Profane Intensifier

[00:00] If you like pictures of postal vehicles on fire, I've got a good place for you.
[00:04] I mean, I don't, but I like pictures of things on fire.
[00:07] Sure.
[00:11] Ooh, should we do one under Googles?
[00:16] That was the play of Super Excited.
[00:19] He told us we had to, sir.
[00:21] He said we signed up for it.
[00:26] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you.
[00:30] All right, guys.
[00:31] So my question for you was, so there's the sort of British saying of bloody.
[00:40] Everything's of bloody this, bloody this, bloody that.
[00:44] Like, it's clearly not meant, you know, it's an exclamation of something that's,
[00:48] it's like a exasperation or, you know, it's sort of a negative connotation or, you know.
[00:56] You know what, when you hear it, I guess.
[00:58] But it's not literal, generally, that I hear it.
[01:01] It's not, there's no blood.
[01:04] What the heck is that?
[01:05] Do you guys know where that came from and why that sticks around?
[01:10] So for me, I guess I thought that bloody, like, not necessarily a curse word,
[01:17] but like very, very strong language.
[01:23] Right.
[01:24] Like you don't say it on TV.
[01:26] Right.
[01:27] Yeah.
[01:28] And so I think that the coral, my thought was that the correlation between, yeah,
[01:33] something that went horribly bloody wrong, like in a literal sense, somehow
[01:40] carried over.
[01:42] But I don't know if there was some, I mean, there must have been a literary
[01:46] event that sparked it.
[01:47] Right.
[01:48] So I guess I'm going to Shakespeare.
[01:52] Hmm.
[01:53] But you're, so you're saying you think like something like, um, there was a
[01:57] mishap and it was, there was a bloody disaster.
[02:00] Right.
[02:01] Literally a bloody disaster.
[02:02] So you say that was like a blood, like a literal bloody thing, sort of that,
[02:05] that idea.
[02:06] Okay.
[02:07] But it becomes a curse word because the event was so horrific that it's
[02:11] kind of taboo to refer to it.
[02:13] Is that, is that what your speculation is here?
[02:16] That's the interesting question, right?
[02:17] Like, how does that work become so pejorative that it's like not said in
[02:21] polite company, right?
[02:23] Yeah.
[02:24] Like the idea that you, you don't even want to bring up the possibility of
[02:27] something bad, that bad going on.
[02:29] Somebody getting hurt or whatever, like, like, uh, yeah.
[02:34] Like, so when, when you say like, bite your tongue or something like that
[02:39] after you say a potential bad thing or something like that, like, yeah.
[02:47] So does this have to be like an embarrassing, like British massacre or
[02:52] something that they're not allowed to talk about?
[02:54] Yeah.
[02:55] Does it have to be an event that's taboo?
[02:57] Are you, are you clapping for me or are you?
[03:00] I was killing a gnat.
[03:01] Killing skeetage.
[03:02] Which, which I did not successfully do.
[03:04] Um, but, um, no, I, my assumption is that it is a, some sort of
[03:09] historical thing with, um, one of the royalty, right?
[03:12] I mean, this is, is this, is this a Bloody Mary situation sort of thing?
[03:16] Like, um, this, uh, um, you know, we'd be, you know, one of Henry the eight's, um,
[03:22] beheaded wives, you know, something like that.
[03:25] Um, yeah.
[03:27] What is Bloody Mary?
[03:28] Does that go back to an actual historical figure?
[03:31] Yeah.
[03:32] That was my understanding.
[03:34] Clearly.
[03:35] I know the answer.
[03:36] I want to Google that.
[03:38] Well, don't Google anything yet.
[03:40] Okay.
[03:41] Put it on.
[03:42] Cause that will fill you up.
[03:43] Yeah.
[03:45] Uh, yeah.
[03:47] Or, I mean, let's go back to, I mean, I guess the plague wasn't really like a
[03:52] bloody affair.
[03:54] It's more of a pustule affair, I believe.
[03:56] Yeah, it was pustules.
[03:58] Pustules affair.
[04:00] Back to the crusades, maybe.
[04:02] Ooh, there you go.
[04:04] Yeah, but they were very proud of what they did there.
[04:07] True.
[04:09] True.
[04:10] But, but I do like the idea that it's, that it could be religious.
[04:13] That could make it taboo too, right?
[04:15] So this is actually like a, um, like the blood of Christ or something.
[04:19] Yeah.
[04:20] Yeah.
[04:21] Maybe that's, maybe that's the answer.
