Bloody

Common, everyday swear word, which many people mistakenly ascribe to a contraction of by Our Lady, which was an invocation to the mother of Christ dating from The Middle Ages. Shakespeare uses the expression “by’r lady” at least 15 times in his various works but never as an adjective. For Shakespeare it was an adverb or an exclamation as in Henry IV Part I Act III, Scene I when Hotspur says, “By’r lady, he is a good musician!” Modern etymologists believe that the contraction of by Our Lady to bloody is “phonetically implausible” (Eric Partridge). Some believe it to be a blasphemous corruption of another medieval oath God’s blood but this has not been proven. The etymological connection with the Old English words blod and blodig meaning blood and bloody is obvious but quite how the latter became a swear word from the 17th century onwards is obscure. The OED gives the origin from young bloods who were rowdy roisterers or revellers who became bloody drunk but no one knows for sure. From about 1750 to the 1920s, it was very much considered a taboo word used only by the lowest classes. It is hard to believe that George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion in 1914 caused a fearful outcry when Eliza Doolittle used the word bloody on stage. For a while, the British press wrote about it as the “Shavian adjective” or “the Pygmalion word”. The bloody First World War changed all that. Controversy over the word rose again in 2006 when the BACC, British Advertising Clearance Committee, banned the Australian Tourism TV campaign that used the line “Where the bloody hell are you?” Sanity prevailed when the committee reversed its decision two weeks later after an appeal.