This question is really very interesting.
tl;dr
The short answer is no, not really: there is nowhere today in the English-speaking world where religious imagery is anywhere near as frequently used for swearing as occurs in French-speaking Québec.
Detail, details, details
I strongly encourage anyone who can read French to read the Wikipedia article on Sacre québecois in the French version, not just in the shorter and duller English version.
The richness and versatility of Quebecker religious profanity is remarkable. Yes, using religious words as “offensive” language — swearing, cursing, taboo words, whatever you care to call them — occurs in all languages, regions, and cultures. But in Québec they surpass anything seen in Spain or Portugal or Italy or even France herself. And that’s without yet venturing into the English-speaking world.
If you read the section on Sacres outside Québec French, you will see that these really have no equivalent in English. Oh sure, a few common curses or milder minced oaths in English deal with religion — as I mentioned earlier, that sort of thing happens everywhere. But nothing like in Québec.
The WP article does mention an older habit of Irish Catholics, which is the only thing I could find that even starts to approach the Quebecker experience:
Irish Catholics of old employed a similar practice, whereby ‘ejaculations’ were used to express frustration without cursing or profaning (taking the Lord’s name in vain). This typically involved the recitation of a rhyming couplet, where a shocked person might say ‘Jesus who, for love of me/Died on the Cross at Calvary’ instead of ‘Jesus!’ This is often abbreviated simply to ‘Jesus-hoo-fer-luv-a-me’, an expression still heard among elderly Irish people. Also: ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!’
Sure, examples of using Christian words in English exist, although some appear dated:
- My God! > My goodness!
- (God) damn it! > Gosh darn it!
- Jesus! > Jeeze!
- Holy Christ! > Holy cow!
- Go to Hell!
- Devil take you!
And even
The WP article on minced oaths lists a few of these dated expressions, most of them now unrecognizable in their original forms:
In some cases the original meanings of these minced oaths were forgotten; bloody became a contraction of “by Our Lady” (i.e., the Blessed Virgin Mary), ’struth (“By God’s truth”) came to be spelled strewth, and zounds changed pronunciation (with the vowel as in found) so that it no longer sounded like “By God’s wounds”. Other examples from this period include ’slid for “by God’s eyelid’ (1598) and ’sfoot for “by God’s foot” (1602). Gadzooks for “by God's hooks” (the nails on Christ's cross) followed in the 1650s, egad for “oh God” in the late 17th century, and ods bodikins for “by God’s bodkins” (i.e. nails") in 1709.
Even were those still in vogue, they are next to nothing compared with the long Quebecker list on WP. I will omit that list here to avoid giving offence, but you should take a look at it if won’t bother you too much. It’s truly remarkable.
This Slate article asserts that the old swear words based on sexuality or religious profanity are giving way to new ones based on sociological judgements. They therein muse that:
The shift in taboos away from sacrilege and gross-out topics toward more personal and, well, flat-out mean epithets appears to be a move in the right direction. The increasingly offensive nature of these words—and the visceral, emotional responses they trigger within us when spoken or heard—just might amount to a signifier of social progress.
The Economist asks similar questions, this time specifically about the :religious profanity of francophone Québec, in an article entitled Swearing in Quebec: If you profane something no one holds sacred, does it make a swear?. The author ponders:
The theory is that it was a form of rebelling against the Roman Catholic church, whose clergy were a dominant force in the lives of Quebeckers, providing health, social services and education, until they handed these powers over to the state following the social upheaval of the 1960s. To casually utter tabarnak, calisse, or the even more popular ostie (host) was a way to thumb your nose at the powers that be.
As theories go, it makes sense. Showing disrespect for something—a prerequisite for certain forms of swearing—only works if the expectation of respect is there to begin with. Quebeckers were highly religious. [. . .]
. . .
With the Roman Catholic church much less of a presence in the daily lives of Quebeckers, the religious words are losing their punch. Swear words disappear not through censorship, but when they no longer offend, according to the exhibit. The tamer ones—esprit (spirit), sacrament, and baptême (baptism)—have already disappeared from daily discourse, it notes, and the others may soon follow.
