MINCED OATHS—SNAFU AND WTF.

MINCED OATHS—SNAFU AND WTF. This wikipedia article has a lot of good examples of “minced oaths”, which are attenuated forms of profanities. “WTF”, which is a minced oath, is now used in speech, pronounced by saying the three letters. The article I linked to yesterday points out that Anderson Cooper, a veteran television personality who is familiar with restrictions on the use of profanity has said “WTF” on the air, apparently without repercussions. SNAFU is a famous example of a similar substitution of a letter for a word. I had always heard that it referred to World War II bureaucracy; this wikipedia article attributes it to the World War II United States Army. The minced oaths come to have a different, softer meaning than the original. Scott Kiesling, a linguist at the University of Pittsburgh is quoted in yesterday’s article as pointing out that “OMG” is more comfortably used to point out somebody’s unusual clothes rather than a tragic accident.