i love the part where samuel l. jackson says he's had it with these motherbothering snakes on this motherbothering plane

So, part of the detritus of my working-class rural roots is that I have a pottymouth. Actually, having a congenital prudish streak--and having been raised right (hi, Mom!)--I did not use profanity at all, ever, until about eighth grade. Then there was all kinds of peer pressure that I finally gave into, and then the floodgates (f***gates?) were open.

I am less profane-prolix nowadays than I used to be. Still, I've been feeling I should cut down further.

I heard a friend say "Oh, bother!" recently in a context where I would have said "Oh, holy [expletive deleted] purple [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted]!" And I decided this would be central to my new effort at cussreduction: substituting "bother" for the principal profanity. Unanticipated bonus: that it doesn't really work in many contexts infuses a bemusement that helps deflate the negative affect prompting my launching the profanity in the first place.

(A curious fact of my combination of prudishness and pottymouth is that there are some, commonly considered as more mild, words I have an involuntary scrunch reaction to whenever I hear. The other four-letter F-word, the one that appears in the new Harry Potter book, I can't really bring myself to say. And almost all slang terms for body parts I never use as actually referring to their respective body part; excepting the posterior, I always use exactly the same terms for body parts that are used in standard high-school textbooks.)