Holidays to swear by
''WE'VE POURED YOU a beer," says the new television ad from Australia's tourism department, and ''we've saved you a spot on the beach. So where the bloody hell are you?"
At least, that's how the original version goes. In Britain, however, the commercial has been rejected by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Center, which says it can't air till the ''bad language" is revised. And what's the naughty word? Not hell, as an innocent Yank might think. It's bloody.
Here we have (to further tweak the much-tweaked Wildean formulation) three nations separated by a common language. Americans have never taken to the slang word bloody, but Aussies use it a lot, and have for a long time. In the late 19th century, writes David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, it was known as ''the great Australian adjective," and by the 1940s it was no longer considered a swear word.
It was a different story in Britain, where bloody turned increasingly taboo after its debut in the 17th century. When Eliza Doolittle said ''Not bloody likely!" in the opening performance of Shaw's ''Pygmalion," in 1914, the scandal was international news; ''Shaw's Adjective Shocks," reported The New York Times, in a piece quoting critics and churchmen on the play's ''vulgar" and ''lurid" language.
That different countries have varying sensitivities is not news, of course. Still, bloody is a bit of a puzzler for anyone who thinks vulgarity must be related to a word's meaning, because bloody means nothing at all. It may be derived from ''the habits of the 'bloods' or aristocratic rowdies" of the late 17th century, says the Oxford English Dictionary; or maybe the repellent associations of the literal bloody were enough to arouse distaste.
But there's no discernible connection with oaths like ''God's blood!" or ''by Our Lady," or with any other taboos. The shunning of bloody ''seems to have been one of those Victorian things," says the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage, and one that persisted into the 20th century: ''British newspapers were still printing it as b--y as late as 1946."
In the half-century since, though, the stigma has faded noticeably. The British advertising board defended its ban on bloody with a survey that showed--as they spun it-- that 70 percent of interviewees thought the word was ''mildly, fairly, or severely offensive." But the Australians responded with counterspin: If you group the responses differently, they noted, you get 85 percent saying bloody is either ''mildly" or not at all offensive. And when it came to broadcast guidelines, bloody was the tamest word on the list: Only 5 percent of people who called it a swear word thought it should ''never" be heard on TV.
Given that reality--and the fact that Foster's beer (in the '80s) and
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THE BOOKS OF MARCH: Barbara Wallraff, of ''Word Court" renown, follows up with ''Word Fugitives" (Collins, $14.95), based on her other Atlantic column, in which questions (what to call the restless feeling that makes you keep looking into the refrigerator?) are provisionally, and sometimes very satisfyingly, answered (''fridgety")...."100 Science Words Every Graduate Should Know" (Houghton Mifflin, $4.95), the latest in a series from the American Heritage dictionaries, isn't just for the class of '06; here you can catch up on newer words like apoptosis (''programmed cell death"), which went mainstream a mere 15 years ago and is already so common that we're pronouncing it with a ''pop" (that second p used to be silent)....And ''Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds"--in which British etymologist Michael Quinion dares to admit that we may never know the true origins of ''the whole nine yards" and ''the full Monty"--is just out in paperback (Collins, $12.95).
E-mail freeman@globe.com. For four weeks' worth of The Word, visit boston.com/news/globe/ideas/freeman.
