Apparently, they were under the impression that "fuckin'" was American slang for "really good".
"It is somewhat more offensive in British use than Americans typically realize."
— Mary Cresswell
on "wanker"
on "wanker"
Sometimes a writer will use "international" slang to make a character seem saltier and "regional" or make themselves seem more in touch with a foreign work (frequently American versus British usage of a word). Sometimes, however, they use the expression more casually than it's said in the place it comes from. When words like "bollocks" or "wanker" appear in, say, an American work that is otherwise PG, British people will find them More Insulting than Intended.
This is also used intentionally, to the opposite effect: unfamiliar or foreign swear words may be used where an equivalent local expression would be inappropriate. (In the 1950s and 1960s "bloody" was considered extremely offensive in the U.K., and was censored from BBC broadcasts, but in more modern times it is considered to be a very mild expletive, somewhere around the same level of severity as "damn" (which itself has lost much of its rudeness) but much less than "fucking": you could use the word "bloody" in a business meeting with no eyebrows raised, and a teenager using the word contextually would probably not get told off for swearing. On the other hand, it can also mean absolutely nothing more than a way of emphasizing your point in Australia.)
This works both ways, as there are a lot of words that are offensive in the US, but innocuous elsewhere in the Anglosphere, such as "fag" referring to cigarettes in Britain, but being a homophobic slur in the U.S., or inversely "Fanny" being a girl's name in the U.S. or referring only to someone's rear end in a rather cutesy old-fashioned way, but being a fairly vulgar term for a vagina in British English. There can be some culture shock when an American watches a British show made for a post-watershed time slot and sees/hears content that simply wouldn't make the cut for US broadcast TV.
This trope covers any confusion or hilarity arising from foreign swear words, not just in the U.S.. Since international expletives are often "G-rated" on American TV, "arse" and "shite" can be family-friendly ways of getting "ass" and "shit" past the censors. In Britain, "ass" is the American spelling of "arse"note — one may write "ass" to emphasize that the speaker is American rather than English. Gestures may be similarly misunderstood, such as the two-finger V-sign to signal "victory" or in the U.S. the hippy sign "peace", which is an insult in Greece and, if the hand is turned around, the equivalent to (or worse than) flipping the bird in some countries such as the U.K.
See also Separated by a Common Language, Bilingual Bonus, Have a Gay Old Time and Values Dissonance. Can result in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. Naturally, if the curse is used in the proper context, then any associated profanity trope—like Precision F-Strike, Atomic F-Bomb, or Cluster F-Bomb—can apply.
Not to be confused with any of a number of tropes that are literally about blood. If you were looking for in-universe cases where it's obvious someone didn't do research (that's unrelated to swear words), that's In-Universe Factoid Failure.
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Advertising
- Tourism Australia's So where the bloody hell are you? ad campaign ended up banned in the UK for the "bloody" and in Canada for the "hell", even though in Australia itself the phrase isn't even a light swear.
- A department store in Osaka, Japan once put "FUCKIN' SALE" signs all over the store for a New Year's sale of fukubukuro, meaning "lucky bags" (grab bags of overstock from the previous year). The store took down the signs and censored their website after getting word of the amusement this caused overseas.
Anime & Manga
- In the first episode of Season 3's edited English dub of Dragon Ball Z, the apparently Australian Jeice gives us such lines as, "ah bugger, this blasted thing!" and, "No bloody Saiyan that we've ever met is that strong."
- In Eden of the East, at least one American uses "Johnny" as a euphemism for a man's special organ (it's also used by a Japanese person in The Tatami Galaxy, so it's apparently not a made-up euphemism). Americans have… numerous common ways to say "penis", but "Johnny" isn't one of them (although "Johnson" is, and "Johnny" is somewhat outdated British English slang for "condom" but still not a word for a penis itself).
- For a different culture's take, see the Cluster F-Bomb from Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi.
- The English dub of Negima!? (second season) has two British (specifically Welsh) characters at or younger than ten years old say 'bollocks' on more than one occasion, once in front of a British adult who just giggled. The rest of the language in the show is pretty tame, however.
- PandoraHearts has a character known as the Chizome no Kuro Usagi, literally "Black Rabbit of Blood-dye" (with an in-universe nickname of "B-Rabbit"). Fan translations often change this to "Bloodstained Black Rabbit," as "dye" and "stain" are roughly synonymous, and English speakers typically don't say something soaked in blood is "blood-dyed." However, when official versions of the manga were released in English, Yen Press translated the name to the objectively less correct and more unfortunately connotative "Bloody Black Rabbit."
- Pokémon the Series:
- James got away with this twice in Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl: Once in "Two Degrees of Separation!" when James describes that Dawn "Doesn't know a bloody thing about us", and the other in "Staging a Heroes' Welcome!" when he says that he and Meowth "didn't do a bloody thing" when Jessie thought they helped her win the Contest. While international broadcasts of the former episode kept the line intact, the latter episode had the line re-recorded to "didn't do a single thing".
