What might a Mormon swear word look like? I’m not talking about softened versions of profanities like shiz and fetch and flip that many Mormons use to avoid their harsher cousins. (Although I admit that, especially given that my blogging name comes from the Book of Mormon, I have a soft spot for shiz, since it’s not only a fun word, but a Book of Mormon character.) I mean a full-fledged expletive that people could clutch their pearls when they hear.
What prompted me to ask this question was that I recently started reading Benjamin K. Bergen’s book on profanity, What the F. In the first couple of chapters, Bergen looks at the types of words that get used as profanities. Across languages, it seems like they are references to holy things made profane (which is of course where the word profanity comes from), to sex, and to defecation/urination/vomiting. (Bergen includes a fourth category, slurs, but to me, this seems like a different type of word.) It’s the first group that interests me here. He points out that a substantial fraction of the most common profanities in places where the Catholic Church is or has been influential are not just religious words, but particularly Catholic-related ones:
Quebecois French . . . makes heavy use of what it calls sacres (“consecrations”) — strong profanities related to Catholicism and Catholic liturgical concepts. Far stronger than merde (“shit”) or foutre (“fuck”) in Quebec are tabarnack (“tabernacle”), calisse (“chalice”), and calvaire (“Calvary”).
The Mormon angle here is just that I was wondering what kind of Mormon holy word might be turned into a profanity if the LDS Church were as influential as Catholicism.