Glaswegians don’t use swear words either….it’s more like punctuation.
Context is everything so in glasgow theres a sort of sustained “****in’……” as a pause where anyone else would fill a gap with ‘errrrr’ and it makes the word mean nothing. Unlikely to get you a job as a Blue Peter Presenter though. I don’t think Blue Peter is ready to be that blue yet.
It interesting looking at the way language is censored on TV – theres a hierarchy of swears (and when you look at definitions of ‘berk’ ‘bugger” and ‘sod’ its hard to reason why they are low scorers- but theres also the question of intent.
We had a problem with a documentary where someone was wearing a **** cancer tshirt for their last day of chemo. The tshirt itself was censored anyway – it didn’t actually say **** – but the channel insisted it was blurred out and we had to argue that blurring it made it look like the shirt wasn’t uncensored and blurring it inferred this person would happily walk around with **** on their chest and that was a distortion of their character – the blurring also took your focus off the more important and profound things that were happening in the scene. But their issue was the ‘ **** ‘ was angry even though it was expressing an angry sentiment towards cancer. An angry **** scores more highly than a **** said in surprise or fear. So in a depiction of act of aggression the word is a more censorable word than if its said in a depiction of someone banging their head or getting their dinger caught in their zip.
Then you get all sorts of weirdnesses like (errm – lets just say) ‘monkeyfumbler’. In the world of uk tv ‘monkeyfumbler’ is far less rude if you say it ironically in an american accent. So if its in ironic air quotes its sort of OK but if you say it like you mean it then its not.