Darned to Heck
From “damned to hell”, to “darned to heck” - it’s probably the best polite slap of reality in situations where the audience is too sensitive towards set and very specific combinations of letters, which, by the way, depend on the context of language (meaning that ass in German - translating to ‘ate’, as in ‘ate a cookie’ - is fine with English speakers so long as not surrounded by English words. Incidentally, the pronunciation and spelling of the English word “ash” is a German curse word, translating back to English as “ass.”)
So what makes a curse word? The set letter combination, or the language that surrounds it?