---
title: "Turned the air blue" means swore a lot; it is a British joke. — Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing · tree and pragmatics
description: "Turned the air blue" means swore a lot; it is a British joke. Who acts: air. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing, sentence 21

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Turned the air blue" means swore a lot; it is a British joke.

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**Who acts:** air · **What happens:** turn, mean, swear, be · **To what, where:** air, lot, British joke · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (air), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:039-pardon-my-french.lesson:21
# text = "Turned the air blue" means swore a lot; it is a British joke.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 039-pardon-my-french.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Turned	turn	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	7	nsubj	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	air	air	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	blue	blue	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	xcomp	_	_
6	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
7	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
8	swore	swear	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	7	ccomp	_	_
9	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	lot	lot	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl:unmarked	_	_
11	;	;	PUNCT	:	_	16	punct	_	_
12	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	16	nsubj	_	_
13	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	16	cop	_	_
14	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
15	British	British	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	16	amod	_	_
16	joke	joke	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	parataxis	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **turn** *in a quote* | past |  | the air |  |  |  | blue *property* | vn roll-51.3.1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent air=Theme |
| 2 | **mean** | present |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **swear** | past |  | a lot |  |  |  |  | vn conjecture-29.5 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **is a** | present | air | a British joke |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

<!-- .note -->
One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)**, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, `mova-school-agreed-en.conllu`) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence `school:euphemisms:039-pardon-my-french.lesson:21`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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