I came across this sentence with a strange use of the word "expletive",
Trump has variously expressed enthusiasm for outsourcing the fight against the Islamic State to Vladimir Putin and for bombing the expletive out of its oil fields.
The word "expletive" doesn't seem to have anything to do with "oil fields" in terms of its meaning. How to understand "bomb the expletive out of something."? Is that an idiomatic expression?
It is a common knowledge that animals pee or poop (excrete) when they are frightened to death. People do, too. Also, animals do it right before their death. That's where the expression came from.
If you scare the s*** out of someone, it figuratively means you scare someone to the extent that they would urinate or defecate. It is a very common expression.
Note: Some do use scare the pee/urine out of someone. It has the same meaning, but less idiomatic and popular.
Sentences such as "I extremely scared her" or "I scared her very much" would not work very well because there is a more common and idiomatic expression.
The expression evolved to become an intensifier for a verb.
"Let's bomb its oil field" doesn't sound intense enough, however, "Let's bomb the s*** out of its oil field" sounds very intense. You just metaphorically compare "its oil field" to an animal or human.
As explained in the other answer, the list of expressions goes on and on. The most important thing to remember is:
Whatever expletive is put in X in Verb X out of Y constructions, it is a strong intensifier. It gets the message across in a strong/intense sense.
I will stop writing on this now before some members "criticize the s*** out of me".
Note: You can use it for a verb like criticize, which means you can be creative in using it.
Edit:
As commented below, the above expression can be toned down a little by saying, "Bomb the hell out of its oil field". It's slightly more acceptable than "bomb the s*** out of its oil field".
Yes this is an idiomatic expression. In general the form is "verb the expletive out of noun". The meaning is just an intensifier of the verb action on the noun. So in your example you could reformulate as "bombing the oil fields of Islamic State extremely thoroughly" though that doesn't pack the same punch as the original.
The expletive in question is most commonly
shit or crap
though other expletives can occasionally be used.
It should be also pointed out that not every verb noun works. You want the noun to be the object of the verb and the action denoted by the verb must be "intensifiable". So you can say for example "I played the s*** out of Halo" meaning you played it a lot and even "I opened the s*** out of that door" (usually in response to a question, and possibly meaning you broke it in some way) but you would be hard pressed to "enter the s*** out of that door" for example.
Most commonly though the idiom is used in terms of fighting as in "I beat the s*** out of sbd" which might actually be the original from which the other phrases are derived by analogy.
Edit: looking at the CoCA corpus by far the most common collocates of "the s*** out of" are fighting words (beat, slap, kick, pound, knock) though scare gets right up in there, being the second most likely verb collocate after beat.
I came across this sentence with a strange use of the word "expletive",
An expletive is strictly any word or phrase that doesn't actually add any meaning to a sentence, for example to add emphasis or to help fit the meter of a poem or song.
It's commonly used for "swear words" (pretty much any word that is considered impolite to use in and of themselves) which are indeed often words that add emphasis but were the meaning would be the same if they were removed. From that sense expletive has come to mean any profanity even if it isn't fully redundant in the way that expletive originally meant.
Now, there are such phrases as "bomb the shit out of them", "beat the crap out of them", "shoot the fuck out of them" and so on. The author wants to reference that phrasing, but doesn't want to actually use one of those expletives. Therefore much like how on television or radio we might "bleep" out an expletive, or how they might also use such mechanism as "bomb the **** out of its oil fields", the author has used the word expletive to stand for the elided expletive.
This particular style of referencing but not using expletives became particularly popular after the Watergate Tapes were published. While Nixon allowed the tapes to be published (not that he had much choice, as they'd been subpoenaed) he had all profanity replaced with the phrase "[expletive deleted]". Ironically this made him seem to be more foul-mouthed than he actually was (what had been Christ or hell in the original changed to imply he may perhaps have said something stronger). Following this "expletive deleted" became a particularly popular choice among some journalists and other writers when reporting upon the use of a profanity, and later reduced to just "expletive".
So in this sense it's largely synonymous with the use of "****" or a bleeping sound.
Your profile places you in Shanghai which is geographically closer to Australia than to the U.S.A.
The U.S. is a country founded by Puritans, so you'll rarely find actual expletives in communication: they "bleep" over them in broadcasts and use asterisks like "f***" or "s***" instead of "fuck" or "shit".
One popular way of not spelling out such an expletive is actually writing "expletive" as a substitute for an expletive. This is what happened here. This substitution, however, is only done in writing. Oral communication typically retains the original (with the whole room erupting in "language!" as a shorthand for "watch your language!") or substitutes words phonetically similar to the conveyed expletive but "defused" (sorry, I'd need a refresher on them myself, only remembering "heck" and "dickens" out of the bunch).
