Thread:BlackBismuth/@comment-31907272-20170608235005/@comment-24577221-20170609163853

That's a fair point; community standards vary even within a city, let alone from country to country, and subtleties of synonyms are tricky when someone is working in a language that isn't the one they know best.

Some words are rather obviously unacceptable. Some are borderline. I can see why someone might be confused about "crap" because it can be used as a synonym for "feces", but that's not its usual usage now. It's usually used just as a generic term for "something quite unpleasant". Sometimes it's used as an acceptable euphemism for "feces", such as in "bullcrap".

And "feces" is acceptable mostly because it's in Latin. "Merde" is more-or-less acceptable in an English-language medium because it's in French... which probably means that most English speakers don't know it. But Captain Picard used it twice on Star Trek: TNG, so I have to presume that it's okay.