- "Bummer" has been said infrequently throughout the anime, but stopped being used after the Diamond & Pearl series. In the US, the word is used to describe pity, but in the UK, the word is a slur for gay men. None of the uses of the word were edited out for international broadcast.
- In a non-Anglophonic variant, the Japanese Lt. Surge (who is supposed to be American) exclaims in an early episode, "Goddamn!" He also does this in the manga Pokémon Zensho. Randomly cussing for no reason at all is a common Japanese stereotype of Americans, though almost exclusively played for laughs.
- In episode 115 of Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon, there is a rap sequence. In the Japanese version of the rap, a Team Skull grunt says (in English) "Let's get high". This is an unusual sentence that likely wasn't meant to allude to drugs. The English dub changed it to "Hey, hi, ho" (which rhymes with the next line "Yay, Guzma, yo!").
- In the Japanese version of Sonic X, Episode 2 has Sonic say "Shit!" in English. Right in front of Cream, too. Sonic's voice actor, Jun'ichi Kanemaru, later admitted in a tweet that he ad-libbed the line without realizing it's inappropriate for a children's show, assuming it was the English equivalent of the Japanese "kuso" (which is similar to "shit", in that it's an expression of frustration or dismay that doubles as a term for excrement, but is much more mild and publicly acceptable).
- In the dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! by 4Kids Entertainment, Sid says "git", which, to Britons, is a very mild expletive but still not one you'd expect to hear on a kids' show (especially not one dubbed by a company famous for its bowdlerization).
- Yu-Gi-Oh! GX used "Spaz" in at least one episode. This is the sole reason why the complete UK DVD release (alongside a single-disc volume and the Season 2 DVD) was rated 12.
Comic Books
- Whoever decided that "wank" would be a good onomatopoeia for Captain America's shield hitting a villain in the face was clearly unaware of the word's meaning in British/Australian/New Zealand slang. Or was 100% aware of it and having a laugh. And, because of the placement of the speech bubble, it looks like "I command you to—WANK!"
- An issue of "The Captain" arc has an Australian member of the Serpent Squad let off an irritated "wanker" during a time when language in comic books was strictly PG.
- In an early issue of Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian series, British artist Barry Smith convinced American writer Roy Thomas to have a soldier call another soldier a "wank." After the issue's publication, Thomas shortly ended up with more informative letters from British readers than he'd have liked.
- In an issue of Generation X, Chamber (whose British-ness is often emphasized) uses the word "wanker" as if it was a rather harmless insult.
- The Harley Quinn miniseries spin-off Harley's Little Black Book features a British costumed villain called the Barmy Bugger. This is yet another example of how US writers aren't aware of how offensive and insulting the word "bugger" actually is in British English — it's not something that even a villain would voluntarily call themselves. Though he is barmy.
- Likewise, in the eighth issue of Luke Cage: Hero for Hire, a Jewish woman fondly uses the word "schvartze" to refer to Luke. However, this is the Yiddish equivalent of the N-word. They apologized in a later issue. The writer, Steve Englehart, was tricked into using it by the artist, George Tuska, who told him that it was a neutral term.
- Lampshaded in one The Simpsons comic, Bart and Lisa end up staying with pseudo-South American freedom fighters. When Bart utters his catchphrase "Ay Caramba!", he is immediately beaten down by a woman for using dirty language in front of her child.
- In an issue of Y: The Last Man, a captured woman calls the leader of the Amazon gang/army a cunt. The Ax-Crazy leader lampshades this by going into a detailed description of the word and how it's not an insult in Britain. The captive responds by spitting on her and getting shot for her troubles. To clarify, it certainly is an insult in Britain, just (in certain circumstances), somewhat more acceptable than in America. Like most expletives, it largely depends on how you're using it.
Fan Works
- In Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, a guy on his Bluetooth rants about "bloody conspiracies", which is somewhat out of place in a normally clean fic.
- In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, the first Rimwards Howondalandian character was introduced with the then intention that she would be a one-shot character who would amplify all the National Stereotypes everybody thought they knew about South Africa and white South Africans. Consequently, the character's use of the Afrikaans language was, to be kind, sketchy, and unconvincing: Pessimal crossed his fingers and hoped nobody would notice if her native tongue turned out to be a mish-mash of Dutch, German, and half-remembered badly spelled Saffie expletives. When he realized he wasn't going to be allowed to drop the character, her Afrikaans — and his — got progressively better and he began doing the bloody research more thoroughly.
- In Essence, Bill uses "bloody" a lot, which makes him come off as Sir Swears-a-Lot.
- Really, this is fairly common in most fanfiction written for something that originated in a country different than the one the author is from. The most prevalent example is probably American authors writing Harry Potter fanfic. Seriously, next time you see a long fic by a non-Brit, count how many times 'wanker' is said. It especially happens to Ron a lot, because he is implied to be swearing sometimes in canon, it's just never outright stated what he said.
- In the other direction, "git" is often taken to be far worse than it actually is. It's actually a very mild insult, barely even considered swearing at all (which is precisely why it's one of the few things to get through the Narrative Profanity Filter in the original books).
