The death of mild expletives?

 As I have previously mentioned, I did a lot of cross-stitching in January and, in order to keep myself amused while my eyes were glued to the material, I listened to a lot of audiobooks. And I mean A LOT.

About half of them were by US authors, the rest by authors from the UK. What I noticed is that, these days, whenever anyone swears in a story, they go straight to the 'heavy-duty' swear words, those that are also called 'Anglo-Saxon', often only four letters long.

No-one seems to use the word 'bloody' any more. Yes, I know that is blasphemy rather than swearing, but still. It's never 'bloody hell' but 'f****** hell'. Whatever happened to 'blinking heck', a phrase used to cover up the more blasphemous one?

No-one is told to 'buzz off' or the much uglier 'bog off'. No, they are told to 'p*** off''. 

And no-one is 'cheesed off' when they are annoyed with someone. No, they are 'p***** off' with them.

Women are not called a 'bitch' or a 'cow' but the 'C-word'. Horrible. Simply dreadful.

What happened to phrases such as "Take a very long walk on a very short pier"? (1)

'Damn', 'bother', 'blast', 'dang' and 'drat' seem to have already died a death in stories.

Nothing is 'rubbish' any more. It's the S-word. 

When someone talks nonsense, people don't say "Fiddlesticks!", "Hogwash!", "Poppycock!" or (my favourite) "Piffle!".(2) Nope. straight to 'BS'.

Maybe writers think they are being daring, bold and realistic. Personally, I don't spend time with people who talk like that. 

By using such a small range of expletives, I just feel that people's linguistic expression is becoming very limited - and a whole lot less colourful. What a shame.

(1) Or the phrase that cropped up in westerns by J.T. Edson: "Go to hell and back (by the long route)."

(2) Not to mention the magnificent 'balderdash'.