That’s bloody brilliant! If you hear that phrase often, I’m willing to bet you either have English or Australian parents, but I probably wouldn’t stake my life on it.

Aha, I’m back. Well Recently in class we’ve been discussing Shakespeare and the classics, and you might wonder how that connects to my first sentence, but as it happens “Bloody” is a classic English phrase, with a surprisingly fun little history. 

It’s said to be a word that comes from the Dutch language (however there is debate on that). The word it is said to come from is the Dutch word Bloote/blote. It’s a word that means bare ,complete, pure, and is why bloody (in England and Commonwealth) is used almost as the replacement of “very”, which actually still doesn’t really make a ton of sense. However in The rest of the English speaking world, bloody is most commonly used for its literal meaning, which doesn’t paint a very pretty picture.

Bloody has also had quite a lot of bad luck as a word. It’s been kicking around as an mild swear word since the lateish 1700’s. However in about 1750 somebody decided it was it was actually a terrible word, and for about the next 200 years it was horribly taboo and a lower class word only. That’s why in 1914 during the play Pygmalion (you would probably know the re-make My Fair Lady), it was a shock to high society when the main character said “Walk! Not bloody likely!”.

It has since then been becoming a much more popular phrase in England as you now hear it all over, and is used on TV and Radio as only a slightly aggressive term. I still have to say, it’s been freely used in Australia for all of the time England was banning it, so make of that what you wish, but I think it’s absabloodybrilliant (also an Australia thing). 

Well thank you for coming to my blog today, and I hope you learned a thing or two about etymology ( and my teacher said I had no vocabulary ).

See you next time?

Holly