- The word "berk", possibly because of its etymology (it's short for "Berkeley Hunt", which is Cockney Rhyming Slang for... you get it), is often mistaken for far worse than it actually is. In reality, it doesn't even register as a swearword to most people, and calling someone a berk is less offensive than calling them an idiot.
- This happens a lot in Sherlock fanfic too.
- Since there's a lot of regional variation in British English, it's not uncommon to see dialogue that covers hundreds of miles in the space of a single sentence.
- In This World and the Next: a reviewer pointed out that "it might as well be called In This Shit and the Fuck", and yet in the very same sentence as he is called "Ronald Fucking Weasley", (literal) Ron the Death Eater is referred to as a "prat." The same reviewer asked if "this author's version of the final battle featured Harry calling Voldemort a pillock and describing his philosophy as bobbins." This is especially bizarre since the author is British.
- While all the swearing recognizable to American readers of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami (a So Bad, It's Good Death Note fanfic) is censored out, British ones are not, leading to Watari yelling things like "THAT TIT IS TAKING THE PISS NOW!... WE MUST GET THE WANK OUT OF THIS SODDING CONTRACEPTION!" fully uncensored.
- Same goes for ITS MY LIFE!, to the point that overused British curses were associated with this fic's Wheatley.
- New Vegas Showtime as an in-universe case, with Haru Okumura, speaking English as her second language, not realizing how strong of an insult a "Cali [NCR] cunt" thrown her way is. The narration notes that "Had Haru been aware of the weight of the insult, the conversation would’ve gone a bit differently".
- The Final Fantasy VIII fic Phantom Dreams has Seifer refer to Squall as a little bugger, which given the Slash Fic nature of the story is Foreshadowing.
- Stargate Atlantis fics featuring Zelenka (whose actor David Nykl is well-known for getting away with routine Czech swearwords in the series) may end up with wildly incongruous levels of Czech swearing — running the gamut from expressions that are comically much milder than what Zelenka does actually use, to downright obscene expressions that David Nykl would probably never dare to use in public...
- Deliberately evoked in A Storm of Chaos: A Doctor Whooves Adventure, The Doctor has something of a potty mouth, saying such things as "bollocks" and "bugger," due to being companions with Derpy, who's from a different region (and her slang is roughly American equivalent). Turns out, she did do the bloody research and can even tell when he curses in alien. He still does it, though.
- Supper Smash Bros: Mishonh From God: Every single British character uses 'bloody', 'hell' and 'wanker' in almost every sentence. Eventually, Sara does try doing the research...by watching Game of Thrones.
Films — Animation
- Lizzie in Cars 1 refers to her husband as a 'persistent little bugger'.
- Rise of the Guardians: Bunny frequently uses Australian colloquialisms. He used the word "bloody" more than once, but the most egregious example is when he thinks Jack's fallen out of the sleigh, only to find Jack smugly perched on the runner. Bunny shouts "Rack off, you bloody showpony!", which in American English translates into "Fuck off, you damn show-off!"
- Robots has a character with a large rear end named Aunt Fanny. In the US, it's just an allusion to her large butt. In the UK, it refers to a... different part of a woman's anatomy, so she was renamed Aunt Fan.
- Shrek 2 was used to be rated U in the UK, despite the complaints about the scene where the Fairy Godmother uses the word "bloody" twice. As of 2022, it was re-rated PG, likely due to the the BBFC's stance of the word "bloody" becoming stricter.
- In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, an old lady calls SpongeBob a "Knucklehead McSpazatron!" — the filmmakers unaware that "spaz" is an offensive term in the United Kingdom for a person with a physical and/or mental disability. Despite the term being used, it slipped under the radar, and was never removed from the film in the UK.
- Superman vs. the Elite: Manchester Black is a gritty, Darker and Edgier antihero from Britain who wears his Britishness with such pride that he has the Union Jack tattooed on his chest; naturally, he says "bloody" and "wanker" with impunity, despite this being a Superman filmnote . This then becomes an in-universe case, when Superman, in an attempt at friendship, briefly mimics Manchester's use of the word "wanker", apparently unaware of the word's meaning, which visibly amuses Manchester.
Films — Live-Action
- Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me had some trouble being marketed in the UK entirely because of this. The posters either partially censored the middle of the offending word or displayed the title of Austin Powers 2. They also had to run different sets of ads before the 9 pm Watershed, because they couldn't use the film's full title.
- In The Avengers (2012), Loki calls Black Widow a "mewling quim" at the end of a particularly vicious rant, quim being archaic English slang for the female genitalia. The film is rated PG-13. The word is pretty archaic, and even those who know what it means would find it more a novelty than actually offensive.note
- Bedknobs and Broomsticks had the rather infamous scene of Charlie Rawlins shouting out "Not bloody likely!" to Colonel Heller. This resulted in the film being re-rated PG in the UK when it received a cinema re-release in 2016 with the Blu-Ray following suit on account of its bonus features, despite the previous theatrical releases and home media releases up to 2009/2013 being rated U.
