Blistering Barnacles

Like that other eccentric seafarer Captain Haddock, Quint has a seemingly endless stream of invective to draw upon. However, whereas Tintin's companion ransacks the language from A (Aardvark! Abecedarians!) to Z (Zapotecs!), most of Quint's curses revolve around the letter F. The insults with which he taunts the shark are almost entirely sexual: over three pages of text he calls it "a motherfucker", a "cocksucker", a "godforsaken sonofabitch", a "miserable prick", an "uppity fuck" and a "shit-eater". Only at the moment of reckoning - when he plunges a final harpoon into the shark's belly - does Quint's language take on a biblical tone ("God damn your black soul!").

Quint had his mouth washed out with soap by the scriptwriters. In the movie he recites a dirty limerick ("Here lies the body of Mary Lee ...") and teases Brody with innuendo as they leave harbour ("Don't worry, chief! They may not like you going out, but they'll love you coming back in!"). Otherwise, his cursing is kept within PG limits and the worst thing he calls the shark is not a "fucker" but a "porker." The fishermen of Amity use mild alternatives to the F word ("Why don't you stuff your friggin' head in there, man, and find out if it's a man-eater.") and Brody's final expletive (Smile, you sonofab-") is deleted by the boom of the exploding tank. The only word likely to offend some members of a Seventies audience ("Come on down and chum some of this shit.") was deliberately placed to generate a laugh before the big reveal of the shark's head. In the Inside Jaws documentary on the DVD Spielberg explains how in 1975 the word had the power to make different sections of the audience gasp, giggle or silently cheer.