A Note on "Bloody"

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THE horror awakened by the adjective bloody, when used as an intensive in England, has long been a source of amused surprise to the American cousins across the water, who can see no reason for it-indeed, they feel that such an exaggerated emotion is as artificial as the Teutonic dismay at the apparently harmless Donnerwetter, when the expletive is used before ladies; and that the offense is as conventional as that caused by the Gallic Nom de Dieu, where mon Dieu is innocuous. The several explanations given for the origin of this use of the word (which can also be properly employed in England, when speaking of a knife or a battle, without shocking anyone), do not remove the Americans' surprise. They cannot see in the adjective (or adverb) a corruption of By Our Lady, which could never be turned into these parts of speech (who would say, Shut your by-Our-Lady mouth?); nor, to their democratic ears, is it shocking to use a word merely because it formed part of the vocabulary of the so-called lower classes. What if laborers of the past had derived the word from the young bloods of the period? To feel a distaste for a word merely because it had been employed by a rough and uncultured part of the population years ago-and for no other reasonis carrying etymological snobbery too far. Damn, hell, and similar expletives, have been known to rescue a scene in a thin comedy ere this; and once London thronged to hear a popular actress say Not bloody likely, in a play which might have had but a mediocre success without this line. When the play crossed the ocean, that phrase had no particular appeal. Whatever the connotations of the word may be in England, there are none in America, where ladies hear it (when some ill-advised aper of his British cousins is bold enough to use it in a drawing-room) quite unmoved. Like damn-which to this day is often written d by the puristbloody is often abbreviated in the interest of public morals; and the censor refused to allow a London revue to be entitled Not B-Likely! after Mrs Patrick Campbell's line had made the British capital gasp. Can it be that this was purely the result of a conventional taboo? Is there nothing inherently indelicate-though the indelicacy may now be largely a matter of habit-in the employment of a word, otherwise so harmless? 29