how very english...

So, an American friend of mine read an interview with a singer called Josh Groban, who'd just visited the UK, in which he said this:

"When I got back to LA, I kept saying 'bloke.' And p*** b******s when I was angry!"

She asked me if I could tell her what had been blanked out.
This is what I came up with (How'd I do? How'd I do?):

Well...
Assuming that the number of asterisks corresponds to the number of letters in each word...
B******s is almost definitely 'bollocks', which means 'testicles', although it could be 'bastards' which, I guess you already know, means 'illegitimate children'.
'Bollocks' is more likely because it is used as a general exclamation or indicator of frustration whereas 'bastards' seems more directed to a particular group of people.
P*** is slightly harder to decide for. 'Piss' is a strong contender - especially when used together with bollocks. Although I have never heard the two words used on their own, I have frequently heard and used the sequence, 'shit...piss...bollocks' to express displeasure - displeasure so strong that I am willing to subject those around me to a string of the best percussive expletives I can manage just to get my point across. 'Piss', of course, meaning 'urine'.
It could be 'poof', meaning 'homosexual', but that has such a perjorative sense in 'English' English that I doubt he would have used that word in an interview...it's kind of a gay 'n' word.
So, I think that we're dealing with 'piss bollocks' here. I could be wrong. I could be trying to shoehorn my own personal favourites into someone else's mouth - and believe me, i have NEVER tried to get my piss or my bollocks into someone else's mouth before - or I could just have missed something else very obvious, but 'piss bollocks' gets my vote.

I hope this helps.

Love 'n' stuff,

mrtat.


p.s. Interestingly enough (or not) I remember reading recently that if you went back in time to when shakespeare was writing, you would understand very little of the spoken english that you heard. Only a handful of english words have remained unchanged aurally from that time and among them are 'shit', 'piss' and 'bollocks'. Which just goes to show, as does my last post, that THE OLD ONES ARE THE BEST.



...So there you go.
What are friends for, eh?
Oh yeah...
When you were young did you ever fake being ill just to get the day off school and then go in the next day to find out that something really cool had happened while you were away that would never happen again? This happened to me once, and it was a whole English lesson on swearing that I missed.
Shit.