3 Since the appearance of the DAE’s second volume in 1940 James B. McMillan has found gosh in an English translation of the German works (all dealing with the United States) of Charles Sealsfield, 1842 (Lexical Evidence From Charles Sealsfield, American Speech, April, 1943, p. 124). The DAE’s first example, 1857, is in the form of gosh-all-Potomac, now obsolete. Gosh also appears in gosh-all-hemlock (1865), goshdang (1871), and gosh-durned (1884), not to mention gosh-awful, from godawful (1883).
1 Boston, 1789, p. 385.
2 New York, 1924; Vol. I, pp. 118–26.
3 The Etymology of an English Intensive, Language, June, 1927, pp. 96–99. See also Darn, by Dr. Pound, Saturday Review of Literature, Sept 7, 1940, p. 19.
1 Darn Again, Dec., 1942, pp. 276 and 277.
2 Darn Upsets Court, New York Times, July 15, 1941.
1 Dr. Josiah Combs suggests the possibility that dagone was borrowed from the name of Dagon, the god of the Philistines and a formidable early rival to Jahveh. When Delilah delivered Samson to the Philistines they took him to their town, Gaza, and there made thankful sacrifices to Dagon. How Samson, given supernatural strength by Jahveh, pulled down the temple of Dagon upon their heads is told in Judges XVI, 26–31. Later on Jahveh took on Dagon for a battle to a finish, with the result described in I Samuel V, 2–5.
2 Vol. III, Part I, Map 599; Providence, R. I., 1943.
1 Neither Thornton nor the DAE lists goddam. Time caused a painful sensation in Nov., 1944, by reporting that President Roosevelt, finding the voting-machine at Hyde Park, N. Y., out of order when he went to vote on Nov. 7, called out “The goddamned thing won’t work.” On Nov. 16 the Glendale Ministerial Association of Glendale, Calif., demanded that he apologize for this “shocking profanity.” On Nov. 21 he told the reporters at a White House press conference that what he had really said was “The damn thing won’t work.” This explanation apparently placated both clergy and laity, for nothing more was heard of the matter.
2 The Great Horn Spoon, American Speech, Aug., 1929, pp. 499–500.
1 The Great Horn Spoon, by D. L. Chambers, Aug., 1928, p. 459; The Great Horn Spoon, by N. R. L., Feb., 1929, pp. 255–56.
2 There is a brief bibliography in The Literature of Slang, by W. J. Burke; New York, 1939, pp. 152 and 153. To it may be added Children of Linguistic Fashion, by Robert Withington, American Speech, Dec., 1934, pp. 255–59; The Psychology of Profanity, by G. T. W. Patrick, Psychological Review, 1901, pp. 113–27; Profanity, by Henry Woodward Hulbert, Biblical World (Chicago), 1920, pp. 69–75; The Art of Swearing, by H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, May 24, 1937; Eighteenth Century Conversation, by William Matthews, Manchester Guardian Weekly, Jan. 14, 1938, p. 36; Hard Swearing on a Church Steeple, by A Quiet Man, Putnam’s Monthly, Jan., 1855, pp. 41–50; and A Cursory History of Swearing, by Julian Sharman; London, 1884. The article on Profanity in Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics; New York, 1928, Vol. X, pp. 378 ff., is worth consulting. There is a brief section headed Exclamations, Expletives, Oaths, Etc., in A History of Modern Colloquial English, by Henry Cecil Wyld; London, 1920, pp. 386 ff. In The World of Sholom Aleichem, by Maurice Samuel; New York, 1943, Chapter XXIII is mainly devoted to Yiddish billingsgate, and in English As We Speak It In Ireland, by P. W. Joyce; second ed.; Dublin, 1910, Chapter VI is on Swearing.
1 Lately cited, pp. 389 and 390.
2 British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part VI, July, 1933, p. 328.
1 London, 1927; revised ed.; 1936.
2 P. W. Joyce, before cited, makes a similar report with respect to Ireland. “The general run of our people,” he says in English As We Speak It In Ireland; second ed.; Dublin, 1910, p. 66, “do not swear much; and those that do commonly limit themselves to the name of the devil either straight out or in some of its disguised forms, or to some harmless imitation of a curse.”
3 He never used a big, big d—.
4 Let’s Stick to Our Own Bad Language, London Sunday Chronicle, Jan. 26, 1930.
1 Mayfair Gives Up Swearing, London Sunday Dispatch, April 19, 1936. I am indebted for this to the late F. H. Tyson, of Hong Kong.
