The Holy Name Society carries on a crusade against the use of the more forthright forms of profanity by American Catholics, apparently with some success among its actual members, who are all males. But many Catholics do not belong to it, and numbers of those who are enrolled have apparently got wind of the fact that hell and damn, if unaccompanied by sacred names, are not, in the judgment of moral theologians, blasphemous, and hence do not involve mortal sin.4 The society, despite its late appearance in this country, is very ancient, for the cult upon which it is founded, to wit, devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, was prescribed by the Council of Lyons in 1274. In its early days, that devotion seems to have been wholly of a positive character, and there was no emphasis upon the negative virtue of avoiding profane language. The latter object seems to have come forward in the Fifteenth Century, when a Spanish Dominican named Didacus of Victoria founded a confraternity to oppose the extravagant and often blasphemous swearing that marked the age. This confraternity was approved by Pope Pius IV on April 13, 1564, and soon afterward it absorbed the earlier cult, and became the Holy Name Society that flourishes today. How and by whom it was introduced in the United States seems to be unknown. By 1882 it was already sufficiently well established in the archdiocese of New York for a diocesan union to be formed there, but it was not until 1900, when a Dominican missionary priest, Father Charles H. McKenna, was appointed its director, that it began to reach its present proportions. In its early American days it seems to have been thought of mainly as a league against blasphemy, but since then its devotional purposes have been emphasized, and it has a wider programme. The obligations of members have been thus set forth officially:
1. To labor individually for the glory of God’s Name, and to make it known to those who are ignorant of it.
2. Never to pronounce disrespectfully the Name of Jesus.
3. To avoid blasphemy, perjury, profane and indecent language.
4. To induce their neighbors to refrain from all insults against God and His saints, and from profane and unbecoming language.
5. To remonstrate with those who blaspheme or use profane language in their presence. This must be governed by zeal, prudence and common sense.
6. Never to work or carry on business unnecessarily on Sunday.
7. To do all they can to induce their dependents to sanctify Sunday.
8. To attend regularly the meetings and devotional exercises of the society.
9. To communicate in a body on the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus,— the second Sunday of January — and on the regular Communion Sunday of the society.
10. To have a requiem mass said each year, some time after the feast of the Holy Name, for all the deceased members. All who can attend the anniversary mass should do so.
11. To assemble at an hour convenient to the society every second Sunday of the month for devotional exercises, and for the transaction of business.
Every member, on being enrolled in the society, signs the following pledge:
Blessed be God.
Blessed be His Holy Name.
Blessed be Jesus Christ true God and true Man.
Blessed be the Name of Jesus.
I believe O Jesus
That Thou art the Christ
The Son of the Living God.
I proclaim my love
For the Vicar of Christ on Earth.
I believe all the sacred truths
Which the Holy Catholic Church
Believes and teaches.
I promise to give good example
By the regular practice
Of my faith.
In honor of His Divine Name
I pledge myself against perjury
Blasphemy, profanity and obscene speech.
I pledge my loyalty
To the flag of my country.
And to the God given principles
Of freedom, justice and happiness
For which it stands.
I pledge my support
To all lawful authority
Both civil and religious.
I dedicate my manhood
To the honor of the Sacred Name of Jesus
And beg that He will keep me faithful
To these pledges
Until death.1
This pledge is recited by the members after the mass they are supposed to attend every month, and at all meetings of the society. In each diocese it has a spiritual director, appointed by the ordinary, but all the other officers are laymen. There is also a junior society for boys twelve years old or older. At eighteen or thereabout they pass into the society proper. It is apparently the theory of the spiritual directors that Catholic women do not swear, for they are not solicited to join.