- The Color of Friendship has a South African man use "bloody" within the first ten minutes of the film. It's a bit crude for a children's film.
- An In-Universe case with the V gesture, which serves as a Running Gag in Darkest Hour: Winston Churchill initially has to have its alternate meaning explained to him. This returns later as a Brick Joke.
- The Harry Potter film series, written for the screen by an American, Steve Kloves, gives Ron a catchphrase: "Bloody hell!" Not unlikely for an 11-year-old British boy to say, but probably not in front of a teacher: In the first film, Ron says it to McGonagall's face for her 'bloody brilliant' transformation from a cat. Likely about half of British teachers would tell an 11-year-old to mind their language, but it wouldn't lead to any more punishment than that.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) has the Highly Evolved Beings a.k.a. mice shout "Oh bollocks!" before being crushed by Arthur Dent. The DVD commentary states that they wanted to sneak in a curse word that wouldn't be as well known to American audiences.
- In Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Lara is fond of the word "bugger." She uses it a couple of times, once with something as innocuous as some food blowing up in the microwave (which would be appropriate if she were, say, Australian). The movie is PG-13, but it's mainly because it's an action movie, so there's very little in the way of swearing anyway.
- The story goes that Steve McQueen didn't know the meaning of the reverse V-sign while making Le Mans and, when told, used the gesture instead of The Finger at the end of the movie as a way of giving his character a European flair, as a globe-trotting racing driver would probably have picked up all kinds of foreign insults on his travels.
- Muppet Treasure Island is otherwise free of profanity, though when Billy Bones is dying, Gonzo and Rizzo lampshade the fact that "this was supposed to be a kids' movie!" Shortly after that, when Billy's shipmates search his room, one of them says "Billy's dead, and he hasn't got the bloody map!" Billy himself asks aloud "How does [Mrs. Bluberidge] bloody do that?" Some versions of the film (such as the one shown in the UK) dub over "bloody" with "bloomin'".
- Disney's Live-Action/CGI remake of Pinocchio has, at one point during Pinocchio’s escape from Pleasure Island, the coachman using the word “Bollocks”. As this word is considered significantly more offensive in the UK than in the USA (generally used as interchangeable with “Crap” in the USA, while more on par with “Bullshit” in the UK) a number of British parents were not amused at hearing this word in a children's movie.
- Jack Sparrow says "bugger" twice in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, despite the film's PG-13 rating and otherwise very sparse use of swear words.
Bloody pirates!
- This is also as close to a Cluster F-Bomb as they could get when he says it repeatedly while trying to get his hand free of the manacle Elizabeth locked him in to bait the Kraken at the end of the movie.
- The American trailer for Playing For Keeps 2012 somehow managed to get away with using "wanker" more than once, most notably being said by a child. It's especially strange in that the MPAA's standards for green band trailers tend to often strict (when not being contradictory).
- It works the other way around, too — the same actor gets in a "Goddamn" in Thunderpants, in an apparently ham-fisted attempt to imitate the speech patterns of the adult Eaglelanders around him.
- In Tomorrowland, Governor Nix’s very last words are "Oh, bollocks." This was enough to get the film a 12A rating in the U.K. despite the film being rated PG in America.
- Middle-finger gestures are generally censored in America, but the Trainspotting poster in which Begbie gives a V-sign is shown without any problems.
- V for Vendetta has loads of American and British curse words, which makes for interesting viewing when it's on channels like FX or BBC America. In the States, they'll bleep the F-bombs, and if they're really uptight, every other curse word, but you can listen to every utterance of "Jesus bloody Christ" and sentences like "I won't have this thing getting any more bollocksed-up than it already is" unedited. Note, too, that several of the major characters are well-known British actors and actresses, like John Hurt, Stephen Fry, etc., and the author of the original graphic novel was Alan Moore, so the cast and crew weren't saying things to try and sound British. A little girl says 'bollocks' in front of her family with no repercussions.
- The Japanese film Why Don't You Play in Hell? has a group of amateur Japanese filmmakers give themselves the English name "Fuck Bombers." It's obviously not supposed to be as vulgar to Japanese ears as English-speakers.
Literature
- Used in-universe on several occasions by Diana Gabaldon. She does do the linguistic research, but several characters (from different countries or different centuries) manage to cuss each other out and have it go right over the other person's head. (For example, Claire using the word "fucking" and utterly perplexing her husband.) In a more fitting sense for this trope, the author also gets away with a lot of creative language in the Outlander series by way of it being exotic and Scottish, or terribly dated — and then lets loose with the contemporary profanity.
- Harry Turtledove doesn't do too badly at curse levels but uses things like 'bloody' far too often in a lot of cases (which has to be quite a bit, given how much we use it). Furthermore, some of the slang is simply wrong. 'Crikey' is an exclamation of surprise, not a swearword that you can chuck in anywhere.
