Wikia

"Smeg" is a mild vulgarism which reached prominence through its use as a supposedly inoffensive expletive in the British science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf. The word was used to replace almost every vulgar term used in the show's conversations, with the exception of the very mild. Additionally, the word itself had many variants, including "smegging" and "smeghead". Indeed, the versatility of the word was epitomized in the Series III episode "Bodyswap":

LISTER: "Oh Smeg. What the smegging smeg's he smegging done?"

Taken from the "Red Dwarf: Smeg Outs" VHS (1995)

The show's creators (Grant Naylor) have stated it was not related to a medical term and was a made up swear word. The show has consistently claimed to know nothing of the word "smegma", and that "smeg" was entirely made up, sounding as it did like a generic, four-letter, single-syllable swear-word that might be used in the future (and so could be used in the programme in place of swear words that, at the time, would not usually be used in mainstream sitcoms).

Lexicographer Tony Thorne, in his 1990 Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (ISBN 0-7475-2856-X), reports instances of "smeg" (and derivatives) being used as a term of "mild contempt and even affection" among "schoolboys, students and punks" as early as the mid-1970s — a decade or so prior to the inception of the Red Dwarf phenomenon — and claims unequivocally that the etymology of the term traces back to "smegma".

In the "Let's Swear" item in Bachelor Boys', the The Young Ones book, the character Rick, played by Rik Mayall, calls another character "smeg face".

Some other usages include:

"Smeg off!"
"Smeghead!"
"Smeggin' hell!"
"Oh, smeg! What the smegging smeg's he smegging done? He's smegging killed me!"

In Red Dwarf mechanoids that are programmed to obey humans may have difficulty deploying smeg and other epithets against humans. However, they can be taught to override their programming, as Kryten did.

The term "Smeg Up" was coined by the cast and crew to refer to bloopers during production; several volumes of "Smeg Up" (or, alternately, "Smeg Out") VHS tapes were released in the 1990s, and "Smeg Ups" have been regular features of the various DVD and Blu-ray releases of the series.

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at {{{1}}}. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Tongue Tied, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.