'Bloody hell' and 'blooming heck'. Potentially offensive lexical items and their parallel euphemistic forms: a corpus-based exploration of usage and change

This paper reports on a study of phonologically related lexical pairs of the type fucking - flipping and bloody hell - blooming heck, where one of the pair is generally considered to be potentially offensive and the other is a milder alternative (see, among others, Adams 139-158, Allan & Burridge passim, Bauer 756-8, Hughes 7, 12-15, Marsh 225-6, Mencken 389-400, and Warren 132-7). Data from two corpora will be presented: these are the spoken component of the original British National Corpus (BNC Spkn), for which recordings were made in the period 1991-1994, and the recently released Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC Spkn 2014), which is based on recordings from the period 2012-2016. With regard to BNC Spkn, comparative frequency data will be presented for the stronger and milder lexical alternatives; here, two separate sets of figures will be given, one for the demographically sampled part of the corpus (informal conversation), and the other in relation to the ‘context-governed’ recordings (see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/URG/). The frequency figures themselves only relate to the items as decontextualized lexis, but additional Information will be provided regarding the extent to which items appear to comply with ‘politic behaviour’ (Watts 2003) and cases where transcripts and/or recordings suggest possible perception of im/politeness by participants. With regard to the raw frequency data for the stronger and milder lexical alternatives, comparison will also be made between the demographically sampled part of BNC Spkn and the textually analogous BNC Spkn 2014 (taking into account the difference in size between the two corpora); this will attempt to verify the following hypothesis: “over time, the stronger forms will become less offensive, and therefore more frequent, while the milder forms will become less used”.