It’s easy to complain about the arbitrary limitations movies can be forced to adhere to when it comes to profanity, but the best writers are the ones who know how to embrace that limitation and use it to their advantage. Sometimes, they even get creative to come up with their own expletives and insults, especially when it means dodging a potential R rating. These efforts give us such quotable gems as “scruffy-looking nerf herder,” “son of a motherless goat,” and “warthog-faced buffoon”—irresistible turns of phrase that have all been collected in a new mash-up from Burger Fiction.
Sometimes, it’s clear what word is being replaced—like when Napoleon Dynamite mutters “freakin’ idiot!” Other times, the insults are more personal and specific, as with the rapid-fire burns exchanged between Robin Williams’ Peter Banning (Pan) and the cockatoo-haired Rufio in Hook. And at their best, these sanitized exclamations can even be artfully alliterative—like when the Wizard of Oz calls the Tin Man a “clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk.”
