George Shaw created a sensation when Pygmalion opened in London in 1914 he had Eliza Doolittle utter the words “Walk! Not bloody likely”.
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Shaw commented in 1914: “I do not know anything more ridiculous than the refusal of some newspapers to print the word bloody, which is in common use by four fifths of the English nation.”
I thought about Shaw when I watched a television commercial recently. Until about Christmas a car driver in the commercial was heard to say “bloody caravans”. A boy in the back seat would repeat “bloody caravans”. Somebody complained, because recent commercials have the driver say simply “caravanners” and the boy repeat it.
My big dictionary recorded the use of the word in the year 1000. Shakespeare used it and Dickens used it a couple of hundred years later.
The word had two uses – one involving the use of blood and the other as an intensifier.
Australian tourism had a campaign that used the expression “where the bloody hell are you?” That was one of our more unforgettable campaigns.
The Bulletin in 1904 described the word as “the Australian adjective”.
The word was considered respectable in Britain until about 1750. Then it was profane. In the 20th century it was seen as nothing more than an intensifier, in other words “it’s bloody hot” or “it’s bloody cold”.
It is now used mostly in Australia and New Zealand and has little use in America.
In the 1940s an Australian divorce court judge held that “the word bloody was so common in modern parlance that it was not regarded as swearing”.
The transportation of British convicts to Australia resulted in the word being entrenched on these shores. In 1847 a writer called A Marjoribanks wrote a London article called Travels in NSW and he said about the “favourite oath” he had encountered here: “I had once the curiosity to count the number of times a bullock driver used the word in the course of a quarter of an hour, and found that he did so 25 times. I gave him eight hours in the day to sleep and six to be silent, thus leaving ten hours for conversation. I supposed that he had commenced at twenty and continued till seventy years of age … and found that in the course of that time he must have pronounced this disgusting word no less than 18,200,000 times.”
I will write about the word hell some time. I recall that a few years ago a town in the USA tried to encourage people to greet each other with the word “heaveno”.
Heaveno didn’t take off.
