Crikey, Streuth, Bloody & Blimey
I actually heard this on sunday night safran on triplej but I heard that these aussie slang words orginated from old christian swear words. I could have the details slightly off but the concept should be correct.
Crikey is a contraction of “Christ Kill Me”
Streuth is a contraction of “God’s Truth”
Bloody is a contraction of “by Our lady” referring the Mary thus “Bloody Mary” cocktail
Blimey is a contraction of “Lord Blind Me”, originally part of the phrase “cor blimey” which was an abbreviation of “may god blind me if it is not so”[1].
Now how could these swear words become so Australian? Cass told me that it is because convicts from England would commonly use these words, which then migrated along with them as they were shipped to Australia for stealing bread and… Saffron.
Reference:
[1]http://english2american.com/dictionary/wholelot.html
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I wonder if the evolution and mutation of language could be classed as being caused by memes? It’s interesting to see the differences in the evolution of a language in different countries.. eg. Australia & England. While we got a majority of lower-class “criminals”, England’s population was still a mixture of upper- & lower-class, so the general spoken language and accent remained pretty much the same, apart from general evolutionary givens (introduction of new words, alteration of accent due to colloquialisms and the reduced importance of formality in language).
Or maybe I’m drawing a long BOW here? Oh haha. LANGUAGES ARE FUN LOL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
casbot
September 19, 2006
The religious derivations which you mention are correct but
what makes you think these words are particularly Aussie? We had them first and although some are old-fashioned, