia, The Trials of Portnoy (2020), it was becoming impossible to sustain, and by the 1970s there was a flood of bad language in print.

Nevertheless, there are still some ingenious disguises and substitutes to be found for our stronger swear words. My own personal favourite is James Weir’s substituting of cantaloupe for the ‘c-word’ in his online recaps of reality television shows. But today we reserve most of our disguises for epithets and slurs. The n-word  ’s taboo is strengthening to the point where even a disguise is often likely to be considered unacceptable in print, and the word – if it needs referring to – is only mentioned in very oblique ways. There is still a place for disguise and euphemism on the printed page.