In what will be the very Last Family Law matter that the firm I currently work for will ever do before it closes its doors due to the boss retiring, we have encountered a particularly delightful piece of 'elegant variation'. Yes, that it the genuine term for this.
A 'sobriquet' is when you replace a name/nickname for a specific person; such as "The Bard" for William Shakespeare. A 'metonym' is when a thing stands in for the whole; as in "Washington" standing in for the US Government. An 'elegant variation' is when a word stands in for another word, or multiple other words; which is distinct from a placeholder term which is designed to conceal.
The Elegant Variation in the case of Apple v Banana (2025) is 'cuss' for every single cuss word which is being said by both Ms Apple and Mr Banana. We have sat through multiple days of cussation which would make sailors blush, which would give rise for ejection from parliament under standing order 94A for being unparliamentary, and which would spray so many blue steaks across the sky that they would write letters a thousand feet high.
There has been so much cussing used of the word 'cuss' that even the cussing lawyers and the cussing judge, have taken to using the word 'cuss' in their replies. It as been abso-cussing-lutely fan-cussing-tastic. Moreover, the transcripts of the case have instead of merely censoring the proceedings, have been inserting the word 'cuss' as an elegant variation into the official transcript.
The really curious thing about the use of the word 'cuss' as an elegant variation, not only in print but as a spoken device, is that the number of cusses has decreased as the case has gone along. This very much suggests that the micro-culture built up within the case has been enough to change people's behaviour. I do not know how long into the future that this will last but if Ms Apple and Mr Banana have been changed by this, then perhaps they might be more pleasant to be around.
I do not know if the lawyers and judges are aware of the stop-motion animated film of Roald Dahl's 'Fantastic Mr. Fox', which was directed by Wes Anderson in 2009 but it has been around long enough that it must have entered at least someone's subconscious by now. Again, I do not know exactly how many times that the word 'cuss' is used as an elegant variation in the film for the various cusses by Messrs. Fox, Badger, Mole, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, et. al. but as best as I can determine there are 17. Wes Anderson himself said that in the initial drafts of the script, that there were three times this amount; which means that the elegant variation in the film was designed to be a running gag from the outset, and then pulled back for comedic timing purposes. Ms Apple and Mr Banana are not even remotely comedians.
As someone who has wrangled many words and has forced them to dance in my strange menagerie of sentences and paragraphs, I quite like the elegant variation of 'cuss' in place for cuss words. While I think it is useful to have cuss words and parts of speech that are generally taboo, continued use of them in everyday conversation, especially to the degree that Ms Apple and Mr Banana were using them, is just gauche. There are different devices and far more pointed turns of phrase that you can use if you want to spit bile and acid at various targets.
I actually wonder if Mr Banana's rampant cussing actually contributed to the break-down in their relationship. By laying the formwork of this case through the use of language, Mr Banana cussed his way to a new tone. Ms Apple probably though "cuss that" because she had enough, and decided to get the cuss out. That's probably a good thing as Mr Banana has repeatedly demonstrated that he is not a nice person; which probably explains the colour of his language. I am not suggesting that he does not know any better how to behave; in fact quite the opposite. All of this seems like a choice.
So it goes I suppose. Clearly Mr Banana has long been desensitised to his own use of language to the point where all of his cussing may as well be meaningless. It doesn't seem to act as an intensifier or even as a modifier of language, rather his cussing is being used in the same kind of way that "Um" or "Like" are used primarily as a filler words, to buy time and signal to the listener that the speaker is still thinking and hasn't finished speaking. Maybe this kind of temporary placeholder is actually being used in during moments of uncertainty and/or while Mr Banana is trying gathering their thoughts. Then again, he doesn't seem to actually think very far ahead; or else we wouldn't have been here in the first place.
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