I bust out with "For the love of cute and fluffy things!" to a guy who'd sidled up to me and told me an anecdote with the punchline of "and my ass is the fourth of July". I'm sure he thinks he's dealing with some sort of Polyanna syndrome.

Then again, in a project meeting he said "Well, what happens when we encounter the problem again?" and I almost snapped at him saying "That's an unduly negative tone to take! On the offchance that we should come up against this problem again, we will embrace the challenge head on, and vanquish it readily."

The business owner cracked up, but power of words, man, power of words. Cute and fluffy things indeed.

I say "sweet fancy Moses!" fairly often. Don't remember where I got that from.

I often say Holy Mother of God, or Mother of God when I really want to say Motherfucker.

Good gravy.

Aw. My grandmother used to say that all the time. That and, "Good night nurse."

Dad: "Shoot fire and save the matches!"

Mom: "My stars and garters!"

I've become sort of attached to "Hummus on a rice cake!" It conveys the same sort of absurdist excitement, depending on delivery.

Ack. Well, I'm a dummy. I ordered Timeless, and it will be delivered tomorrow. To my office. Which is closed. Bah.

I thought I changed my Amazon preferences so that my home address was my default, but -- obviously not. I must have just ordered it really quickly and didn't even look at the address field.

At least I didn't send it to my brother.

I said, "Jesus, Joseph and Mary!" in a meeting with my boss, who made a crack about being raised Catholic. Which he is, too.

At least I didn't say, "Shit, piss, and corruption!", which used to be one of my mother's more outrageous swears.

"Shit, piss, and corruption!",

Oh man, I like that one.

I was saying "Tartar sauce!" for a while, when the kids were little. It's surprisingly satisfying.

My dad says "damnation!" and "I swanny." For real, no sense of irony, "I swanny." Or is it "swannee?"

My parents used to just not swear around us, until traffic just got too much when I was about 14 or so. One branch of our family (one of the crazy ones) swore liberally around their kids, but only in Patois, so at least when the kid went to school (in the upper class white Detroit suburb where they lived) no one had any idea what she was on about.

Way to go to not put your heart into it.

My mother used to use 'Ayatollah Khomenei' as a swear.

My father was fond of "What the hell are you doing, shit-for-brains," which came back to bite him in the ass when my two year old brother said it to him one day.