Being more deliberate in speech is one of those things that has a lot of stops and starts, at least for me. I've pretty much entirely replaced "theory" with "hypothesis" in my speech in the contexts you describe. I've also worked on removing slurs (although the ableist ones are the last to go, at least in my vocabulary).
Religious-based swearing, though... that I feel I've gone backwards on. My swears include [i]more[/i] Jesus now than they ever have before. Part of that may be that I grew up Jewish and so Jesus doesn't really mean anything to me or my family so it's a useful word that people recognize as being some kind of blasphemy and I do enjoy blaspheming. But I've noticed recently how [i]much[/i] I use it and that makes me feel a bit weird. I'll have to think about substitutions.
no subject
Date: 7/15/14 01:23 pm (UTC)From:Religious-based swearing, though... that I feel I've gone backwards on. My swears include [i]more[/i] Jesus now than they ever have before. Part of that may be that I grew up Jewish and so Jesus doesn't really mean anything to me or my family so it's a useful word that people recognize as being some kind of blasphemy and I do enjoy blaspheming. But I've noticed recently how [i]much[/i] I use it and that makes me feel a bit weird. I'll have to think about substitutions.