Everyone has been declaring which words are too rude to utter in public. Shortly after breakfast, Radio 4 happily discussed by name the book by Cory Doctorow called Enshittification. But on Radio 4’s Feedback it proved impossible to say the word that shocked some listeners when they heard it on a dramatisation of a work by Doris Lessing on Rhodesia in the 1940s. It had to be called the N-word.
One formerly taboo word still does sterling service as an intensifier. Kate Winslet, on Desert Island Discs last month, said: ‘You lot who were in my year at school, you were bloody horrible to me.’ Bloody, said the OED when it came to address the word, was ‘now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered “a horrid word”, on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc) b–––y’. That was in 1887.
Now the OED judges that ‘in most contexts the word’s taboo status has now been largely or entirely lost’. The process seemed to begin earliest in Australia. In America, bloody had hardly caught on. Its origin is still controverted. In 1989, the OED said: ‘The origin is not quite certain; but there is good reason to think that it was at first a reference to the habits of the “bloods” or aristocratic rowdies of the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century. The phrase “bloody drunk” was apparently = “as drunk as a blood”.’ The OED now finds this less likely. It also doubts connections to the oath byrlady, or to the transubstantiation of wine into the blood of Christ. It settles for phrases in the 17th century such as bloody villain, bloody murderer, undergoing ‘semantic bleaching’ so that bloody became a mere intensifier.
Yet it retains its flavour. When Kenneth Clarke said in 2016 that Theresa May was a ‘bloody difficult woman’, we recognised the mental world he inhabited.
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