Bloody rude words

[Tabouli]

Saitaina:
> I've always associated bloody with f**k.   I've always used 'bloody hell' in a place where I would have used the other >such as ("fing hell!") thus disturbing my mother even more with my language.  
>
> Am I completely off base with my association?

(WARNING: I really can't bring myself to asterisk letters out - the whole concept of doing this to render a word less rude is bizarre/amusing to me!  What *are* we human beings about that we can consider an abstract sound or string of symbols to be offensive, for whatever reason?  If it's by association with the action it represents, why is "rape" not a swear word, or "murder"?  What's with putting in those ludicrous beeps when people swear on TV??  Weird)

Not completely - in Australia (a country whose favorite word was once rumoured to be "bloody") bloody is often used as a less offensive substitute swear word for "fucking", used as an adjective, either directly, e.g. "bloody politicians", or qualifying another adjective to make it more emphatic, e.g. "bloody awful".  The origin of the word is, I have been (reasonably) reliably informed, more to do with blasphemy than blood, being a corruption of "by Our Lady".  This doesn't exactly make any sense any more in the way it's used, but then, neither do most of the modern uses of the word "fuck"!  I welcome correction from older Australian list members, but seem to remember that about 20 or so years ago they used to censor the use of "bloody", but nowadays they don't bother.  Swearing in Australia has been strongly affected by media from the US, these days - lots of traditional slang and swearing is getting replaced by American equivalents.

Thinking about it, bloody could also be substituted for "God/damn/ed".  How bad are these considered in the US these days?

I used to give international students a quick rundown on English swear words, with up to four asterisks to indicate how offensive they were considered to be (to ensure that no-one played the time-honoured joke on them which goes "Here's how to be really polite to Professor McGonagall, you go up to her and tell her she's a complete dickhead...")... IIRC I gave bloody two stars (i.e. worse than "bum" but not as rude as "shit").  My guess for American list members is that it's roughly equivalent to "ass" in the obscenity stakes.

Amy Z:
> Over here "bloody" might be an affectation, like an American saying "I'll ring 
you" or calling his/her mother "mum," but we have little idea where it 
falls in the bad-words continuum.<

Americans use British words like "mum" as affectations?  Now this really is interesting... tell me more!  My (Canadian) chiropractor tells me that Canadians pronounce it "mum" but spell it "mom".






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