. . .
When profanity no longer serves, there is always obscenity to fall back on. My stepdaughter, who was born and raised in Montréal says her twenty-something friends increasingly use a mix of English and French, such as calisse de bitch.
Im summary, no, l’Anglophonie has nothing comparable to what la Francophonie has in the Quebecker religious swear words.
These figures are almost always the numbers for the top N words in a corpus. The results can vary considerably depending on what corpus is used and what N is (as you can see in this paper).
"The English language is a lot more French than we thought, here’s why" (by Andreas Simons, on Medium), summarizes one of the sources Wikipedia quotes for the 29% Latin figure:
The latest research was done in 1975 by Joseph M. Williams, where he examined the 10,000 most frequently used words in English, based on a rather small sample size of corporate letters. Here are my issues with his research:
- the research carries a bias towards French and Latin, as companies are more likely to use academic language
- proper names were not removed, possibly diluting the results for an etymological composition
- he used the 10 000 most common words in that corpus of letters, not really “core vocabulary”
Because of these problems, the author found numbers of his own by taking a list of the 5,000 most common English words (which will be about "85% of all words in any English source") and scraping etymology sites (mostly Etymonline) to see what languages were mentioned in the first few words of each word's etymology:
Note that sometimes a word of Latin origin will return “French” using my method. This is because Etymonline always mentions French before Latin if the word entered English through French and the word changed sufficiently from the root. A word such as “origin” (from “origo”) will therefore return French, whereas a word such as “provide” (from “providere — provideo”) will return Latin.
I'm not sure how much I trust the results, but this is the most transparent analysis I found so far — the code used to generate the numbers is linked to in the article. This code can be modified to output words it classifies as Latin. I haven't run the code myself but it looks pretty simple to make these edits. Lines 220-240 in the original Sorter.py are:
for word in words1:
print(word)
origin = scrape_and_interpret(word)
if origin == "french":
count_french += 1
list_french.append(word)
elif origin == "latin":
count_latin += 1
list_latin.append(word)
elif origin == "old_english":
count_old_english += 1
list_old_english.append(word)
elif origin == "germanic":
count_germanic += 1
list_germanic.append(word)
elif origin == "greek":
count_greek += 1
list_greek.append(word)
elif origin == "other":
list_other.append(word)
count_other += 1
Change two lines and get this:
for word in words1:
#print(word) # Comment out print statement that prints all words
origin = scrape_and_interpret(word)
if origin == "french":
count_french += 1
list_french.append(word)
elif origin == "latin":
count_latin += 1
print(word) # Add `print` so that it prints out words of Latin origin
list_latin.append(word)
elif origin == "old_english":
count_old_english += 1
list_old_english.append(word)
elif origin == "germanic":
count_germanic += 1
list_germanic.append(word)
elif origin == "greek":
count_greek += 1
list_greek.append(word)
elif origin == "other":
list_other.append(word)
count_other += 1
Alternatively, if you have access to the online OED, it's pretty easy to get a list by searching for current words of Latin origin, sorted by frequency. Note that many of these words also turn up when you search instead for words of French origin, since so many words have multiple etymological influences (it would be a bit strange to count them in only one direction or the other). I'm sure most people who know at least some English will recognize the top 1000 words on said list of Latin-origin words, and most educated people will recognize at least most of the next 1000 words, if not more.
Best Answer
Yes, there's even two sections for different types of these in the Wikipedia article about French phrases used in English ("List of French expressions in English"):
Not used as such in French
Found only in English
I remember reading before that nom de plume is not idiomatic in French, where instead they use nom de guerre. However, it appears that nom de plume now exists in French as well (thanks to Basj for the correction), possibly due to influence from the English term.
Another funny one I vaguely remembered reading about is giclée, a neologism coined to make art printed using an inkjet printer sound fancier, but that has unfortunate connotations of ejaculation in French (it literally refers to a "spurt" or "squirt").