Strewthisms : A Little Dictionary of English Exclamations and Curses as Religious Euphemisms

Extraordinarily enough, this year, I realise, marks twenty years since the
first submission of my ‘Strewthisms’ proposal to Penguin Reference Books
in the Strand. It was rejected. Rooting through a file, I stumbled across
this provisional list and was compelled (as a completist) to pick over the
bones of a forgotten unfinished project. In my own case, the historical
context is a mid-20th Century English childhood and the strictures of
devout – not to say priggish – British publishers in their avoidance
of profanities in the slang of schoolgirl heroines and schoolboy heroes
animating the pages of Girl and The Eagle comics, whose adventures were
a direct corrective to the violent American comics that had landed on our
shores as ships’ ballast to be branded a baleful influence coarsening young
minds. As I nostalgically wrote (Dispossession, 2008, Salt): ‘After so many
bitter winters of post war rationing, we’d sensed the dark clouds lifting to
herald a new dawn of bright comic books and pink bubble gum.’ Ironical,
perhaps, to remember that the Rev. Chad Varah CH CBE, co-founder of
The Eagle (wholesome comic for a new dawn of pure-minded New
Elizabethans) was more notably the founder of the Samaritans, the world’s
first crisis hotline to provide support to those contemplating suicide.

All fired
Begorrah
Begob
Bejasus
Blasted
Bloody
By Gad
By Goles
By Golly
By Jay
By Jingo
By Lakin (By Our Lady)
By Heck
Chriggle
Christopher
Christopher Columbus
Consarn
Cor Lumme
Crikey
Crimble
Crimbo
Cripes
Dadblamed
Dadblasted
Dadburned
Daddrat
Dadrot
Dagnab
Danged
Darn
Darnation
Dashed
Dern
Deuced
Dingbust
Doggone
Drat
’Eck as like
Egad
For the love of Mike
Gad
Gadzooks
Gadso
Gadswoons
Gard
Garn
Gee
Gee Whiz
Gemini (O Jesu Domini)
Glory be to Pete
Go to Ecky
Godblimey
Goldanged
Goldarn
Goldarnit
Golding
Golly
Good Christmas
Gorblimey
Gosh
Goshdarn
Have a Happy
Heck
Him Below
Holy Mackerel
Holy Smoke
I’ll be blowed
I’ll be darned
I’m dashed
Jeanie Mac!
(An expression roughly equivalent to the quite common formula
‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the Holy Martyrs!’,
avoiding use the Lord’s name taken in vain.)
Jeese
Jeez
Jee Willikins
Jee Whiskers
Jeepers
Jeepers Creepers
Jiminy (O Jesu Domini)
Jiminy Crickets
Jings
Jumping Jehoshaphat
Kinnell
Land
Landsakes
Laws-a-me
Lawks
Lawksamussy (Lord Have Mercy)
Lor
Lordy Me
Lor Lummy
Lord Lovikins
Lumme (Lord Love Me)
Marry
Marry Come Up
Mother O’Murphy (Mother of Mercy)
My Sainted Aunt
Merry Crimble
Nobodaddy
Od saves
Od’s bobs
Od’s body
Od’s bodikins
Od’s pitikins
Od rod ’em
Od’s zounds
Oh Glory!
Old Nick
Ruddy
Sakes Alive
Snakes Alive
Save Us
’Sbobs
’Sbodikins
’Selp
’Sflesh
’Sfoot
’Slife
Strewth (God’s Truth)
Swelp
Swelpme
Swelpme Bob
Swop me Bob
Swop me Bod
Tarnation (even ‘What in Carnation?’)
Tarnation take me
The Man Upstairs
The Ould Fella
Wouns
What the Deuce
What the Dickens
Xmas
’Zbloud
’Zblud
’Z’death
Zoodikers
Zoonters
Zounds

• 

A Moral Conundrum for Puritans:

Does a euphemism become no less a profanity when it’s translated in one’s head?

 

(And, yes, of course – for crying out loud! – this list of Strewthisms is no way near complete!)

 

PS. I grew up in the early Atomic Age when King Charles III, as a schoolboy, was heard to say ‘Blast!’ and was widely condemned by the British Press.  

 
•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

 

 

Arbour. Amour. Affaire de Coeur . . . Saboteur.

