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> Are these people so upset by the word that their brains fail to parse it when one vowel is obscured?

You're at your mom's house, eating dinner. Suddenly, you realize that a call to nature must be answered, urgently.

Which phrase do you use?

    "Mom, hold that thought, I gotta take a shit"
    "Excuse me for a moment, I need to use the bathroom"


That's utterly different. When someone says "use the bathroom," my unconscious brain doesn't automatically substitute it with "take a shit" in the parsing process, which is what happens with bleeped swearwords on TV and with f*ck style censorship on the page.

"Go to the bathroom" and "take a shit" are completely separate phrases, they don't even necessarily refer to the same activity. It's not even really a euphemism.




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