Bloody Good speech

  

"Bloody, as an adjective or adverb,  

is an expletive attributive commonly used in British English, Irish English, and Australian English; 

 it is also present in Canadian English, Indian English, Malaysian/Singaporean English, Hawaiian English, South African English, and a number of other Commonwealth of nations.  "

"It has been used as an intensive since at least the 1670s. "

" Considered respectable until about 1750, it was heavily tabooed during c. 1750–1920, considered equivalent to heavily obscene or profane speech. 

Public use continued to be seen as controversial until the 1960s, but the word has since become a comparatively mild expletive or intensifier "

"Use of the adjective bloody as a profane intensifier predates the 18th century. 

 Its ultimate origin is unclear, and several hypotheses have been suggested. It may be a direct loan of Dutch bloote, (modern spelling blote) 

 meaning entire, complete or pure, which was suggested by Ker (1837) to have been "transformed into bloody, 

 in the consequently absurd phrases of bloody good, bloody bad, bloody thief, bloody angry, etc..

where it simply implies completely, entirely, purely, very, truly, and has no relation to either blood or murder, 

 except by corruption of the word." 

"The word "blood" in Dutch and German is used as part of  

minced oaths,  

in abbreviation of expressions referring to "God's blood", i.e. the Passion or the Eucharist.  

(minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. An example is "gosh" for "God", or fudge for fuck.) 

" Ernest Weekley (1921) relates English usage to imitation of purely intensive use of Dutch bloed and German Blut in the early modern period. 

the earliest records of the word as an intensifier in the 17th to early 18th century do not reflect any taboo or profanity. It seems more likely, according to Rawson, that the taboo against the word arose secondarily, perhaps because of an association with menstruation. "

"The Oxford English Dictionary prefers the theory that it arose from aristocratic rowdies known as "bloods", hence "bloody drunk" means "drunk as a blood". 

"Until at least the early 18th century, the word was used innocuously. It was used as an intensifier without apparent implication of profanity by 18th-century authors such as Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift ("It was bloody hot walking today" in 1713) and Samuel Richardson ("He is bloody passionate" in 1742)."

"After about 1750 the word assumed more profane connotations. Johnson (1755) already calls it "very vulgar", and the original Oxford English Dictionary article of 1888 comments 

 the word is "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". 

"On the opening night of George Bernard Shaw's comedy Pygmalion in 1914, Mrs Patrick Campbell, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, created a sensation with the line "Walk! Not bloody likely!" and this led to a fad for using "Pygmalion" itself as a pseudo-oath, as in "Not Pygmalion likely" 

"Also in Australia, the word bloody is frequently used as a verbal hyphen, or infix, correctly called tmesis as in "fanbloodytastic". In the 1940s an Australian divorce court judge held that "the word bloody is so common in modern parlance that it is not regarded as swearing". Meanwhile, Neville Chamberlain's government was fining Britons for using the word in public. "

" In 2007 an Australian advertising campaign So where the bloody hell are you? was banned on UK televisions and billboards as the term was still considered an expletive. 

in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone the actor Richard Harris at one point says: 

 "You can't even see the bloody cave, let alone the bloody guns. And anyway, we haven't got a bloody bomb big enough to smash that bloody rock 

 ..." – but bloody was replaced with ruddy for British audiences of the time 

"Many substitutions were devised[year needed] to convey the essence of the oath, but with less offence; these included bleeding, bleaking, cruddy, smuddy, blinking, blooming, bally, woundy, flaming and ruddy. "

The King James Version of the Bible frequently uses bloody as an adjective in reference to bloodshed or violent crime, as in "bloody crimes" (Ezekiel 22:2), "Woe to the bloody city" (Ezekiel 24:6, Nahum 3:1). "bloody men" (26:9, Psalms 59:2, 139:19), etc. 

 The expression of "bloody murder" goes back to at least Elizabethan English, as in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (c. 1591), "bloody murder or detested rape". The expression "scream bloody murder" (in the figurative or desemanticised sense of "to loudly object to something" 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody

 

"The tyrannous and bloody deed is done.

The most arch of piteous massacre

That ever yet this land was guilty of.

Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn

To do this ruthless piece of butchery,

Although they were flesh'd villains, bloody dogs," 

---- Richard III, Shakespeare