‘What the X’ in Anglophone government meetings: Areal distribution, emotionality, and euphemism

Abstract

This article examines the use of potentially offensive expressions, specifically “what the hell” and its euphemistic variants, in local government meetings across English-speaking countries. Two primary research questions are addressed: first, are there noticeable differences in the frequency of these expressions between countries and within regions? And second, how do euphemistic alternatives compare to “what the hell” in terms of emotional intensity and valence, both across and within national varieties? The study draws on data from three large, recent corpora of geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts and the corresponding underlying audio to explore the geographic distribution and emotional nuances of these expressions in various English-speaking countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. To assess the emotionality of expressions, specifically anger, the speech emotion recognition model emotion2vec is employed. The findings provide insight into how the acceptability and emotional weight of “what the hell” and variants differ across regions. Additionally, the study demonstrates the potential of vector-based representations of speech in multimodal corpus analysis, while empirically validating theoretical claims in semantics related to pejoration and euphemism.