Of the non-profane pejoratives in common American use son-of-a-bitch is the hardest worked, and by far. It rose to popularity in the United States during the decade before the Civil War,2 and at the start was considered extremely offensive. A German traveler, Theodor Griesinger, reported in 18581 that it was “der ärgeste Schimpfname, dessen sich der Amerikaner bedient.” He added, however, that “man hört es von Tausenden tausendmal täglich,” and that “nirgends in der Welt wird mehr geflucht and geschimpft als in Amerika, and besonders in Newyork.” He noted its identity with hurensohn, a fighting word among Germans.2 Son-of-a-bitch is likewise supposed to be a fighting-word among Americans, but I am inclined to think that many other terms, including the simple liar, are more apt to provoke actual blows. Not infrequently, indeed, it is used almost affectionately, and when accompanied by a smile does not necessarily offer offense. It was so used in “The Virginian,” a novel and movie by Owen Wister, wherein one character said to another, “You son-of-a—,” and the other interrupted with “When you call me that, smile.”3 But, as we have seen, it is now forbidden by the movie code of morals, along with its abbreviation, s.o.b.4 The American newspapers avoid it diligently. When, on October 4, 1939, the tabloid New York Daily News, which is bolder than common, ventured to use it in a cartoon caption in the denaturized form of son-of-a—, the Editor and Publisher, the trade journal of the daily press, expressed indignation. The offending cartoon, which was by Ray Bailey, showed Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini standing at a bar. Mussolini seemed to be sulking, and Hitler, with one hand on a bottle of vodka and the other on Mussolini’s shoulder, addressed him thus: “Come, Benito, I want you to shake hands with this son-of-a—.” The caveat of the Editor and Publisher was as follows:
No newspaper outside of New York City could get by with it, and we doubt that any other newspaper than the News would try to. Our own opinion is that they don’t need to. The News editorial page is abundant proof every day that forcefulness can be attained without vulgarity or the introduction of corner-loafer vernacular. The undeniable fact that the four-word epithet has become one of the most common in the American language does not, we think, warrant its use in print before millions of people who still regard it as offensive. It isn’t a word that a father would care to hear from the mouth of his young son, and its appearance in a Daily News editorial cartoon is about all the approval many young sons would ask for its inclusion in their own vocabularies. Editors can’t afford to forget that phase of their responsibility.1
The English bloody continues to seem innocuous to Americans. The NED’s first example of its use as foul language is from “Two Years Before the Mast,” by the American Richard Henry Dana, 1840. After that it seems to have gone into hiding until the turn of the 80s, when John Ruskin denounced its use as “a deep corruption, not altering the form of the word, but defiling the thought in it.” There has been some lessening of the English horror of it since George Bernard Shaw shocked the British Isles, in 1914, by putting it into the mouth of the elegant Mrs. Patrick Campbell, playing Eliza Doolittle in his play, “Pygmalion,” but it is still regarded as somewhat advanced, though every male Englishman from 4 to 90 uses it more or less, and it is not unrecorded on the lips of females, at least below the rank of royal duchesses. Perhaps one may best explain
its position by saying that it is still frowned upon officially, but is gradually losing its offensiveness to public opinion. Indeed, there is even some doubt about it officially, and that doubt shows itself in irresolution and lack of consistency. The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, who censors all stage plays, allowed it to pass in “Pygmalion,” but six years later, in 1920, he deleted it from a play dealing with labor.2 In 1936 he winked at it when Noel Coward used it three or four times in a one-acter,3 but before the end of the year the magistrates at Bath were fining a Fascist soap-boxer for uttering it in a speech.4 During this period there was some discussion in the London newspapers of an order issued by Lord Beatty to Captain Sir Ernie Chatfield at the battle of Jutland — to wit: “There must be something wrong with our bloody ships, Chatfield. Turn two points to port” — but all the papers represented bloody by a dash.1 They were still doing so in 1939,2 but soon afterward the decline of prudery which came in with World War II emboldened some of them to spell it out. In 1941 even the London Times went overboard, as D. B. Wyndham Lewis recorded maliciously in the Tatler.3 “Clashing her wiry old ringlets in a kind of palsied glee at her own audacity,” he wrote, “Auntie Times has printed a little poem containing the line, ‘I really loathe the bloody Hun,’ and all Fleet Street stands aghast.… Don’t say we didn’t warn you if Auntie is seen dancing down Fleet Street ere long in her red flannel undies, bawling little French songs.”
