swear word

[Damien Hall]

Victor said:

"From one of the Christmas episodes of The Vicar of Dibley (still being rerun
on PBS):

Choir leader: Why is Jesus special?
Boy: His name is a swear word?"

Presumably this was to note the use of 'swear word' and not 'curse word' for blasphemous language / an obscenity?  'Swear word' is the usual BrE lexeme for these things - so much so that, when I went to the States, I found the AmE term a strange description of 'shit', 'fuck' and other obscenities that weren't blasphemous, and I still do.

Some raw ghits (these search-terms in sites in the domain .uk):

Swear word - about 158,000

Swearword  - about 106,000

Curse word -  about 84,000

Curseword  - about 23,200

So it's not as overwhelming as I thought in favour of 'swear( )word', and these figures also speak against my feeling that the usual BrE way to spell it was without a space.  Still, the relative popularity of 'swear( )word' also comes out clearly here:

http://bit.ly/SwearWordCurseWordBrE_Ngram

Damien

--

Damien Hall

University of Kent (UK)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of France'

English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and Languages

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org