The Dutch use diseases a lot. Kanker (cancer) for example. Kanker-this, kanker-that. Teens use it a lot, but when you reach a certain age, say 18+, using it in company is a major no-no.
Then there's tyfus (typhoid), used the same way as kanker. Much milder a swearword than kanker is, but still not advisable.
Tering (tuberculosis), a word similar to tyfus.
One can string these together, perhaps adding religious profanities, like Jezusteringtyfuskankerchristus! That one would be seriously frowned upon, by the way.
But I doubt it all has the same ring in English, though. All these words employ hard t's, r's and k's, which sound agressive if you swear in Dutch. Perhaps each language has it's own swearwords that sound most impressive, partly because of the sounds they are comprised of.
I remember running across that on the web somewhere and thinking it was cool. I'm actually using this ideas for one of my cultures that doesn't have a concept of hell as we understand it (so they can't use words like hell or damned as language enhancers) but are concerned with health and cleanliness. So words like plagued, blighted, stagnated are more salient to them. Though there is enough contact between different religions and cultures that there is some "cross-contamination" in terms of idioms, just like there is in modern America.
Like Mr. Fry, I am always a bit nonplussed by the idea that swearing is primarily a lower class phenomenon or shows a lack of education and vocabulary. My dad was a university professor and a very well read man with a very extensive vocabulary, and he swore extensively and creatively, running the spectrum from stock in trade f and s bombs, to more colorful expressions. And I didn't notice an absence of swearing when he and his colleagues got together either. When I was a kid, there was still a double standard, though, and swearing was something "daddies did more than mommies." If my mom swore in front of us kids, you knew you were REALLY in trouble.
I don't swear in professional situations, or in public situations where I don't know people well enough to know whether they'll be offended. As a kid, swear words were something you said around other kids, when you thought the grownups couldn't hear you. And swear words were something grownups said around other grownups (usually) when they thought the kids couldn't hear them. But I learned while living in the dorms in college that some people are really bothered by it, even between age peers, and you can't always predict who. At home, in the bosom of family, though? I'm a foul little thing.
But whether or not we use these words in our own lives, people do and always have, and it seems unrealistic to omit it entirely from fiction, unless you are going for a sort of fairy tale or formal, mythological feel to your fantasy, rather than a more "immersed in the world and characters" tone.
But I do think about when various characters use strong language, who my characters swear "in front of," and which words they use.