By 1942 the consternation of the journalists had begun to wear off, and before the end of that year a respectable provincial paper was printing bloody boldly — in a report of a speech before a Rotary Club by a rev. canon!4 Simultaneously, the British Ministry of Information was employing Eric Knight to prepare a handbook for the use of American troops in England, in which it was explained that while bloody had still better be avoided in mixed company it was not forbidden to soldiers in the field. But this change of front was naturally accompanied by aberrations. So late as December, 1939, a Labor M.P., William Dobbie of Rotherham, was forced to apologize to the House of Commons for using bloody in debate.5 There is, as I have said, no general objection to it in the United States, but it is not often heard save as a conscious Anglicism, and there are tender persons who profess to shiver when it is used, apparently on the ground that it has not yet come into full repute in England. In 1938 the Boston Globe, a highly decorous paper, shocked the Anglomaniacs of its territority by reporting that a six-year-old American girl, asked on her return from a trip to England how she had liked the country, replied that she had liked it bloody well, and the Globe was forced to get out of the resulting unpleasantness by putting the blame upon an abandoned telegraph operator, who, so it alleged, had substituted bloody for very.1
There are frequent discussions of the origin of the term in the English philological literature, and even in the newspapers, but no general agreement has been reached. Most Englishmen, asked to account for its lingering disrepute, will tell you either that it is a shortened form of by Our Lady, and is hence blasphemous, or that it embodies a reference to catamenia, and is hence indecent. The first theory, of course, is obviously nonsense, for the English, taking one with another, do not object to blasphemy, and some of their common expressions are much worse. Nor does the known history of the term show any relation to any physiological process.2 It apparently arose as a mere intensive in Restoration days, when there was a mild revival of strong language in England, and by the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century it had become quite innocuous. The NED suggests that it may have been related, at the start, to the noun blood, signifying a roistering young man of the upper class, but Partridge rejects this derivation as bookish and unwarranted. “There is no need,” he says, “of ingenious etymologies; the idea of blood suffices.” “The root-idea of blood as something vivid and/or distressing,” he adds in his edition of Grose’s “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,”3 “is never absent in the adjective.” In the early days of its popularity in England bloody often appeared in the adverbial form of bloodily, and it is still used as an adverb quite as often as it is used as a verb, but the -ly ending long ago disappeared — a phenomenon frequently encountered in English, especially when the corresponding adjective ends with y and is in constant use, e.g., very, jolly and pretty. Says Ernest Weekley in “Words Ancient and Modern”:4
If we compare the use of Fr. sanglant, Ger. blutig, and Dutch bloedig, we see that we merely have to do with an expletive instinctively chosen for its grisly and repellent sound and sense. In Dutch een bloedige hoon is a bitter insult, what would be called in French un sanglant outrage.…[In French] the word is used with injure, reproche, outrage, etc.… German blut is still used as an intensive prefix, e.g., blutarm means miserably poor,1 and the archaic blutdieb might be rendered in robust English by bloody thief. “Das ist mein blutiger ernst” is fairly polite German for “I seriously (Shavian bloody-well) mean what I say.” Less polite is “Ich habe keinen blutigen heller” as a declaration of impecuniosity. Here blutig is a decorative substitute for rot, red. From all this it appears that there is no need to build up fantastic theories in order to account for the word with which we are dealing.2
The question as to how bloody came to be so disreputable in England remains. In 1942 Walter Duranty suggested that it may have suffered that change at the time of the Crimean War (1854–56), when the British soldiers probably encountered the Russian word bliudi, pronounced blewdy and meaning dirty, improper, obscene.3 Unhappily for this theory bloody apparently aroused no indignation among English prudes until long after the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and I have been unable to find any evidence that the British soldiers in the Crimea ever actually became aware of bliudi. It is much easier to believe that the opposition to bloody was originally merely a squeamish Victorian objection to its reference to blood, and that its later extreme disrepute arose from the folk etymologies I have mentioned, and especially from the effort to relate it to catamenia. Such imbecile afterthoughts are common in the history of language, and it is not unusual for a term once perfectly harmless to acquire an aura of the forbidding with the passage of the years.
