| 词组 | bloody |
| 释义 | bloody The use of bloody as an intensive adverb and intensive adjective is more of a usage problem in British English than it is in American English. Harper 1975, 1985 has a short sketch on bloody, ending with a warning to Americans to have a care for English sensibilities. The most curious thing about bloody to Americans is the revulsion with which the word has been regarded in British English; it carries no particularly vulgar tinge in American English, even when used as an all-purpose intensive as it is in British English. And nobody really knows how bloody acquired its bad odor. The OED shows that the intensive use was current in the second half of the 17th century. Its first known occurrence in print is in Sir George Etherege's play The Man of Mode in 1676. The passage is of uncertain meaning. It occurs when one of two rakish gentlemen who have been rallying a shoemaker about his home life and his drinking directs his servant to pay the shoemaker half a crown. The other gentleman says: • Not without he will promise to be bloody drunk. This may be a simple intensive use, or it may not be. A single occurrence is hard to interpret. James A. H. Murray in the OED says that bloody was in "general colloquial use" from the Restoration to the middle of the 18th century. During that time it seems to have had no particular offensive taint: • It was bloody hot walking to-day —Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 8 May 1711 What happened after about 1750 no one seems to know. But bloody went out of use by the fashionable and polite and became confined to the speech of the lower orders of society. It seems likely that Samuel Johnson's Dictionary had some effect. In the second edition ( 1755), he entered the adverb, defined it "very; as bloody sick, bloody drunk" and added the note "this is very vulgar." The entry seems to have been considered vulgar by Johnson's successors; the entry is omitted from the 8th edition, which appeared in 1798 and 1799, and is also missing from Todd's edition (1818). But Noah Webster picked it up in his 1828 dictionary, keeping Johnson's original entry intact. Still the word could be found occasionally in print. Byron put the word into the mouth of an English highwayman shot by his hero Don Juan: • 'Oh Jack! I'm floor'd by that 'ere bloody Frenchman!' —Don Juan, Canto xi, 1823 But as the 19th century went along, the word seemed to mysteriously acquire even more loathsome connotations. The OED notes Ruskin in 1880 writing: • The use of the word 'bloody' in modern low English is a deeper corruption, not altering the form of the word, but defiling the thought of it. If bloody were as tainted by "deeper corruption" as Ruskin says, it is little wonder that George Bernard Shaw could create a sensation in 1914 by putting it in the mouth of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion and having it spoken in public on the stage. The New York Times correspondent wrote that the utterance of the forbidden word was the chief interest in the play, and that the audience heard it shudderingly. Mrs. Patrick Campbell remembered it somewhat differently; in her autobiography she wrote that The 'bloody' almost ruined the play; people laughed too much. After World War I the word began to creep into respectable literature again, appearing in works by such writers as W. Somerset Maugham, John Masefield, and Aldous Huxley. Still, Webster's Second (1934) could add "regarded in England as a gross vulgarism." Between the wars there was some interest in speculating on the origin of Moody's stigma. H. L. Mencken in The American Language (4th ed., 1936) notes: "Various amateur etymologists have sought to account for its present evil fame by giving it loathsome derivations, sometimes theological and sometimes catamenial, but the professional etymologists all agree that these derivations are invalid, though when it comes to providing a better one they unhappily disagree." Foster 1968 notes the appearance of bloody in public speeches as part of the general casting off of linguistic restraints after World War II. He quotes Lord Boothby in a 1963 speech saying "I was bloody nearly mental till I was nineteen " This use is not very different from that of Fielding's Old Mutable: • STEDFAST.... If you change your mind again before they are married, they shall never be married at all, that I am resolved. • OLD MUTABLE. [Aside.] This is a bloody positive old fellow.—The Wedding-Day, 1743 Earlier bloody had such a bad reputation that several euphemisms were used in its place: ruddy, bleeding, sanguinary, and blooming, among others. Ruddy gained enough taint of its own to be considered a bit of a swearword itself, and Gilbert and Sullivan created such an outcry when they introduced the operetta Ruddygore in 1887 that they changed the spelling to Ruddigore after the fourth performance. Even that spelling seems to have raised eyebrows. Foster 1968 notes that the Duke of Edinburgh uttered the phrase "ruddy well" in a 1956 newsreel, and that has taken some of the sting out of the word. Foster also points out that the use of ruddy and blooming as euphemisms in British English has somewhat tainted their use in other senses, so that references to "a ruddy color" may bring snickers. Longman 1984 makes the same point about bloody itself, warning that the slang sense might interfere with a use of an older sense. The senses conflict in such a context as this: • ... and saw my foot slung up to a gantry, swathed in bloody great bandages —R. F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days, 1972 But some Americans worry about the opposite reaction: • Unfortunately titled (for those turned off by implications of violence and justifiably unaware of the veddy British use of "bloody" as an intensive), John Schlesingers Sunday Bloody Sunday ... —Judith Crist, New York, 27 Sept. 1971 But the intensive use is known in American English, even though it is not as common as it is in British English. Leacock 1943 is amused by a passage from James Fenimore Cooper, in which mild expletives are represented by dashes, but bloody is untouched: • ..."D-----e," said the bosun, "what the d-----l, does the bloody fellow mean?" And Eliza Doolittle's "not bloody likely" cannot even raise an American eyebrow: • ... wishes he would "try a more laid-back look and Hawaiian shirts." Not bloody likely —People, 29 Sept. 1980 In British use bloody has slowly been finding its way into print. The OED back in 1887 commented on the practice of the British popular press of representing it, when they had to, as b y. In 1946 Newsweek had some fun with the British press when a Lady Elisabeth White said in court, "yes, I stole the bloody things." Newsweek reported that "from the Daily Worker on up" the London papers printed the word as ------- or b-------. The press has gotten braver since: • ... said last night that the Glasgow firemen would be "bloody fools" if they did not accept the new agreement —Rosemary Collins & Peter Cole, The Guardian, 3 Nov. 1973 • What a bloody shame that when something went wrong, it had to happen this way —Norman Thompson, quoted in The Sunday Times (London), 7 Apr. 1974 • I'm bloody browned off —Joe Gormley, quoted in Daily Mirror (London), 31 Oct. 1974 Now it turns up in print not only in the U.K. but also in Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Australia is of particular interest. Howard 1980 and 1984 comments on the wide use of bloody in Australia, as do several earlier commentators. It appears that the word there long ago lost some of the stigma it had in England. A poem published in 1904 made fun of its frequency of occurrence in Australian English (this version was printed in Time, 24 Apr. 1944): • The sunburnt bloody stockman stood And, in a dismal bloody mood, Apostrophised his bloody cuddy; The bloody nag's no bloody good, He couldn't earn his bloody food! A regular bloody brumby. Bloody! This same poem is given in a footnote in American Speech, October, 1960, and is identified as being from W. T. Goodge, Hits, Skits and Jingles, Sydney, 1904. It is interesting that the original apparently printed dashes in place of Time's bloody. Our most recent evidence of British English suggests that intensive bloody is now what older dictionaries would have described as "colloquial." It is generally found only in reported speech and in fictitious speech in literature. It probably still offends more delicate sensibilities. |
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