What the Fudge

Do you watch "The Good Place"?  That's one of the shows at the top of our DVR que - something we watch almost when it is actually on.  We like it a lot.  One of the things I like about it is how they decided that anyone in The Good Place can swear, although they still want to and intend to swear.  So when they go to swear some other word just comes out of their mouth, like: "What the Fudge."

It's not like we'd never hear this vocal device before.  There are people that for real in their lives.  But it is nice that they wanted to include for the characters that this would be part of their language even if they couldn't actually use the language, and in this particular case making the inability to use the language on a network TV show part of the plot of the show.

Previously I've been a fan of shows where they found other workarounds.  I think the first time I came across this was on Mork & Mindy long, long ago.  Orkans had an expletive they used: Shazbot.  When I was in grade school we giggled quite a bit over the use of Shazbot, but I don't think it ever really worked its way into our everyday speech as a curse word.  It was more like something that was a joke and a punchline all in one word.

I don't know why, but today I reached for a curse and what came out of my mouth was Shazbot.  Sometimes you never really know what I am going to say next.

My personal favorite over the years I think was feltercarp.  I can still hear the sound of Dirk Bennedict saying feltercarp.  Feltercarp is one of the two made up curses from the original Battlestar Gallactica.  The other one was frack.  I think of the two I prefered feltercarp to frack.  Interesting side note: if you do a Google search on "feltercarp" the second entry listed is a post on this blog.  So maybe it had a limited appeal.  Limited apparently to me.

Feltercarp didn't make the leap from the Dirk Benedict Starbuck to the Katee Sackhoff Starbuck.  On the new BSG frack went from being essentially a placeholder interjection to a full blown implimentation of the word used in context - like a verb: "I'd love to frack that."  Somehow it lost it's charm for me in the utilization.  It was fun when it was a made up expletive, but as an actual word it felt artificial.

It doesn't seem fair that I thought it didn't work on BSG when they were using it in essentially the way I find so entertaining on The Good Place.  In the newest instance they aren't making up a new word, they are substituting a word for a word they know they can't say.  The difference being that on The Good Place the replacement is an actual word being misused rather than putting in an entirely new word.  I guess that since one is being done in a humorous context where the other was in a dramatic context probably weighs in as well.

I bet I would laugh out loud if one of the characters on The Good Place slipped in a feltercarp.