When I need to curse . . .
Under ordinary circumstances, I embarass sailors.
As a long time reader of Elfquest, I have been known to resort to "puckernuts" on occasion. Rare occasion. I don't usually use the made up bad words from SciFi channel like my friends do. Never really got into that one with the blue not quite chick and the farting alien. My friends say "Frill" a lot.
It does manage to sound a bit more ferocious than the somehow formal "Owl pellets!" or the etiolated "Curse it!" and "Dung!" resorted to because Wendy and Richard Pini would prefer not to even push at the edge of PG.
Sometimes I'll disarm it all by pushing it right over the top: "Jesus Hexametrous Christ!" I haven't yet used
hexavalent.
More typically, it'll be more concise: "Oh, wombats!!" "Git in there, you... wombat!"
If I'm being intellectual, I'll display my grasp of something most Americans would call esoteric -- my grasp of Russian
mat' picked up in a previous career. Baaaad Russian obscenity is
Yob' tvoyu mat'! and with a sincere enough delivery it can start fights at least in civilian contexts. Not-quite-obscene obscenity is to invent or compose phrases of words that start with the letters Yo and M. "Yo' Mama" might actually work, especially among Russians fluent and versed in both English and American pop culture!
Naprimer, "Yolki-Matalki" -- a Yo-M phrase that literally means "sticks of fir" and might to effect be recast into English expletive as "Fiddlesticks!" f'r Pete's sake. Something like
Yob' tvoyu babushku v rot with any other details one cares to add (I add in false teeth) drags your grandmother into this, and oral sex too. Though I think by then it starts to get funny. However,
Tvoya babushka yebaetsya s kitaiskimi soldatami is probably usually used seriously -- how would you take being told your grandma debauches herself with Chinese soldiers? Russians are culture-conditioned against oral sex -- whores only, you see -- and this also plays upon the never too buried Russian paranoia about foreigners.
And my wombats occasionally mix in, with
Vombatskaya blyad'! which sounds a bit like Dracula throwing up, and which might be freely cast into English as "Wombat bitch!" Your mileage may vary.