A Los Angeles, California, man says his mother studiously avoided swearing. Instead of a curse word, she substituted the word piffle, which was often even more effective than a four-letter word because it was so unexpected. Piffle is most likely onomatopoetic, suggesting a disgusted exhalation through pursed lips. It’s common in the United Kingdom, and figured in the title of the popular 2006 British television program about etymology, Balderdash & Piffle. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Piffle Swearing Replacement”
Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hey, this is David Malky from just up the coast in Los Angeles.
Hi, David. Welcome to the show. Hi, David. Thanks so much. Glad to talk with both of you.
What can we do for you? Well, I thought you might be interested in something that my mom used to say, and still does say, and she is a good church-going lady who does not like swearing.
And in fact, she would always say that when people swore, it would be distracting for her because people who swear, she would say, don’t notice how much they swear, and people who don’t swear do notice how much they swear.
So it sort of creates an effect that was less than complimentary.
And so what she would do is that she has her own word that she would say when she is frustrated, which is piffle.
And I would spell that P-I-F-F-L-E.
So if she’s working on something and something goes wrong, she’d go, oh, piffle.
And so I didn’t know if that was a word that she made up or if that was just some sort of an old-timey minced oath of some sort.
But the thing that she always liked about it was that she was able to provoke the opposite reaction in other people because, as she would say, I would get more funny looks with a good piffle than any swear word I could have said.
Absolutely. I agree with her.
And plenty of people use the word piffle, particularly I associate it with Britain.
Yeah, me too.
I don’t think that it’s very American.
I mean, it’s definitely used in the United States, but I do.
Yeah.
For me, it’s marked as British.
Yeah, but it’s been around since at least the late 19th century, piffle, and probably comes from just, it’s sort of onomatopoetic, you know, just piffle.
It’s got that plosive sound that lots of good swear words do.
Well, and also, but it’s got the thing where you’re kind of like, it’s a noise of disgust, like pfft.
Sure, sure, sure.
Well, so I wonder if she may have picked it up from watching, you know, Masterpiece Theater or something like that. She was always a big reader, big PBS fan.
Yeah, it could have been.
And there was actually a show back in the mid 2000s called Balderdash and Piffle.
You can actually find it’s a wonderful program that was on the BBC that involved the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary asking the public to help them find the first citations or the first examples of different words in the dictionary.
Like earlier examples than what they have, the origins of those words.
Yeah, and you can find those on YouTube.
They’re a lot of fun.
But piffle is, I think, a wonderful word.
I just ran into somebody recently who says, instead of a curse word, they just say, bad word, which I think, again, like piffle, stops down whatever’s going on and calls attention to itself much more than a curse word does.
I think it’s more effective.
Well, so that’s interesting because what you just said and also what my mom said implies that part of the purpose of swearing is to provoke a reaction in a listener, which I think is only a secondary consideration because otherwise we wouldn’t swear when we were alone.
Right. That makes you feel better too.
Well, yeah, absolutely. It feels like there’s some emotional release that is associated with it, but maybe if you put a big importance on the notion of swearing, then people reacting to what you’re doing is also more important to you.
Right. I agree with you, David. There’s definitely the demonstrative use where you’re performing the word in order to draw attention to yourself or to the circumstances.
But then there’s the utterly ordinary linguistic, typical semantic use of it where it’s just part of your speech and part of your vocabulary.
And I would argue that a really skilled cursor is more of the latter and less of the former.
I would agree.
People that you’ve known who can really just reel out the four-letter words often don’t care at all if they have an audience.
It’s just part of their discourse.
I would agree that, you know, words that – there are always words that some people might object to, but it doesn’t mean that they’re less useful words, you know, if they are part of your language.
So I think in my mom’s case, because she was – because she noticed when other people would swear, she took it upon herself to demonstrate in the opposite way so that, you know, she was sort of putting a stake down for not swearing.
Right.
But if she got up in the middle of the night and stubbed her toe, would she say piffle?
Oh, 100 percent.
Absolutely.
Really?
Absolutely.
Even if no one was listening.
Wow.
Great restraint.
Well, yeah, I just think it’s, you know, for her and the way she was raised and the sort of, you know, the moral compass such as it is that happens to include swearing in, you know, a tight-knit church-going family or what have you.
I feel like those things get ingrained at a certain point.
Yeah, you can ingrain the pithful habit as much as you can ingrain the cursing habit.
David, thank you so much for your call.
We really appreciate it.
Well, I appreciate you looking into it.
Thanks for all the insight.
Yeah, sure.
Take care.
