You’ll have seen Oor Wullie’s Big Bucket Trail, I hope? The art installations have brightened streets across Scotland. It’s a wonderful idea and helps very good causes. But I might have a word with Wullie, the wee scamp, about his language. His “Jings, crivvens, help ma boab” is a strangled oath, sometimes called a minced oath.
Minced oaths are a form of euphemism, the figure of speech we adopt when we don’t want to actually say what it is that we mean. “Big boned” for fat, “Cupid’s measles” for venereal disease. We use them all the time. “Jings, crivvens, help ma boab” is a euphemistic: Jesus, Christ, help me God.
Euphemisms are necessary, of course. Direct terms don’t suit our culture. Whether that is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion. It is irrefutable that a lady saying she’s “off to powder her nose” (or one of the many other ways of saying this) is much more often heard than her informing her companions that she’s leaving the room to urinate or defecate.
It would be easy to make a case, and some people do, that this mealy-mouthed squeamishness gets in the way of understanding. For a euphemism, or a minced oath, to work the person listening has to understand what he or she is hearing. A rarely-used or old-fashioned euphemism, “enceinte” for instance, might need quite a bit of explanation and therefore obscures meaning.
Talking in a circumspect manner has its uses. It is much more considerate to say “passed on” or “taken from us”, rather than the terribly stark “I hear your husband is dead”.
The reason there are so many strangled oaths: gadzooks (God’s hooks, the nails used in crucifixion); cor blimey (God blind me); odds-bodkins (God’s sweet body), to name a few, is that using the word “God” in an oath used to be considered blasphemy. You might argue that it still is. One of the Ten Commandments (No. 2 or No. 3, depending on your brand of religion) is: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”.
Even when this was a more rigorously observed social tenet, people still had to say something when they hit their thumb with a hammer. So they used minced oaths. Oor Wullie (and The Broons, they’re guilty too!) can be forgiven for their repeated semi-blasphemies; they are conforming to our polite, euphemism-addicted society.
Word of the week
Enceinte (adjective)
French for pregnant, used as a euphemism. “Pregnant is no longer seen as impolite, there’s no need to say a girl is enceinte.”
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
