- Many emotive taboo words or phrases, despite having nothing in common semantically, can substitute for each other syntactically
- Many (nonsensical) modern taboo expressions come from originally historical religious expressions that lost their emotive power → frigative substitution
- e.g. Damn you → fuck you, Holy God/Jesus → holy shit
- Profanity → obscenity and scatology
- Happens in other languages too
- In these constructions, semantic meaning plays no role in uniting
- Taboo words can give insight into grammatical constructions not evident in non-taboo lexicon