Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, turn, gold urn, gosh dad, gosh dang, gosh awful, blast, contain, confound, by Jove, by Ringo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Bigelow Papers), joined, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.

Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States