[04:23] Right.
[04:24] Because that's what makes it a curse word as we're sort of, it's sort of like
[04:27] saying Jesus Christ or something.
[04:29] A form of sacrilege.
[04:30] Yeah.
[04:32] Ooh, that's a good.
[04:34] I like Bloody Mary a lot.
[04:35] There was, wasn't that a thing when we were kids?
[04:38] Like there was a stare in the mirror and say Bloody Mary three times thing.
[04:42] That feels like it could be a British holdover.
[04:45] Was it a married queen of Scots?
[04:47] Wasn't she the one who got murdered and that she's the Bloody Mary?
[04:50] I'm just speculating now.
[04:52] I mean, she got murdered by the state.
[04:55] I mean, she got executed, right?
[04:57] Like, yeah.
[04:58] And again, I mean, so for Scotland.
[05:03] Right.
[05:04] Right.
[05:05] That would be like a huge event.
[05:07] Maybe the derivation is not actually English.
[05:09] Maybe it's Scottish.
[05:11] That's actually a very good possibility.
[05:18] Hmm.
[05:19] Although was married queen of Scots actually from Scotland or Scots like some
[05:23] place.
[05:24] Yeah, no, she was from Scotland.
[05:25] My British history sucks.
[05:32] My American history is bad.
[05:34] My British history sucks.
[05:36] I'm with you.
[05:38] Okay, so we've narrowed it down to it's either some something with royals,
[05:46] a married queen of Scots thing or a tremendous tragedy.
[05:54] In British history, right?
[05:56] Or it's the blood of Christ or something like that.
[05:59] So, Joey, you've thought about this.
[06:01] It was codified by Shakespeare.
[06:03] Right.
[06:04] Right.
[06:05] Joey, you've thought about this probably more than we have.
[06:07] What are your thoughts on this?
[06:09] I mean, I guess like, I mean, I always get like a sort of.
[06:13] I always think of like something like with literal blood, but you know,
[06:20] like the phrase I hear the most is a bloody hell.
[06:23] Yeah.
[06:24] Yep.
[06:25] And that doesn't make any sense.
[06:27] Which, yeah, I guess, I guess.
[06:29] Yeah.
[06:30] If you could mean some of the, you know,
[06:34] some of this art, you know, art from the, you know,
[06:38] back in the days, there was lots of hellscapes with, you know,
[06:46] torture and whatnot and stuff being going on there.
[06:49] But.
[06:50] So you think like a Dante sort of like the circles of hell.
[06:57] It's a harmonious Bosch.
[07:00] Is that my guy?
[07:01] Yep.
[07:02] Yeah.
[07:03] Like famous, ridiculous painting.
[07:06] Yep.
[07:07] Yeah.
[07:08] Yeah.
[07:09] Yeah.
[07:10] All the hells.
[07:11] All the hells.
[07:13] Um, I don't, I mean, I never, I sort of got,
[07:16] those are like sort of my associations with it, but beyond that,
[07:19] I had, I had nothing, you know, I don't,
[07:21] I don't pretend to understand how the British people think.
[07:25] Um, you know, Brexit was, was, uh, proof of that.
[07:28] You know, I thought,
[07:29] I thought I knew what they were going to do and they did not do it.
[07:34] Yeah.
[07:35] Yeah.
[07:36] British people don't pretend to know how British people think most of the
[07:39] time.
[07:40] No.
[07:41] Um, so that would involve praying on your neighbor.
[07:44] And if you want to do that or showing some form of emotion,
[07:47] emoting, it's no good.
[07:50] We're flavoring your food, you know?
[07:53] Right.
[07:54] So are we, uh, do we want to give this a,
[07:57] based on our guesses so far, what's our timeframe then?
[08:01] Are we, are we talking?
[08:06] Middle eight by the middle ages at the latest, I would think, right?
[08:09] Like 12th, 13th, 14th century.
[08:14] Okay.
[08:15] So that would be free Shakespeare thing.
[08:17] You're better on these timelines than I am.
[08:20] I mean, so my intuition is always to go for Shakespeare on these things,
[08:23] but I really liked the bloody Mary thing a lot.
[08:27] And now we're talking like 18th century.
[08:32] Right. Yeah.
[08:34] So that's much later.
[08:35] That'd be quite a bit lighter.
[08:37] So wait, Coalson, you've read all the Shakespeare.
[08:42] Sure.
[08:43] I not, not all the Shakespeare.
[08:45] I don't, I don't know.
