Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Martha and Grant, I LOVE your show. I've been listening via podcast for about six months. Thanks for all of your work. I fully enjoy it.

Now to the meat of the post. I am an aspiring novelist, like so many others. As I have been working (I have written approximately 45,000 words) I find myself searching for ways to offer depth to my characters and world. One way is to give each character their own turns of phrase, etc. So, now I am looking for a list of curses, profanity, and generally offensive terms for my characters to use as they attempt to survive the conflicts within my story. Since my story is not set on our planet or in our day I have been trying to create my own "realistic" curses. I think that a list from our history would be very helpful to reference and add more witty and archaic responses for them.

Preferably I would love to find a list of such things that include words or phrases from the present to as far back in history as we can go. Even without my need for such a thing I think that a list of this kind would be terribly interesting. I have searched online for a list but all I have found are multitudes of commentaries for the "F-word" and other common four-letter words of our day.

Thanks, in advance, to anyone who can help with my search.