He regards the coinage of tanj ("There Ain't No Justice") by Larry Niven as a "noble experiment" that "proved that euphemisms are often worse than the crudities that they replace", because they make the story look silly.
[2][3] Ruth Wajnryb shares this opinion, stating that tanj or flarn do not work as profanities because they are not real, and are "just a futile attempt to give clean-cut stories some foul-mouthed action".
[4] Jes Battis observes, in contrast, that the use of frell and dren in Farscape allowed the television series to get away with dialogue that would normally never have made it past broadcasting and network censorship.
Battis also notes that Firefly used a similar strategy, by using Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese for all profanities, also using the word gorram as a replacement for god damn, a phrase usually considered blasphemous.
[8] In the series of Star Trek: New Frontier novels by Peter David, the principal protagonist, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun, frequently utters the word grozit, a curse from his home world of Xenex.
[1] Battlestar Galactica's frak, a word that Lee Goldberg characterizes as "something truly amazing and subversive" and that Scott Adams calls "pure genius", has also escaped its original context.
Originally spelled frack, it along with felgercarb were coined by writer Glen A. Larson for the 1978 Battlestar Galactica, for much the same reasons that frell and dren were coined for Farscape: the ability to use profane dialogue, with words that would be immediately understood as synonymous with the real profanities that they stood in for, without falling foul of network censorship and broadcasting restrictions accompanying its original Sunday evening broadcast timeslot.
[10] The BBC Two science fiction television series Red Dwarf replaces most of its characters' profanities with invented terms, mainly smeg (possibly a truncation of smegma[citation needed]) and its compound smeg-head.
Some of the most notable substitutions are: fuck → fork, shit → shirt, bitch → bench, asshole → ashhole, and the derivatives motherfucker → motherforker and bullshit → bullshirt.