I got into a discussion with someone today over the challenge of describing expletives in print. My publication, like most, tries to avoid them and usually doesn’t punk out by using various dashes and/or punctuation marks to fill in the missing letters.

I’ve read, and used, some interesting substitutions for expletives over the years. My favorite was when a co-worker described a tense moment between two members of a state legislature: “Smith told Jones to perform a physical impossibility.” It took me a few moments to translate that one.

In Ball Four, Jim Bouton referred to the Magic Word — the single word that was guaranteed to get a baseball player tossed from a game by an umpire. Let’s see…how to explain…the word describes someone who has made an Oedipal choice in sexual partners. Yeah, that’s it.

“A common Anglo-Saxon term” is another phrase of art that you’ll see from time to time. People seem to be able to translate that with little trouble, although there are a lot of common Anglo-Saxon terms and I’m sure some of them are quite sweet.

It’s almost poetry, really, to dodge the use of a common expletive and replace it with a description. “You little Georgia O’Keefe!” sounds so much more interesting than the common vernacular, and folks have to pause and decipher it (sometimes unsuccessfully), and that gives everyone a chance to calm down. It’s a beautiful thing.