Phonically derived substitutes of potentially offensive lexical items: a corpus-aided study

The object of study in this paper is the set of English word pairs of the type 'hell-heck'. The characteristics which define such pairs are: (i) a word which is considered, or at some time in the past has been considered, to be blasphemous, obscene or otherwise taboo (e.g. hell), may be replaced by another word (e.g. heck) in order to make it more acceptable; (ii) the two words are also directly linked to each other by virtue of their sharing certain phonemic characteristics, usually the same initial consonant or consonantal cluster. The main aim of the paper is to illustrate, with the help of corpus data (British National Corpus), which uses of HELL words are carried through to their HECK counterparts. In so doing, I indicate the relationships obtaining within individual HELL-HECK pairs, and also describe features which are more generalizable, being of relevance to a number of the pairs in question.