And anyway, we haven't got a bloody bomb big enough to smash that bloody rock ." – but bloody was replaced with ruddy for British audiences of the time. Because it is not perceived as profane in American English, "bloody" is not censored when used in American television and film, for example in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone the actor Richard Harris at one point says: "You can't even see the bloody cave, let alone the bloody guns. In the US the term is usually used when the intention is to mimic an Englishman. The word as an expletive is seldom used in the United States of America. Meanwhile, Neville Chamberlain's government was fining Britons for using the word in public. In the 1940s an Australian divorce court judge held that "the word bloody is so common in modern parlance that it is not regarded as swearing". Also in Australia, the word bloody is frequently used as a verbal hyphen, or infix, correctly called tmesis as in "fanbloodytastic". One Australian performer, Kevin Bloody Wilson, has even made it his middle name. The word was dubbed "the Australian adjective" by The Bulletin on 18 August 1894.
Usage outside the UK īloody has always been a very common part of Australian speech and has not been considered profane there for some time. On the opening night of George Bernard Shaw's comedy Pygmalion in 1914, Mrs Patrick Campbell, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, created a sensation with the line "Walk! Not bloody likely!" and this led to a fad for using "Pygmalion" itself as a pseudo-oath, as in "Not Pygmalion likely". Johnson (1755) already calls it "very vulgar", and the original Oxford English Dictionary article of 1888 comments the word is "now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered 'a horrid word', on par with obscene or profane language". It was used as an intensifier without apparent implication of profanity by 18th-century authors such as Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift ("It was bloody hot walking today" in 1713) and Samuel Richardson ("He is bloody passionate" in 1742).Īfter about 1750 the word assumed more profane connotations. Until at least the early 18th century, the word was used innocuously. The Oxford English Dictionary prefers the theory that it arose from aristocratic rowdies known as "bloods", hence "bloody drunk" means "drunk as a blood". It seems more likely, according to Rawson, that the taboo against the word arose secondarily, perhaps because of an association with menstruation. However, Eric Partridge (1933) describes the supposed derivation of bloody as a further contraction of by'r lady as "phonetically implausible".Īccording to Rawson's dictionary of Euphemisms (1995), attempts to derive bloody from minced oaths for "by our lady" or "God's blood" are based on the attempt to explain the word's extraordinary shock power in the 18th to 19th centuries, but they disregard that the earliest records of the word as an intensifier in the 17th to early 18th century do not reflect any taboo or profanity. The contracted form by'r Lady is common in Shakespeare's plays around the turn of the 17th century, and Jonathan Swift about 100 years later writes both "it grows by'r Lady cold" and "it was bloody hot walking to-day" suggesting that bloody and by'r Lady had become exchangeable generic intensifiers. Ernest Weekley (1921) relates English usage to imitation of purely intensive use of Dutch bloed and German Blut in the early modern period.Ī popularly reported theory suggested euphemistic derivation from the phrase by Our Lady. The word "blood" in Dutch and German is used as part of minced oaths, in abbreviation of expressions referring to "God's blood", i.e. It may be a direct loan of Dutch bloote, (modern spelling blote) meaning entire, complete or pure, which was suggested by Ker (1837) to have been "transformed into bloody, in the consequently absurd phrases of bloody good, bloody bad, bloody thief, bloody angry, etc., where it simply implies completely, entirely, purely, very, truly, and has no relation to either blood or murder, except by corruption of the word." Its ultimate origin is unclear, and several hypotheses have been suggested. Use of the adjective bloody as a profane intensifier predates the 18th century.
0 kommentar(er)
