Eric Zorn, “Excuse Our Bad French” (Chicago Tribune, Sep. 29, 2009)
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com, said word mavens call these terms “minced oaths.” They fall into two categories, he said: “Alterations, where the euphemized version has a close phonetic similarity to the original curse word, and substitutions, where there is more of a decoupling.”
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