- Ender's Game: The aliens that humanity is at war with somewhat resemble insects and thus are often called Buggers, which makes an awful lot of the text hard to stomach for British readers... "We can't let the Buggers win!" "I'm going to kill as many of the Buggers as possible!" It would be akin to somebody writing a huge sci-fi epic where we're being invaded by deadly swarms of Dumbasses or surrounded by Assholes. This is lampshaded in Ender's Shadow, where European-native Bean is entertained by the Americans and others calling the aliens expletives. The author seems to have been informed of his mistake after the first novel and all subsequent publications use the term "Formic" or "Hive Queen" to describe the aliens, while the Ender's Game Alive audio play only uses "Buggers" when someone is upset and is actually trying to be insulting. The Formic Wars prequel novels have many other names for the newly-discovered aliens by the Asteroid Miners, who usually consist of clans from various ethnic groups. When a scientist first finds out that the Venezuelan miners aboard the El Salvador named them Hormigas ("ants" in Spanish), she refuses to use the term, claiming that no scientist would approve of a living being named in a still-spoken language, preferring to use the roughly-equivalent Latin term Formic.
- In The Kane Chronicles, which is G-rated, except for a Narrative Profanity Filter with Carter sometimes, Sadie uses the word "bloody" a lot.
- In The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, Zyn utters the priceless line "That’s why I’m the leader of this pathetic group. The only thing you little buggers do is ask questions." Seeing as the author marketed the book for children ages six to twelve, she presumably was unaware of what "buggers" actually meant.
- In the Lois McMaster Bujold novel Memory, Miles Vorkosigan is said to have "buggered the cartridge" from a Sonic Stunner to improvise a grenade. He goes on to describe Impsec's security recording as having been "buggered" when he finds evidence of tampering. Nowhere else in Bujold's books do we find this sort of expression. "Buggered" is fairly innocuous US slang for fouled-up or broken (but usually not irreparably). In the UK you can describe something as "buggered" or talk about "buggering [something] up", but in most dialects if you say you've "buggered [something]" you'll get some strange looks. Thus Miles' statement sounds as odd to the British ear as it does to the US ear when a Brit "lights up a fag."
- Planet of Adventure: Jack Vance innocently-named an alien race the Wankh; the resulting second volume Servants of the Wankh sold quite well in a niche market. For a recent republication, he consented to rename them Wannek, irritating at least a few fans because a race that can express a sentence in the overtones of a single chime ought to be monosyllabic.
- John Brunner, in his dystopian near-future novel The Sheep Look Up (set in a 20 Minutes in the Future version of the USA), fell foul of this by having a midwestern DJ (who had been poisoned, alongside thousands of others, by leakage into the water table of a military psychedelic) use the word "bollocks" in what is probably the filthiest limerick ever printed.
- Star Wars: The Han Solo Adventures series contains a character named Bollux. Unsurprisingly, he was renamed to Zollux for the UK release (as a nod to this, later material, even in the US, would refer to Zollux as an alias he would adopt later). Han specifically asks him at one point if he minds that his name is a rather insulting joke, so it's not really worried about the radar. In the UK and Ireland, "bollocks" is an NSFW term for testicles.
- Some of the Warhammer 40,000 novels in The Space Wolf Omnibus seems to have very little cursing other than this.
- In a rare example of an English writer not understanding English slang, the Victorian poet Robert Browning got the impression that the word "twat" meant part of a nun's cowl, and included it in his 1841 poem Pippa Passes: "Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats, / Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods, Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!" His mistake was not pointed out until 1888.note
- A French children's book author decided to introduce some local sayings to young readers in a book taking place in Canada. Unfortunately, one of those sayings happened to be "tabernacle", which due to traditional views on blasphemy is roughly as obscene in French Canada as "fuck" or "shit."
Music
- Within a few days of each other, Lizzo and Beyoncé drew criticism for using "spaz" in the lyrics of their songs. While "spaz" is an innocuous slang term in the USA, in the UK it's considered an ableist slur. Both singers apologised and issued new versions of their songs that replaced the word.
- The Monkees were told their song "Randy Scouse Git" was not acceptable in the U.K. because of its titlenote , and would have to be released with an alternate title. So, they called it "Alternate Title". Ironically, they picked up the phrase from The BBC in the first place — it's something Alf calls Mike in Till Death Us Do Part ... but that was broadcast in the late evening and he was trying to be offensive.
- "Weird Al" Yankovic caused a minor controversy over the word "spastic" being used in "Word Crimes". He apologized on Twitter, saying he didn't know that it was an offensive slur in the UK note .
- Frank Zappa wrote a song called "Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead", which appears on his live album Bongo Fury, sung by Captain Beefheart. He was unaware of the meaning of "Poofter" and just thought it was a funny British word. When a British journalist told him what it actually means (a less offensive version of faggot), he was shocked. Unsurprisingly, this song is hilarious to British listeners in a way that was never intended. Of course, given Zappa's sense of humor — having received an "Explicit Lyrics" warning on an instrumental album — he probably didn't mind.
