One Woman's Mission To Find Fun Alternatives To The F Word

The article speaks about a woman's mission to find suitable and fun alternatives to the four letter word

- Sonali Acharjee

ONE DAY, AFTER cursing profusely in front of a group of eight-year-olds, Sneha Keshav, a 27-year-old branding student from the New York School of Visual Arts, suddenly decided it was time to wash her mouth out with soap. Convinced that she was overusing the word ‘fuck’ on a daily basis, Keshav embarked on a 100-day project last month. Her goal? To create suitable easy-to-use substitutes for popular swear words and phrases. She called the project Taming of the Fuckery and has already come up with over a hundred new alternatives to the word in question. Now when they are in a bad mood, Keshav and her followers will immediately tell people to ‘go fly a kite’, ‘fork off’, ‘eat my shorts’ or ‘zip it’. And if they goof up, they hiss, ‘oh sugar’, ‘holy guacamole’, ‘ay caramba’,‘what the falafel’ or ‘doggone it’. For the moments when they are overcome with joy and excitement, Keshav has come up with a special set of words: ‘fudgenuts’, ‘holy moly’, ‘blistering barnacles’ and ‘amazeballs’. And in those rare situations where they find that they have no choice but to abuse, they have decided to make do with ‘you waste of space’, ‘piss off’, ‘Tilda Swinton’ and ‘you little maggot’.