Phonically derived substitutes of potentially offensive lexical items in modern English: two corpus-based studies

This paper presents data regarding the use of English words originally used, euphemistically, for similar sounding words which might offend. Examples of this phenomenon are the word pairs hell-heck, fucking-flipping, christ-crikey, and bloody-blooming. The description will relate to modern British English, and it will be mainly corpus-based. Data from two largely comparable sets of texts were used in the study. These are the spoken component of the original British National Corpus (BNC), and the Spoken BNC2014. The study has two main aims. One is to describe the typical lexico-phraseological uses of what might be called the 'heck' words, including comparison with the respective 'hell' words. The other is to investigate whether there has been any significant change in the usage or frequency of such items during the approximately 20-year period between the compilation of the two respective speech corpora.