[08:46] This is the thing.
[08:47] I, I, um, I'm not a huge Shakespeare scholar by any means,
[08:51] but I don't believe that Shakespeare is using the term bloody.
[08:56] I, I, I mean, maybe it's, but like,
[08:59] I agree.
[09:00] It's not like a thing that he, and then like he,
[09:03] clearly he was not afraid to curse.
[09:05] Like that's not sure.
[09:06] And he, yeah.
[09:07] And he invented a bunch of language.
[09:09] I mean, it's possible that this is, but I, I'm not.
[09:13] You know, I'm with you.
[09:14] I don't remember this from like, I mean,
[09:16] of course there's like Macbeth and stuff, but that's not.
[09:19] I mean, if Shakespeare did it,
[09:21] it could be maybe an offshoot of that, but like,
[09:23] it's not something that he used in his vernacular that I can remember.
[09:27] Yeah.
[09:28] Yeah.
[09:29] Yeah.
[09:30] I'm, I'm agreeing with that.
[09:31] That's the case.
[09:32] Yeah.
[09:33] I think this Bloody Mary Queen of Scots situation is maybe the.
[09:36] Feel strong.
[09:38] Feel strong.
[09:39] The only, the only argument I'm going to make is that I do feel like
[09:44] potentially it's religious.
[09:45] Then that's why it's such a taboo word.
[09:48] Well, I mean, the, the entire Henry the eighth thing was religious,
[09:52] right?
[09:53] He's breaking up with wives and created a new church so he could divorce
[09:56] these people and then murder them.
[09:58] Yeah.
[09:59] Yeah.
[10:00] Yeah.
[10:01] And if it were a religious thing, like I feel like Shakespeare would have
[10:03] caught on to that.
[10:04] Like that would have been in the, the parlance of his time, you know,
[10:08] perhaps.
[10:09] Yeah.
[10:10] But like, I don't think he's, you know, uh, what's, what's a, um,
[10:14] what's a movie that it's like with a bunch of British cursing in it.
[10:20] I mean, like a snatch or whatever, right?
[10:23] Like,
[10:24] Yeah.
[10:25] Yeah.
[10:26] I don't feel like he was trying to go for that aesthetic Shakespeare,
[10:31] I mean, you know, like, um,
[10:36] Yeah, I agree, but I don't know how that makes the point that you're
[10:40] trying to make.
[10:41] What I'm saying is it could have been, it could have been around,
[10:44] but that wasn't the aesthetic he was working on.
[10:46] Right?
[10:47] The term could have been there already is what I'm saying.
[10:48] I mean, he was using the popular vernacular.
[10:50] And that's part of it.
[10:51] Sure.
[10:52] I mean, he was using the popular vernacular.
[10:54] I mean, that's part of it.
[10:55] Sure.
[10:56] Sure.
[10:57] I, my, my word of warning is this,
[10:59] this kind of consensus is rare.
[11:01] And whenever it happens, we're just completely a hundred percent.
[11:04] We're way wrong.
[11:05] It's some German import from like Charlemagne or some shit.
[11:10] It's a blood sausage thing.
[11:12] Yeah.
[11:16] All right.
[11:17] So it's French is what we're getting there.
[11:19] All right.
[11:20] We ready?
[11:22] Yeah.
[11:23] Yeah.
[11:24] This is Falcons.
[11:35] Use of the adjective bloody as a profane intensifier.
[11:39] So basically it's like the F bomb predates the 18th century.
[11:43] Its ultimate origin is unclear and several hypotheses have been suggested.
[11:48] Maybe a direct loan from the Dutch.
[11:51] Blah, blah, blah.
[11:53] In that after the 18th century,
[11:56] until quite recently,
[11:57] bloody uses a swear word was regarded as unprintable,
[12:01] probably from the mistaken belief that it implied blasphemous reference to the
[12:06] blood of Christ or that the word was an alteration of by our lady.
[12:12] Hence widespread caution in using the term even in phrases such as bloody
[12:17] battle, merely referring to bloodshed.
[12:20] Also by our lady is common in Shakespeare plays for nothing.
[12:25] It's like for those who are reading this,
[12:28] why apostrophe are is how that's spelled by her lady.
[12:34] Okay.
[12:35] What?
[12:36] What is this?
[12:37] The contracted form of buyer lady.
[12:40] Or what is her lady?
[12:42] What is that?
[12:43] I guess I don't.
[12:44] I mean, now you're going to make me to stay in diameter by our lady.
