Don’t wash your mouth out with soap. Check out these creative F-bomb replacements, instead.
image via taming of the fuckery
One summer, when I was in high school, I was dared to go a full week without swearing. This meant no more exasperated “fucks,” no resigned “damn-its,” not even a lowly “what the hell?”. I can’t remember what I’d been promised were I to have completed the terms of the bet, but it’s safe to assume that, whatever it was, it probably wasn’t worth the mental effort it took me to clean up my vocabulary for even a short amount of time.
Suffice it to say, the experiment was a total fucking failure.
In spite of compelling scientific evidence which suggests that a well placed swear word is actually pretty good for you, there are still those among us who prefer not to indulge in vulgarities, and more power to them. Swearing is most effective when used conservatively, saving just the right word for just the right moment, rather than punctuating every sentence with some inevitably uninspired combination of expletives. But, as my high school dare taught me, wiping one’s vocabulary clean of F-bombed crater holes is no easy feat. Swearing can, for some, become a sort of linguistic crutch, offering a helpful place-holder word to fill ungainly grammatical gaps.
To help replace that crutch with something a little more family-friendly, artist Sneha Keshav has launched Taming of the Fuckery, a new project in which the New York-based designer has embarked on a 100-day illustration spree, designing creative typographical alternatives to various iterations of the word “fuck.” As she explains on the project’s website:
Taming of the fuckery is about finding colorful alternatives to the word 'fuck' which has taken over our vocabulary ever so slyly. As I embark on this 100 day journey, I will do my best to tighten my tongue and typography.
Keshav’s designs are both whimsical and genuinely helpful for anyone looking to transition from a vulgarity-soaked vernacular to a squeaky-clean vocabulary. Here are just a few examples:
To see the rest (and perhaps clean up your own potty-mouth while you’re at it), you can check out the project’s website, or follow it on Instagram.
[via design taxi]
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