blood [OE] The Germanic root of blood, along with its verb bleed [OE], seems always to have carried the sense of ‘descent, race, kinship’ along with the liquid in your veins. Something so vital to life is bound to play a large part in the language. Blood represents violence, genetic inheritance, and, in blood, sweat, and tears, hard work and sacrifice; in 1940 Winston Churchill announced to Parliament that he had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat’. Nowadays bloody [OE] is a relatively mild swear word, but it used to be virtually unprintable. In the 19th century, and well into the 20th, it was on a par with obscene language and caused deep offence. Its use by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) in Pygmalion (1913), where Eliza Doolittle says, ‘Walk! Not bloody likely’, caused a sensation, and indeed the play’s stage directions mark the word ‘Sensation’ after the line in question. This reaction probably arose because people thought the word contained a blasphemous reference to the blood of Christ, or was a corruption of by Our Lady. In fact the most likely origin lies in the aristocratic rowdies, or ‘bloods’, of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Most of the earliest examples, in the second half of the 17th century, involve someone being ‘bloody drunk’, which probably simply meant ‘as drunk as a blood’. However, it is difficult to tell whether it is being used as a swear word, description, or intensifier; it seems to have been used as the latter from as early as Late Middle English, and it may have been used as a swear word from as early as c.1540. Because it became a taboo word, the records are incomplete—bleeding was being used as a substitute by the mid 19th century, and Coleridge used the fancy word for bloody—sanguinary—in 1800. See also bloom.