[12:56] Okay.
[12:57] Apparently, uh, you know, for, uh, apparently they were too lazy to say complete
[13:03] words back then.
[13:05] It seems like something happened in the mid 18th century.
[13:10] And yeah, until at least the 18th century, their order is used innocuously.
[13:14] So again, we're looking for like that.
[13:17] I mean, we kind of nailed that we're looking for a big event, but that event
[13:21] seems elusive somehow.
[13:25] Yeah.
[13:27] That's odd.
[13:28] That is super odd, right?
[13:31] Okay.
[13:32] The bloody Mary has nothing to do with Mary Queen of Scots at all.
[13:36] Oh, okay.
[13:37] Good.
[13:38] Of course we were wrong on that.
[13:39] So it says it's, uh, we were, I mean, that's, um, that's the first thing
[13:47] that comes up in Wikipedia, that that's a thing.
[13:49] But apparently it's traced to a waitress named Mary who worked at a
[13:54] Chicago bar called the bucket of blood.
[13:57] Who names their place that I don't know.
[14:01] And according to vampire bars, a place called the bucket of blood.
[14:05] Um, in, what was the name of that time when I was living in California,
[14:10] we did this race around Lake Tahoe and it was like one of these, uh,
[14:15] Uber marathon races or whatever where, uh,
[14:19] you have a team of like 12 people or whatever.
[14:22] Anyway, the first half that we like ended in the city, which I can't
[14:26] remember, but you would go and get drinks at the bucket of blood.
[14:29] That was the bar.
[14:31] Yeah.
[14:32] All right.
[14:33] Anyway.
[14:34] Okay.
[14:35] So Mary's a cocktail waitress at the bucket of blood.
[14:37] Yeah.
[14:38] And apparently, um, uh, the tradition at Harry's New York bar in Paris,
[14:43] uh, is that one of the patrons for whom the cocktail was first mixed in
[14:49] 1920 declared that it looks like my,
[14:51] like my girlfriend who I met at the cabaret at the bucket of blood.
[14:55] Um, so the patrons, uh, and the bartender agreed to call it bloody Mary.
[15:02] So as far as bloody, just a couple of footnotes here,
[15:06] the Oxford English dictionary likes the theory that arose from aristocratic
[15:10] rowdies known as quote bloods.
[15:13] Hence bloody drunk means drunk as blood.
[15:16] Hmm.
[15:17] Okay.
[15:18] Yeah.
[15:19] So we still, something happened in the mid 18th century to turn it from
[15:24] innocuous to like super vulgar.
[15:27] I feel like it was just like Victorian England, right?
[15:29] Like, yeah, it could be.
[15:31] Yeah.
[15:32] Somebody just decided like, no, we're not saying that.
[15:39] Somebody just decided.
[15:41] The Pope.
[15:43] Maybe.
[15:44] Yeah.
[15:45] Queen.
[15:46] It's always up in our business.
[15:48] All right.
[15:51] Does that satisfy?
[15:52] I think so.
[15:53] I'm a dictionary have to say here.
[15:58] So many things.
[15:59] I don't know, but I do know what the July 11th word of the day is on urban
[16:06] dictionary.
[16:07] What's that?
[16:08] It is mass coal.
[16:10] And the definition is selfish idiots in my neighborhood who think they don't
[16:14] need to wear a mask.
[16:15] And there's another one I like a smize that's smiling with your eyes.
[16:25] Yeah.
[16:26] I've heard that before.
[16:27] Yeah.
[16:28] Which is what you have to do if you're wearing a mask.
[16:29] If you're not a mass coal, you need to smize.
[16:32] Coalson, can you use smize in a sentence?
[16:34] Um, no.
[16:44] Great.
[16:45] Great effort.
[16:46] Great effort.
[16:47] Well done.
[16:49] We're going to have to put the explicit warning on this show, right?
[16:53] Because we said bloody like 45 times.
[16:57] Can we do it just explicit for the UK?
[17:00] Is that possible?
[17:01] In Australia.
[17:02] We can claim it's just a lot of blood we're talking about.
[17:09] Claiming that to our sensors.
[17:11] Yeah.
[17:13] All right.
[17:14] We will be back with you soon until we are there.
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[17:44] For a once and always coach.
[17:51] Bobby Siclinard.
[17:52] Now in the hall of fame.
[17:53] Turn out the lights.
[17:55] The party's over.
[17:58] That was bloody succinct.
[18:00] I liked it.