The English have produced a number of euphemisms for bloody. e.g., bleeding, ruddy and sanguinary. Of these, says an English correspondent,4 bleeding and ruddy have become “swear-words in their own right, as strong as bloody itself,” and sanguinary is used “only facetiously.” For a while the more prissy English newspapers used the Shavian adjective, and, for the adverb, pygmalionly, but these somewhat arch and roguish forms did not last long. Blooming, which the NED traces to 1882, has also been used, but it is regarded as so feeble that the British Broadcasting Corporation allows message-bringers and crooners to moan it upon the ether.1 When, on January 22, 1887, a new operetta, “Ruddygore” by Gilbert and Sullivan, was presented at the Savoy Theatre, London, the title caused a considerable raising of eyebrows. It was exactly descriptive, for the piece was a burlesque on the gory melodramas of the time, but the more queasy Savoyards raised such a pother against it that it was changed to “Ruddigore” after the fourth performance. Even then, there were murmurs, and letters of protest flowed in on the authors. To one (and perhaps to more than one) of these letters Gilbert made the following characteristic reply:
I do not know what there is to complain of. Bloodigore would have been offensive, but there can be no offense about Ruddygore. Ruddi is perfectly harmless; if, for example, I were to talk of your ruddy cheek you could not be angry with me, but if I were to speak, as well I might, about your — well — 2
The Australians, who are much more spacious in their speech than the English, use bloody with great freedom, and do not seem to regard it as especially shocking. They call it, somewhat proudly, the great Australian adjective,3 and have embodied it in some of their folk-poetry — for example, the following refrain of a song sung by Australian troops stationed in Newfoundland in 1942:
No bloody sports; no bloody games;
No bloody fun with bloody dames;
Won’t even tell their bloody names;
Oh, bloody, bloody, bloody!1
The Australians (like the English, but to a larger extent) use bloody as an inserted intensive in various other avoids, just as Americans use goddam, e.g., imma-bloody-material, umber-bloody-ella, inde-bloody-pendent, hippo-bloody-crite, abso-bloody-lutely, hoo-bloody-rah.2 It will be noted that the ma in the first example is duplicated, no doubt for euphony. There is also a common abbreviation N.B.G., i.e., no bloody good.3
1 The Study of American English, S.P.E. Tract No. XXVII; 1927, p. 208.
1 See AL4, p. 224. Says H. W. Seaman (private communication, May 9, 1944): “Hard-boiled fiction from America has influenced English speech and writing. The boys’ papers have heroes who speak as nearly American as the authors can manage to make them.”
2 At the start they were upset more or less by the objurgations in the English newspapers, and made some effort to placate English prejudices. When a talkie called No! No! Napoleon was under way in 1929 Variety reported (July 10, p. 15) that it was being done in both an “American version” and an “English translation.” The sentence, “A nut-factory, eh?,” was translated into “A madhouse, eh?,” and “I’ve been framed” was converted into “This is a put-up job.” This spirit of concession was well received by the English cinema magnates, and one of them contributed an article to the London Star on Feb. 4, 1930 in which he expressed the opinion that the day of American slang in England was over. “English actors of both sexes,” he reported, “are being employed in ever increasing number, and a superior type of American artist is being engaged who has the culture and ability to acquire English cadences and intonations.” But Hollywood’s reform did not last long. In a little while its producers discovered that the English fans, at least on the lower orders, really enjoyed and esteemed American slang, so nut-factory, to frame and many congeners were restored to use, and the “superior type of American artist” was displaced by the traditional recruits from the ten-cent stores and barbecue-stands.
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