Radio
- On LoveLine, Adam Carolla once pondered if it was okay to say "shite" on the radio at 10 PM Pacific (it is, or at least it was when he said it).
Tabletop Games
- Having researched Victorian Thieves' Cant enough to create a glossary but not enough to know which words were still in use, the Dungeons & Dragons setting Planescape also included "berk" on its list of slang. To make matters worse, most of the books were written in-universe style, slathering virtually every character's speech with cant, and that was the writers' single favorite word. Most Brits don't know what berk derives from, so it does sometimes get used casually in the UK as well, but it is still a reasonably strong term (equivalent to "moron") even if you don't know its history.note
- Though the few still-in-use terms included in the Cant were jarring enough ("bloody" and "sodding" being the most jarring) the use of the word "pike" for "move on" was ill-advised since the only derivation still in use is "Pikey", which is rather racist.
- Strangely enough, "pike" is still in use in Australia and New Zealand (where it isn't offensive at all and means "to cancel at the last minute on a social engagement"), along with "piker" (one who is notorious for doing so). "Pikey" is however completely unknown (or at least it was, until snatch.).
- Though the few still-in-use terms included in the Cant were jarring enough ("bloody" and "sodding" being the most jarring) the use of the word "pike" for "move on" was ill-advised since the only derivation still in use is "Pikey", which is rather racist.
- Pokémon: Shining Legends Incineroar has a move called "Goddamn Punch" in the Japanese version. In Japan, it doesn't raise flags as much as it does elsewhere. The move was changed to "Profane Punch" for the English version.
Toys
- The team behind LEGO's 2001 BIONICLE series took inspiration from Polynesian mythologies and languages, mainly Maori, to give their work a unique flavor, with some even hoping that the Maori will appreciate such a gesture. Unfortunately, the dictionary they used didn't elaborate beyond the words' literary definition. The small islanders were named Tohunga, meaning expert or craftsman, which happened to also be the title of traditional medical practitioners and priests who were discrimianted against by Western settlers for supposed witchcraft. Maori cultural representatives reached out to LEGO, though unlike what most believe, a lawsuit was avoided. LEGO not only removed almost all references to the word (replacing it with the made-up "Matoran"), they reconfigured the entire BIONICLE franchise to discard or downplay its cultural-mythological elements, and established an expensive legal check for future names ($10,000 per name in a franchise with lots of characters) specifically to avoid such incidents. All because they took the wrong dictionary off the shelf.
- The Transformers character Over-Run was never originally going to have that name; it was going to be called Spastic. When it came to Hasbro's attention that that word has a wildly different meaning in the United Kingdom (it's a very derogatory term for people with mental disabilities), they admitted that they were unaware of the negative connotation of its British meaning.
TV Tropes
- The term Fan Wank: There's usually discord between it and the tone of the environment in which it's being used. This gets even more discordant when someone describes a claim as being Wankable. And of course, if you know what it means you could take it as a compliment (it's used as one in porn reviews).
- That apparently metaphorical meaning of 'wank' seems to have overtaken the literal British meaning on the Internet. Apparently alternate history's full of wankers.
- However, the term Fan Wank often has a more literal meaning when used by Brits. In the Doctor Who fandom, for instance, Fan Wank is used to mean "Continuity references put in the script to get the fans off", as if the writers were tossing the fanbase off.
Visual Novels
- The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures has a large portion of its plot set in the Great British Empire, it was almost inevitable for the Fan Translation to run into this. At one point in Episode Three, a Juror loudly exclaims "BOLLOCKS!"note Quite something for a series whose official translations use Gosh Dang It to Heck!
- The title of the animesque Visual Novel Katawa Shoujo was initially this. "Katawa" is considered an ableist slur that is similar to "cripple", and is bad enough that people aren't allowed to say it on Japanese TV and radio. After the game's creators were informed that the title was offensive, they... decided to leave it as it was, combining this trope with Intentionally Awkward Title.
- Jett in Queen of Thieves cheerfully calls Nikolai a "wanker" when commiserating with the heroine about some of his recent frustrating behavior.
Webcomics
- In one strip in Irregular Webcomic!, Colonel Haken discovers what he assumes to be a coprolite, only for Erwin to tell him it isn't one yet. Haken drops the brown object in question and exclaims, "Ach! Verdammte Scheiße!" David Morgan-Mar assumed the word "Scheiße" was a mild German word, only to be informed by German readers that it is actually a very rude one.
- The Polandball comics have Poland dropping "kurwa" ("fuck!") every other sentence. Though combined with the stereotype that Poles swear a lot it seems oddly fitting.
- Similarly, Finland in Scandinavia and the World has "perkele" as his catchphrase (if not only word), which is much the same thing.
Web Original
- Gavin Free of Achievement Hunter, who is British, actually comes off as one of the cleaner Let's Players of the group in the US because he doesn't use "fuck", "shit", or "cunt" all that often, but he tosses off "bugger" and "bloody bollocks" without batting an eye.
