[citation needed] Public use continued to be seen as controversial until the 1960s, but the word has since become a comparatively mild expletive or intensifier.
[citation needed] In American English, the word is used almost exclusively in its literal sense to describe something that is covered in blood; when used as an intensifier, it is seen by American audiences as a stereotypical marker of a British- or Irish-English speaker, without any significant obscene or profane connotations.
Ernest Weekley (1921) relates English usage to imitation of purely intensive use of Dutch bloed and German Blut in the early modern period.
According to Emily Reed (2018), "sanglant" (meaning "bloody") was used as an expletive in Anglo Norman, with published examples dating back to 1396.
In that year, two examples of such insults appeared in Manières de langage, a medieval textbook for French-language learners.
However, Eric Partridge (1933) describes the supposed derivation of bloody as a further contraction of by'r lady as "phonetically implausible".
According to Rawson's dictionary of Euphemisms (1995), attempts to derive bloody from minced oaths for "by our lady" or "God's blood" are based on the attempt to explain the word's extraordinary shock power in the 18th to 19th centuries, but they disregard that the earliest records of the word as an intensifier in the 17th to early 18th century do not reflect any taboo or profanity.
Johnson (1755) already calls it "very vulgar", and the original Oxford English Dictionary article of 1888 comments the word is "now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered 'a horrid word', on a par with obscene or profane language".
[7] On the opening night of George Bernard Shaw's comedy Pygmalion in 1914, Mrs Patrick Campbell, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, created a sensation with the line "Walk!
Also in Australia, the word bloody is frequently used as a verbal hyphen, or infix, correctly called tmesis as in "fanbloodytastic".
In the 1940s an Australian divorce court judge held that "the word bloody is so common in modern parlance that it is not regarded as swearing".
[citation needed] The term bloody as an intensifier is now overall fairly rare in Canada, though still more common than in the United States.
Many substitutions were devised[year needed] to convey the essence of the oath, but with less offence; these included bleeding, bleaking, cruddy, smuddy, blinking, blooming, bally, woundy, flaming and ruddy.
In the UK the BACC required that a modified version of the ad be shown in the United Kingdom, without the word "bloody".
[14] In May 2006 the UK's Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the word bloody was not an inappropriate marketing tool and the original version of the ad was permitted to air.