At the farther end of our garden, behind the boxwood maze, there was a bower with

honeysuckle and other creeping plants overlooking the tennis court. That evening I sat with Douglas on the swing-seat within the trellised shadows of 

the arbour. Douglas had been singles champion at our village club.   

  Boy, my kid brother, knew perfectly well how I first met Douglas, from that 
auspicious day I returned home from a match with a tennis ball I’d mistaken for my own.
  Douglas had written his name on it in indelible ink: DE SHERRARD (the ‘E’ stood for Eric, I was to learn eventually, of course, but at first I’d been willing to believe the ‘de’ was the nobiliary particle, because Douglas was such a perfect gentleman). I have the ball still. 
  The fringes of our fingers were touching. I felt an electrical charge passing between us.

  A crescent moon rocked gently in the cradle of a pine crest.
  Above us, in the twilight, hung yellow roses so brilliant that for a moment I’d almost mistaken them for lanterns. Beyond the rhododendrons, the chalk lines of the tennis court glowed in the dusk, and I glimpsed a pair of bats dipping low over the net.
  I nestled on Douglas’s shoulder as he talked of warring Dayak tribesmen.
  ‘When drums speak out, laws hold their tongues,’ he said gravely, puffing on his pipe.
  ‘In a remote place of flies and midges men don’t need permission to smoke,’ he added thoughtfully in parenthesis, striking another match.
  Suddenly I felt Douglas’s shoulders stiffen and he slowly reached down and I saw his hand close on a large windfall apple, which with a lightning move he hurled into the darkness.
  There was a yelp of pain from the shrubbery and Boy emerged.
  ‘Listen, chummy,’ Douglas drawled, ‘there’s a difference between staring and being stark blind.’
  Douglas was a crack shot with a sporting rifle; he could shoot the eye out of a mosquito, or so he claimed. And he also said he slept with his eyes open like a hare. 
  ‘What do you want here?’ Boy asked in a shrill quavering voice.
  ‘Your sister,’ Douglas boomed. 
  ‘No one wants to marry a quaint old thing in a poke bonnet,’ Boy sneered. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘Mummy says she would not let a daughter of hers marry a Roman Candle.’
  It was true. Mother and Boy had got up a whispering campaign against me when they had learned Douglas was a Roman Catholic. 
  Boy ran off up the path, shouting, ‘She’s got it bad, Mummy! She’s got it bad!’
  ‘Sawn off little runt,’ I heard Douglas mutter.
  ‘What did you expect?’ my brother grinned evilly, when the next evening my new beau arrived looking glum. ‘Rosaries all the way?’

Dispossession, pages 292 and 293, Sister Morphine (2008)

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

That space the Evil One abstracted . . . and attention gained with forked tongue . . .

This morning I was awakened by the ‘tsk-tsk!’ of a stonechat. In Provence or thereabouts they call the bird Le Tarier pâtre (the Shepherd’s Auger because it sounds like persistently abraded rock). When I hear it, I always imagine a spectral sculptor in the hills chipping away at an invisible statue of Demeter, the goddess of grain.

‘Tsk-tsk!’ It’s an imagined space with a qualitative volume.

The substance of shadow.

‘We see least with borrowed eyes,’ my art mistress once said with emphatic earnestness in my last term at school, and I’d vowed then to always question the witness of my own sight, particularly as a favoured elementary visual exercise of hers was the study of ‘counter-shapes’, that is, those structural underpinnings that give substance to a figurative composition, such as the interstices between limbs or objects and their interplay with shadows.

Perception Psychology test card.

This concern for close compositional observation very often finds expression in my fiction. Take this sentence from my narrative, Dispossession, an account of a vulnerable woman’s banishment from her family home and of her feverish scheming to revenge herself of the treacheries of her younger brother (Sister Morphine, Salt, 2008). She confesses:

            I felt neglected and vulnerable, held together weakly by will alone, 
            like a house shored up by its own shadow. 

In this case, of course, the shadow – not the house – is the powerful counter-shape that’s representative of the lost domain.

So I continue to brood on the latent power amassed in certain undiscovered counter-shapes and sometimes I’m rewarded when the art of an Old Master, when viewed afresh, unexpectedly yields – with the delayed action of a time bomb – a revelation whose explosive force is the greater for being granted five centuries after the device was primed.