- Parodied in The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the Amiga CD32, when he's forced to use a power adapter since the console was never released in North America and decides to "adapt" his swears too by using terms like "bloody", "cunt", "bollocks", "wank", and "arse".
- Atop the Fourth Wall:
- Linkara once, "borrowed a phrase from the British" to describe people as 'twats', but pronounced it 't-wot' — to rhyme with hot, instead of 't-wat' to rhyme with hat. This is how the word is pronounced in the United States, but not in the UK. Cue many confused British people wondering what the hell a twart is and why it's apparently British.
- In his second "Top 15 Screw-Ups", he notes that his use of "heroic spaz attack" has been discontinued after his British fans informed him of its association with cerebral palsy.
- Bravest Warriors never uses strong language intentionally, but there is a character named Wankershim. This may have been intentional, given his behavior in "Butter Lettuce". After an incident where Wankershim absorbed the Universe, it was re-titled as "The Wankerverse".
- While swearing is rare and mild in the Homestar Runner universe (with the odd exception of the word "crap"), in sb_email 22, Strong Bad receives an e-mail from a fan from England. Since the e-mail concluded with "Thank You," Strong Bad told the sender he would sound more English if he used something in its place like "Cheers", "Cheerio", or "Nevermind the Bullocks". Knowing Strong Bad, he probably didn't know or care he was being offensive, or perhaps thought he was but wasn't, since the British term is 'bollocks', and 'bullocks' refers to cattle.
- Strong Sad casually uses the word 'spaz' in Strong Bad Email 99 "different town".
- Played straight and averted by Survival of the Fittest, as some British characters are played by British handlers themselves, while others do tend to lapse into this.
- Wil Wheaton exclaims 'Bollocks' multiple times in the Ticket to Ride: Europe episode of TableTop. This is later discussed in the episode's gag reel:
Wil: We can say 'Bollocks' in America like crazy, and nobody knows what we're saying, but over in Europe, they have a real problem with that. Also, hello, England. Fanny.
- Vinesauce Vinny adopted the phrase "mingeing gobshite" as a generic insult he uses whenever he slips into a British accent as a bit. Limes, who is actually English, eventually found out about this and pointed out to him that "mingeing" isn't even a real word and that he'd probably been mispronouncing "minging" (pronounced as in Priceless Ming Vase), which is a pretty mild insult compared to any permutation of the word "minge". And also that "minging gobshite" would be a pretty anachronistic expression because "gobshite" has fallen out of use nowadays.
- Bakura in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series swears one bloody hell of a lot. You wankers. Invoked since the maker of the videos actually IS British.
Western Animation
- Animaniacs: Amusingly, Wakko, who speaks with a Liverpudlian accent, has used the term "fanny" a few times.
- In the Daria episode "Depth Takes a Holiday", the Holiday Spirit of Guy Fawkes Day punctuated nearly everything he said with the word 'Bollocks!'; "wanker" and "tossers" also make an appearance. As a result, the entire episode was (mercifully, one imagines) cut from the UK presentation of the series. The fact that the episode played mostly uncut on Noggin, when the song 'Gah God Damn It!' from "Daria! The Musical" was removed, is the source of quite a few snickers by those few US fans who were in the know.
- Codename: Kids Next Door has a character whose full name is Francine, but who everyone just calls "Fanny" (assuming they're not using her title). "Fanny" is an Embarrassing First Name in America but it's even more embarrassing using its British meaning. To add to this, Fanny has an Irish accent, meaning that she likely spent a chunk of her childhood in Ireland.
- The Fairly OddParents!: Cosmo and Wanda's son was named Poof, with the writers unaware that it's a homophobic slur in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The team behind The Fairly OddParents!: A New Wish were aware of this and had his name changed to Periwinkle; Peri for short.
- Family Guy:
- Family Guy have also used to the 'w' word — when Stewie makes it to the set of Jolly Farm Revue and is told to "Piss off, you grotty little wanker!" Family Guy being the tasteful show it is, they probably knew what was being said, judging by previous examples of Family Guy fun with Anglicisms:
Cleveland: The only British idiom I know is that "fag" means "cigarette."
Peter: Well, someone tell this "cigarette" to shut up. - Stewie (who has a fake British accent because he's a villain), uses both British and American words. Cue hilarity when he vainly refers to his backside as his "fanny."
- The "cigarette" example comes up again in the "Chap of the Manor" episode, where we're presented with a fake British show that American Guy is supposedly based on.
- Family Guy have also used to the 'w' word — when Stewie makes it to the set of Jolly Farm Revue and is told to "Piss off, you grotty little wanker!" Family Guy being the tasteful show it is, they probably knew what was being said, judging by previous examples of Family Guy fun with Anglicisms:
- This clip from The Flintstones where Wilma says "bollix," which comes from the same root as "bollocks" (balls) and actually means the same (messed up) as "bollocks". In the US at leastnote , bollix can be used in polite society, whereas, while we might not know the root or real meaning of either word, we have a feeling that bollocks shouldn't be used when ladies are present. (If Lady Snootington is present, its best not to use bollix either, lest she deem us to be a wanker.
