This was bloody at the turn of the century - a bad word, but not so bad that it was not in common use, according to Shaw, “by four-fifths of the British nation.” Perhaps because of this somewhat equivocal status, bloody comes in for more than its fair share of opprobrium from Victorian language mavens. Bloody became “the catchword of the season” and pygmalion became a popular oath itself, as in “not pygmalion likely.” Had he scripted Eliza to say “Not fucking likely!” (which he very well could have in 1914) there in all likelihood would have been a real scandal, akin to that generated by shift in "Playboy of the Western World." When George Bernard Shaw wanted to create a scandal, but not too big a scandal, in his 1914 "Pygmalion," he had Eliza Doolittle exclaim in her newly perfect posh accent, “Walk! Not bloody likely! I am going in a taxi.” The first night’s audience greeted the word with “a few seconds of stunned disbelieving silence and then hysterical laughter for at least a minute and a quarter,” and there were some protests from various decency leagues, but on the whole a scandal never materialized. At around this time, the word starts to get more offensive: It begins to be printed as b-y or b- and falls out of polite use, where it continues through the Victorian era. Miss Edgeworth gets her “bloody” in at almost the last moment it is possible, however. Henry Fielding, author of "Tom Jones," uses it in one of his plays in 1743: “This is a bloody positive old fellow.” And Maria Edgeworth has her hero exclaim of another man, “Sir Philip writes a bloody bad hand,” in 1801’s "Belinda." If Miss Edgeworth - who wrote novels about young women finding love and good marriages for a largely female readership, as well as morally improving children’s literature (six volumes of "Moral Tales for Young People") - had her young hero say “bloody,” it can’t have been that bad a word. In the late 17th century, dramatists had no problem including the word in plays seen by genteel audiences, and printers had no problem spelling it out in their editions of those plays: “She took it bloody ill of him,” is just one example, occurring in the 1693 Maids Last Prayer. The career of bloody is interesting, because one can clearly see either its perjoration (becoming a worse and worse word) or the rise of civility in action - or perhaps both. Either it derives instead from the adjective bloody as in “covered in blood” or, as the OED proposes, it referred to the habits of aristocratic rabble-rousers at the end of the 17th century, who styled themselves “bloods.” “Bloody drunk,” then, would mean “as drunk as a blood.” It is often supposed to be a corruption of the old oaths by our lady or God’s blood (minced form: ’ sblood), but this is another urban legend that turns out to be false. The definitive expletive of the 18th century was bloody, which is still in frequent use in Britain today, and is so common Down Under that it is known as “the great Australian adjective.” Bloody was not quite an obscenity and not quite an oath, but it was definitely a bad word that shocked and offended the ears of polite society. They began to be used in nonliteral ways, and so became not just words that shocked and offended but words with which people could swear. Under these conditions of repression, obscene words finally came fully into their own. The 18th and 19th centuries’ embrace of linguistic delicacy and extreme avoidance of taboo bestowed great power on those words that broached taboo topics directly, freely revealing what middle-class society was trying so desperately to conceal. Excerpted from "Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing"
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