Why The Bloody Hell Were They Offended? (Week 9)

This weeks reading was ‘Australian cultural scripts- bloody revisited’, by Anna Wierzbicka, and it concerned the use of the word ‘bloody’ in Australian speech discourse. Bloody as an adjective has been a part of Australian speech for a long time, since the 1890’s in fact, when weekly magazine of the time, The Bulletin labelled it ‘the great Australian adjective’ (Ludowyk, 2002). But why the bloody hell do some people find it offensive? You can be sure I don’t mean any bloody Aussie when I say that! But the English do find it offensive. So offensive, in fact, that in 2001 they banned an Australian tourism ad featuring Lara Bingle, that asked the question- ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ (Hong, 2008). The $180 million campaign was swiftly banned in the UK because ‘bloody hell’ was deemed an offensive term. But in Australia, it’s not an offensive term. It wasn’t meant to offend anyone by being used in the tourism ad, least of all the English! ‘Bloody’ is used as a sort of intensifier of what is being said, for example, ‘I just kicked my bloody toe!’. Wierzbicka (2002) identifies two meanings to the word ‘bloody’, depending on if they are used adjectively or adverbially. The Australian National Dictionary (2008) describes the difference as being the adjectival use associated with with negative feelings, while the adverbial use is not necessarily associated with bad feelings. While ‘bloody’ may be considered to be impolite in other countries, in Australia it is a part of Australian culture and speech discourse. Therefore, it should be viewed as one of the common and casual phrases used in everyday life (Hong, 2008). References Australian National Dictionary, 2008, http://australiannationaldictionary.com.au/index.php Hong, M, 2008, ‘Bloody hell and (im)politeness in Australian English’, Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication, vol. 1, no.1, pp 33-39 Ludowyk, F 2002, ‘The Anatomy of Swearing’, accessed 14/9/12, http://andc.anu.edu.au/ozwords/April%202001/Swearing.html Wierzbicka, A 2002, ‘Australian cultural scripts- bloody revisited’, Journal of Pragmatics, v34, pp1167-1209