2 Modern Maledictions, Execrations and Cuss-Words, North American Review, Nov., 1934, pp. 467–71.
1 An Anthology of Printable Profanity, by Oren Arnold, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Jan. 13, 1935, p. 4.
2 The lecture was on Dec. 1, 1939. I should add that the Boston Evening Globe, in an editorial on it on Dec. 4, spelled out the word.
3 The elegant swelluva was reported in American Speech, Dec., 1939, p. 318.
4 I am reminded of this by a learned Dominican,
1 I am indebted for the history of the society in the United States to Mr. Vincent dePaul Fitzpatrick, managing editor of the Baltimore Catholic Review. For its principles and practices see In His Name: Official Holy Name Manual; New York, 1941.
2 Partridge traces it in English use to 1712, but Mr. Eric Sandquist of Boston has pointed out “son and heir of a mongrel bitch” in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act II, scene 2 (1605–6). There is evidence in the journal of Captain Thomas Morris, of the British Army, that the American Indians, if not the American whites, had picked it up by 1764. He says: “There was an alarm in the night, a drunken Indian having been seen at the skirt of the wood. One of the Delaware nation, who happened to be with Pontiac’s army, passing by the cabin where I lay, called out in broken English: ‘D—d son of a b—ch!’ ” Morris, who served with the Seventeenth Regiment of Infantry, published his journal in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse; London, 1791. It was republished in the first volume of Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, edited by the late R. G. Thwaites; 33 vols.; Cleveland, 1904–07. For this I am indebted to Roy Harvey Pearce of the Johns Hopkins University.
1 Lebende Bilder aus Amerika; Stuttgart, 1858, p. 292.
2 So is hijo de puta in the Spanish-speaking countries.
3 I am indebted here to Mr. Edgar Gahan, of Westmount, Quebec.
4 The cognate s.o.a.b. is embalmed in the name of Soab creek on a map issued by the. Canadian Geological Survey.
1 Oct. 7, 1939. The worldly New Yorker used it in the collision form of sonofabitch on Feb. 26, 1944, p. 20.
2 It was likewise deleted when Pygmalion became a film, but the Lord Chamberlain had nothing to do with that. Films are policed by the Film Censor, who is even more watchful. But nothing comparable to our Postoffice censorship of books and magazines exists in England, so there was no official action when John Masefield used bloody in The Everlasting Mercy in 1911, and the fact was not brought up against him when he was made Poet Laureate in 1930.
3 What Stage May Say, London Daily Telegraph, Jan. 15, 1936. I am indebted here to the late F. H. Tyson, of Hong Kong.
4 — But Unbowed, London Morning Post, Sept. 25, 1936.
1 For example, in Beatty’s Immortal Phrase, London Daily Telegraph, March 12, 1936.
2 For example, Do You Know?, by Edward Shanks, London Sunday Times, Jan. 1, 1939.
3 Standing By, May 21, 1941.
4 Changing Language, Gorton Reporter (Ashton-under-Lyne), Oct. 30, 1942. The canon was the Rev. T. W. Taylor and the Rotary Club was that of Rochdale. The speech was quite iconoclastic in doctrine. The canon came out strongly against Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), who published an expurgated Family Shakespeare in 1818 and so gave the language the verb to bowdlerize. “He doubted,” said the Reporter’s report of the speech, “whether a severe expurgation was on the right lines, and questioned whether today we were lowering our standards.”
5 British Decorum’s Heavy Hand, by Paul W. Ward, London dispatch in the Baltimore Sun, Dec. 24, 1939.
1 Retracts Slang, Editor and Publisher, May 14, 1938.
2 A third popular theory occasionally bobs up, but it is heard much less often than the two I have mentioned. It is to the effect that bloody refers to the blood shed at the Crucifixion, and is thus related to the archaic God’s blood, which later became ’sblood. Se
e The Origin of Bloody, by P. A. Waldron, John o’ London’s Weekly, Oct. 29, 1937.
3 London, 1931, p. 42.
4 New York, 1926, p. 17.
1 Several correspondents suggest that Weekley erred here. Blutarm, in German, is most often used to designate anemic, and when it is used in the sense he gives it is usually spelled as two words, blut arm. But blutarm as one word is given in Cassell’s New German and English Dictionary, edited by Professor Karl Breul of Cambridge; London, 1909, as also meaning “poor as a church-mouse.”
2 Of this Robert Withington says in A Note on Bloody, American Speech, Oct., 1930, p. 33: “It is, however, to be remarked that both the French and the German ‘equivalents’ of bloody are distinctly literary words.” Weekley’s examples of sanglant are from Molière and Voltaire. When Shaws Pygmalion was translated into German and presented at the austere Lessing Theatre in Berlin an equivalent for the bloody in Eliza Doolittle’s speech, “Not bloody likely,” was found in the banal exclamation quatsch, meaning twaddle. In German, London Morning Post, Sept. 9, 1935.