- The word is used again in 'Dino Goes Hollyrock' by an agent.
- Hey Arnold! is jam-packed with this:
- When there is a British character featured with dialogue, they nearly always use "bloody" as a casual adjective.
- It gets worse when Brit fashion designer Johnny Stitches shows up to make Helga his new muse. He casually swears all the time, and punctuates his exit with one almighty "BOLLOCKS!" Oddly, this remains uncensored on Netflix UK.
- Jetta from Jem uses "bloody" occasionally. She's rude, aggressive, and generally considered the worst Misfit.
- Mighty Max had an episode featuring swarms of killer insects in which Max regularly refers to them by the term "bugger." It's not clear whether the creators wished to imply that he was a closet Orson Scott Card fan (unlikely given his Book Dumb tendencies), genuinely didn't know what it meant in the UK, or were well aware of what it meant. Hilarity Ensued when the show was picked up for syndication over here and transmitted without anyone bothering to watch it all the way through first...
- Monster High: Ghouls Rule used the word "spaz" a few times, considered in its native U.S. to be a perfectly safe word for someone briefly acting wild. Since it's an ableist slur in the UK, the closed captions for the hearing impaired censored it.
- A mild version crops up in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic in the episode "Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000." Specifically, the fact that in North America, "cider" is generally used to refer to a non-alcoholic drink whereas across the pond it's generally assumed to be alcoholic, what Americans would refer to as "Hard Cider." As a result, a lot of Europeans got a kick out of the cast going to ridiculous lengths in order to get cider.
- One episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) featured the Mayor catching a flying object and exuberantly yelling "I've got it, I've got the little bugger!" The first part of the line was apparently looped when it aired in Europe.
- Happened in The Simpsons several times:
- Bart has used the word "wanker" several times, and more egregiously, Groundskeeper Willie used the word "shite" to describe a tractor. You'd think people would notice that it's just one almost silent letter away from its American counterpart. (Sky1 apparently didn't notice this until after their first airing of this episode — unsurprisingly it's cut from future screenings, and as Channel 4 runs the series at 6 pm it's safe to say it's snipped there as well.)
- "Love, Springfieldian Style" featured a Sex Pistols parody including a song consisting entirely of "<Noun> is bollocks!"; for comparison, this is essentially equivalent to "bullshit." When the episode was aired on Sky in the UK it was the first Simpsons episode ever to premiere after the watershed.
- The same episode also used "slag off", used in the context where an American would probably tell someone to "piss off"; viewers across the pond would have heard the term for "talking smack" instead of its intended meaning. An earlier episode, "The Otto Show" (where Bart wants to be a rock star after seeing Spinal Tap) features "slag off" being used in the same context, so either this was a deliberate Call-Back, or someone didn't do their research even with a little over a decade separating the episodes.
- Winked at in "The Frying Game", where Homer is forced to ensure the safety of a screaming caterpillar taking up refuge in their garden. After making it clear several times he wishes to kill it but knows he can't, Homer accidentally (almost) kills it. The judge then sentences him to community service for (among other things) "...aggravated buggery."
- The episode "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken" features The Bloodening, a spoof of classic English horror films (particularly Village of the Damned (1960)), which centres on a group of children being able to tell the adults of the village their secrets. One of the children accuses two men of rogering a woman. That scene is uncensored on Channel 4.
- The episode "Trash of the Titans" features the Irish band U2 and repeated use of the word 'wankers.' There's a discussion in the DVD Commentary, where it's noted that the band was surprised by its repeated casual use, and the show's staff was surprised that it was an issue at all.
- It's also gone right over Principal Skinner's head on one occasion in "I'm Spelling As Fast As I Can":
Bart: Oh, come on, everyone knows the first day of school's a total wank.Skinner: If by wank you mean educational fun, then stand back, it's wanking time.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Plankton's Army", Plankton says if he and his relatives all unite and work together, they could be "a real pain in the fanny." Censors for Nickelodeon UK have either permitted the line or it's managed to slip past them for years.
- Teen Titans (2003) has the Spanish-speaking twins Mas y Menos (who are two of the youngest Titans at that). In one episode they say "Y este viejo esta jodiendo. "Jodiendo" is a profane word which translates to "fucking" (as in "fucking with us"). It's unlikely that they were meant to actually say that. The Spanish dub changed their wording.
- The Transformers episode "The Girl Who Loved Powerglide" opens with a man with a British accent saying "I feel like an absolute bloody fool." When the series was released on DVD in the UK, the box set containing the episode was slapped with a "PG" rating for mild language, whereas the other sets were given "U" ratings (the UK equivalent to the American "G").
- Beast Wars and Transformers: Animated used "Slag" as an epithet, which while referring to metallic ore byproduct, is also a slur meaning "slut" in Britain, causing UK broadcasts of those shows to undergo edits. This also necessitated the rename of the Dinobot Slag to the related term "Slug" in recent years.
- Beast Wars and Transformers: Animated used "Slag
