What's your favorite swear word/insult?

[Jenny A]

Personally, I prefer frak.

Jes Battis observes . . . that the use of frell and dren in Farscape allowed the television series to get away with dialogue that would normally never have made it past broadcasting and network censorship. The words are respectively equivalent to fuck and shit and are used as both interjections and nouns in the series. In the episode "Suns and Lovers", for example, Aeryn Sun says "frell me dead!" as an exclamation of surprise, much as a real-world person would utter "well, fuck me!"[frell] or, indeed, "fuck me dead!" Battis also notes that Firefly used a similar strategy, by using Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese for all profanities, also using the word gorram as a replacement for god damn, a phrase usually considered blasphemous.[ Likewise, dialogue in Babylon 5 is liberally peppered with the word frag ('fuck').

Similarly, invented expletives are used throughout the Star Wars Expanded Universe. For example, the Alderaanian expletive stang was introduced in the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye and subsequently used in Star Wars novels, comic books, and games. Also, Star Wars authors commonly use the Huttese curse fierfek, first introduced in a short story published in the 1996 anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace, and the Corelian curse sithspawn, first introduced in the 1994/1995 comic book series Dark Empire II.

Parke Godwin opines that excessive profanity, as a part of naturalistic dialogue, "dulls much modern fiction and too many films" and states it to be a pitfall for novice writers, or for writers who never grow up, to fall into. He states that it is a "lazy copout that no longer frightens horses in the street, merely annoys and ultimately bores an intelligent reader". He advises writers that "less is more", and that if it really is the right thing for a character to be salty, it should be made clear to the reader why, observing as an example that in his science fiction novel Limbo Search the profanity used by character Janice Tyne is a symptom of her fear and tension, caused by being burned out at age 27 and afraid of the future.

Wanda Raiford observes that the use of the nonce word frak in both Battlestar Galactica series is "an indispensable part of the naturalistic tone that show strives to achieve", noting that it, and toaster (a racial epithet for Cylons), allow the show to use obscene and racialist dialogue that no real-life educated American adult would consider using the real-life equivalents of in polite company. She compares the racial hatred associated with the use of nigger (an utterance of which she states to have preceded and accompanied "every lynching of a black person in America") to the racial hatred of the Cylons, by the humans, that the use of such phrases as frakking toasters indicates in the series. She also observes that several of the characters, including Gaius Baltar, are frakking toaster lovers.[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity_i...ce_fiction