word choice - Is "what on earth" still commonly used in real life? Is there any alternative that is not cursing or obscene?


I'm a non-native speaker. When I was at school, we were taught that "on earth" is used for emphasis in questions such as:



What on earth are you talking about?



However, from my experience (English movies, TV, online discussions, etc.), I seldom see people actually use the phrase "on earth".


From what I see, the most commonly used phrases that express basically the same meaning are "What the fuck..." and "What the hell...".


I don't like cursing or obscenity (call me old-fashioned), so here are my questions:


Is "on earth" still commonly used in real life?


Is there any alternative that is not cursing or obscene?



Answer



The usage stats from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) look as follows:


                          BNC             COCA
                      TOTAL  SPOKEN   TOTAL  SPOKEN

what the hell          716     143    4668     408
what on earth          585      85     607      99
what the fuck           93      30     980       1
what the heck           31      15     671     294
what the devil          55       7     121       6
what in heaven's name   12       1      29       4
what the blazes          9       1       8       0
what the deuce           2       0       9       1 
what the flip            0       0       2       1
what the blank           0       0       0       0

As you can see, "what on earth" is still common on both sides of the pond, but relatively more common in the UK than in the US.


So let's look more closely at its popularity in the States. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) paints the following picture:


enter image description here


(X axis: year, Y axis: incidences per million words)


This suggests that indeed, both "what the hell" and "what the fuck" have been getting more popular in the recent decades.


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