About the Project
Why study fictional profanity?
Because the words a fictional world invents to swear by tell you everything about that world.
HolyShirtBalls is an open archive and reference site for fictional profanity — the made-up swear words, curses, insults, euphemisms, and taboo expressions invented by writers, game designers, and screenwriters to give their invented worlds texture and emotional weight.
Every culture — real or imagined — reveals its deepest values through the words it forbids. When a worldbuilder invents profanity, they’re encoding social hierarchies, religious anxieties, and political histories into a single syllable. Frak tells us its fictional society carries the same emotional voltage as ours. Belgium as an extreme obscenity (Hitchhiker’s Guide) is a philosophical joke about the arbitrariness of all taboo. Belter Creole’s vocabulary in The Expanse embeds centuries of political oppression into its phonology. These aren’t incidental details — they’re the craft of building believable worlds.
And sometimes the invented words escape. Frak did. Smeg did. The Good Place’s entire vocabulary is currently doing it. That migration — from fictional world to real-world usage — is its own kind of linguistic event, and we track that too.
The archive
Each entry is documented with the rigor of a scholarly dictionary: etymology, first appearance, usage history, semantic drift, taboo trajectory, regional and in-universe variation, and real-world cultural footprint. The archive currently spans 173 entries across 97 franchises in TV, film, books, comics, games, and animation.
It grows through community contributions — every entry can be proposed, refined, and fact-checked through pull requests on GitHub.
The name
“HolyShirtBalls” is itself a fictional profanity — Eleanor Shellstrop’s compound expletive from The Good Place, where the afterlife’s architecture prevents anyone from articulating actual swear words. It felt like the right name for an archive that studies exactly this kind of creative linguistic invention.
Contributing
The archive is open source, and there are absolutely fictional expletives we haven’t cataloged yet. If you know one, add it.