3 Private communication, Dec. 4, 1942. Duranty later recorded this surmise in his book, Search For a Key; New York, 1943, p. 18.
4 Mr. Arthur D. Jacobs, of Manchester.
1 Here I am again indebted to Mr. Jacobs, who says that blooming bears “exactly the same relation to bloody as dash does to damn.”
2 The record here is taken from a Series of letters in the London Sunday Times, May 24, May 31, June 7 and June 14, 1936. I am indebted for clippings of them to the late F. H. Tyson, of Hong Kong.
3 A contributor signing himself R. G. H. reports in the Sydney (N. S. W.) Morning Herald (A Word of Fear, Feb. 11, 1939) that this phrase originated at the University of Melbourne in 1898. The university, at that time, conferred the degree of doctor of letters on Edward E. Morris, author of Austral English: A Dictionary of Australian Words, Phrases and Usages; London, 1898, and the students staged a burlesque of the ceremony. Morris had omitted bloody from his book. The students, apparently resenting this prudery, presented a solemnly-gowned candidate who carried under his arm a huge tome inscribed The Great Australian Adjective. Other Australian discussions of bloody are in Australian or Shavian?, by George Mackaness, Sydney Morning Herald, March 1, 1941, and After Business Hours, by Wallace Nelson, Australian Manufacturer (Sydney), Jan. 28, 1939.
1 Robert Graves says in his Lars Porsena, or, The Future of Swearing; New York, 1927, p. 34, that this song originated during World War I and is called simply The Australian Poem. New stanzas are added from time to time.
2 I am indebted here to Messrs. P. E. Cleator, Norman Anning, David H. Dodge and G. S. Leach. An interesting note on such forms is in Sandwich Words, by Harold Wentworth, Philological Studies, Sept., 1939, pp. 65–67. Wentworth lists some curious forms, e.g., abso-one-hundred-percent-lutely, abso-goddam-lutely, West-by-God-Virginia, and Sinclair Lewis’s “I’ll by thunder make you artistic.” The late Irving Babbitt of Harvard (1865–1933), the foe of the Romantic movement, is said to have been fond of son-of-a-Romantic-bitch. Joseph Pulitzer’s invention of inde-god-dam-pendent and obli-goddam-nation is noted in AL4, p. 315.
3 A long essay on bloody is in Words, Words, Words!, by Eric Partridge; London, 1934. See also Words Ancient and Modern, by Ernest Weekley; New York, 1926, pp. 16–19.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book was set on the Linotype in Janson, a recutting made direct from the type cast from matrices (now in possession of the Stempel foundry, Frankfurt am Main) made by Anton Janson some time between 1660 and 1687.
Of Janson’s origin nothing is known. He may have been a relative of Justus Janson, a printer of Danish birth who practised in Leipzig from 1614 to 1635. Some time between 1657 and 1668 Anton Janson, a punch-cutter and type-founder, bought from the Leipzig printer Johann Erich Hahn the type-foundry which had formerly been a part of the printing house of M. Friedrich Lankisch. Janson’s types were first shown in a specimen sheet issued at Leipzig about 1675. Janson’s successor, and perhaps his son-in-law, Johann Karl Edling, issued a specimen sheet of Janson types in 1689. His heirs sold the Janson matrices in Holland to Wolffgang Dietrich Erhardt.
H. L. MENCKEN
was born in Baltimore in 1880 and died there in 1956. Educated privately and at Baltimore Polytechnic, he began his long career as journalist, critic, and philologist on the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899. In 1906 he joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, thus initiating an association with the Sun papers which lasted until a few years before his death. He was co-editor of the Smart Set with George Jean Nathan from 1908 to 1923, and with Nathan he founded in 1924 the American Mercury, of which he was editor until 1933. His numerous books include A Book of Burlesques (1916); A Book of Prefaces (1917);In Defense of Women (1917); The American Language (1918—4th revision, 1936); Supplement One (1945); Supplement Two (1948); six volumes of Prejudices (1919, 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926, 1927); Notes on Democracy (1926); Treatise on the Gods (1930); Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934); Happy Days (1940); Newspaper Days (1941); Heathen Days (1943); A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949); and Minority Report (1956). Mencken also edited several books; he selected and edited A New Dictionary of Quotations (1942). He was co-author of a number of books, including Europe after 8:15 (1914); The American Credo (1920); Heliogabalus (a play, 1920); and The Sunpapers of Baltimore (1937).
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