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Censoring oneself, parent-style. What word do you use to avoid going all Blue-streak on your kids? Via Planet Mom:

Needless to say, I shared my choice phrase with the best of them, eagerly offering up the whys and wherefores of my patented utterance, “Son-of-a-buffalo!” Many agreed it was classic and had stood the test of time. It was also practical, in that it was juuuuust lengthy enough to allow for reprogramming in mid-tirade—that magical window of time during which gears shift in the language factory, the brain catches up with the lips and whatever sinful blurb that was going to be produced gets transformed into something far more G-rated.

Reminds me of this passage from Bill Cosby, Himself:

When you’re a father you censor yourself. You get just as angry with a child but you don’t want to say, “What the filth and foul and I’ll filth and foul, filth and foul and, yeah, ya filth and foul face, and I’ll filth and foul, foul, filth!” You don’t want to say that to a child so you censor yourself and you sound like an idiot: “What the… Get your… I’ll put a… Get out of my face!”

You can hear the whole thing here. Clip starts at about the 21-minute mark.