31 May 2020
FREDDY [opening the door for her] Are you walking across the Park, Miss Doolittle? If so—
LIZA. Walk! Not bloody likely. [Sensation]. I am going in a taxi. [She goes out].
Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to catch another glimpse of Eliza.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [suffering from shock] Well, I really cant get used to the new ways.
CLARA [throwing herself discontentedly into the Elizabethan chair]. Oh, it’s all right, mamma, quite right. People will think we never go anywhere or see anybody if you are so old-fashioned.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I daresay I am very old-fashioned; but I do hope you wont begin using that expression, Clara. I have got accustomed to hear you talking about men as rotters, and calling everything filthy and beastly; though I do think it horrible and unladylike. But this last is really too much. Dont you think so, Colonel Pickering?
PICKERING. Dont ask me. Ive been away in India for several years; and manners have changed so much that I sometimes don't know whether I’m at a respectable dinner-table or in a ship's forecastle.
CLARA. It's all a matter of habit. Theres no right or wrong in it. Nobody means anything by it. And its so quaint, and gives such a smart emphasis to things that are not in themselves very witty. I find the new small talk delightful and quite innocent.
—George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Act 3, 1914
Bloody is commonly used in colloquial speech and writing as an intensifier throughout the English-speaking world, with the notable exception of North America. Once considered highly offensive, like most swear words it has ameliorated over the course of the last century and become less so, although it still isn’t considered to be polite speech in most places. The process of amelioration got its start in Australia, and there it has come the farthest in terms of acceptability.
This amelioration can be seen to be happening in the above scene from Pygmalion and the various characters’ reactions to Eliza Doolittle’s use of the word. It shows class differences in that working-class Eliza uses bloody without a thought, while it shocks and surprises her upper-middle-class companions. It shows generational differences in that young Clara finds the word exciting, while her mother objects to it. And Colonel Pickering, inured by long exposure to the language of soldiers and sailors, isn’t sure what is considered polite language and what isn’t. This scene created a sensation upon the play’s London opening in 1914, so much so that people began using the phrase Pygmalion expression / talk / word as a euphemism for bloody. And not just in the years immediately following; the Oxford English Dictionary includes a 2002 citation of Pygmalion word substituting for bloody.
The origin of this intensifying use of bloody is most likely the result of a standard linguistic process known as semantic bleaching. Over time, the literal meaning of the word or phrase is “bleached” away, leaving behind only a marker for how the words around it should be interpreted. A similar example of semantic bleaching is awesome. It originally meant awe-inspiring, but over the centuries that meaning faded, and it has come to simply designate something good.
Bloody is, obviously, derived from the root blood + -y, a suffix used to mean having the qualities of, full of. And indeed, it originally meant, and can still mean, literally covered in blood. And by extension it is used to refer to killing, the spilling of blood, and general cruelty. The word goes back to Old English, and can, among many other texts, be found in Beowulf. Here in lines 987b–990 it is used to describe the man-eating monster Grendel, who cannot be harmed by weapons:
Æghwylc gecwæð
þæt him heardra nan hrinan wolde
iren ærgod þæt ðæs ahlæcan
blodge beadu-folme onberan wolde.(Everyone said that no venerable iron possessed by hard men would strike him so as to harm the opponent’s bloody battle-hand.)
One of the earliest uses of bloody as an intensifier is from Scotland c. 1548 in the testimony of an Abraham Creichtoun for slandering an Isobelle Keringtoun, recorded in the Liber Officialis Sancti Andree:
I grant heir befoir þer honest personis þat I have fairely and wranguiflie jniurit and difamyt gow sayand and allegand gow ane commown bluidy huir and þat ye had lyin by your husband wytht vþeris diuers jniurious wordis quhilkis wer nocht of verite.
(I grant here before these honest persons that I have openly and wrongfully injured and defamed you with other diverse, injurious words which were not true, saying and alleging you are a common, bloody whore and that you had lied to your husband.)
Over the centuries, various metaphors have been put forward to explain why bloody is used as an intensifier and why it has been considered so offensive. None of the them have good evidential support, and semantic bleaching remains the most likely reason. Among these various suggestions for the development of this sense that fall short of the mark are that bloody:
Comes from oaths like Christ’s blood! or God’s blood!, but none of these oaths are recorded as intensifiers and functional shifts from interjection to intensifier are rare
Is a euphemistic form of by our Lady or byrlady, but the same problems with interjections as intensifiers apply
Is a reference to menstruation, but there is no textual evidence to support this
Is a reference to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but early uses of bloody are not especially found in religious or anti-Catholic contexts
Refers to noble blood and the revelry and drinking habits of aristocrats, but again no textual evidence supports this contention, and the phrase drunk as a Lord, which is advanced to support it, is a later development.
In short, the semantic bleaching hypothesis remains the best explanation for the word’s use as an intensifier. This explanation may be prosaic and less interesting to some, but then it is a usual process by which language develops, and that is, in a way, more interesting than the more far-fetched explanations.
Sources:
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bloody adj., bloody adv.
Liber Officialis Sancti Andree. Edinburgh: 1845, 139.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. Pygmalion, n., adj., and adv.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. bloody, adj., n, and adv.
Shaw, Bernard. Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts. Rough proof—unpublished, London: Constable and Company, 1914, 49–50.