Is ‘bloody’ still offensive?
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