Hidden emblemata revealed.

I need write little more in explanation when the subject of my recent discoveries (this past Monday) is shown to be Albrecht Dürer, hero of the German Renaissance, and when the once hidden emblemata can be seen exposed here on this page in the two drawings I’ve presumed to deconstruct, stumbled upon while riffling through a catalogue of the Dürer oeuvre.

You can see the shadowy interstices here that Dürer identified when he subtly assays the conflict between Piety and Sin – Good and Evil – for in each case the interstice of the ubiquitous Serpent appears, insinuating evil into the devotional duties of knelt prayer and priestly injunction (the First Commandment). 

Is there truly a subliminal message in these interspaces of Dürer’s art? A century and a half after these images were made, the tremendous words of John Milton in Paradise Lost told of the Great Adversary whose stratagems as Tempter to suborn mankind resounded as an ordained truth . . . so, in this consideration of the latent potency of counter-shapes in religious art I think it apposite to conjoin those words with Dürer’s prophetic images, for surely they are precursors of ‘that space the Evil One abstracted’ perceived by the blind poet from out of his own darkness. 

‘. . . the brute Serpent in whose shape Man I deceived:
that which to me belongs is enmity . . . between Me and Mankind;
I am to bruise his heel. . .’

‘That space the Evil One abstracted stood from his own evil . . .

To me shall be the glory sole among the Infernal Powers . . .’

 

‘The Potentiality of the Plane’ . . . Postscript (October 3rd 2021)

I’ve just read this by a mystic concerned (like the poet he venerated, Gerard Manley Hopkins) with the mysteries of spiritual ‘indwelling’ and the co-inherence of interrelationships . . .

‘I think in a line [as one who is sequentially conscious] – but there is the potentiality of the plane.’ This perhaps was what great art was – a momentary apprehension of the plane at the point of the line . . . the Praying Hands of Dürer . . . the Ninth Symphony – the sense of vastness in those small things was the vastness of all that had been felt in the present.

                                                              Many Dimensions by Charles Williams 1931

See also: 

O Fruit of that Forbidden Tree whose Mortal Taste Brought All Our Woe . . .

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/o-fruit-of-that-forbidden-tree-whose.html

and

Et vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suæ, Eva . . . de ligno autem scientiæ boni et mali ne comedas. 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/09/et-vocavit-adam-nomen-uxoris-su-heva-de.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Lament of a Girl Led Astray (score from Sister Morphine).

Put a tenner on the table as yer leavin’,

Put a tenner on the table

                                          won’tcha, dear.

Put a tenner on the table.

                                         if yer love me,

’Cos a girl ’as gotta live . . . 

’Cos a girl ’as gotta live . . . 

’Cos a girl ’as gotta live on more than

cold and bitter beer.

For many years, I admit, yes, we’d conducted a sort of meretricious relationship, which had branded me, I suppose, as a species of ‘kept woman’, for there was a lighthearted understanding that we should assist each other financially from time to time, when low on funds.

        Hence, when Douglas stole from the warmth of my bed in the small hours, I would often run to the piano to vocalise my penniless state in a patter song of my own devising . . . 

        The mock pathos of my Lament of a Girl Led Astray and jangling honky-tonk beerhall accompaniment had generally been productive of more than a tenner.

        Then, a change fell upon all things, when, in the light of one exceedingly feeble dawn, he confessed he was leaving me for a younger, more provident woman.

        ‘After traipsing after you all these years! You . . . you . . .’ I stuttered, quite beside myself with anger. ‘You . . . you . . .’ 

        Douglas turned slowly at the threshold. 

        ‘Well?’  There was a peculiar twist to his lips as if he were pleased to be hurting me.

‘You . . . you . . . bally bastard!’ I finally managed weakly.

        He gave a derisive little laugh and slammed the door.

        ‘I don’t care a blind fig who she is,’ I shouted after him senselessly, I was so angry, ‘or a brass farthing for your petty fornications!’

        Even now, his desertion, in retrospect – as I gazed in a reverie at the river’s oozy bed – prompted a bitter taste in my mouth; his laughter had simply added wormwood to gall.

Dispossession, Page 319, Sister Morphine (2008).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html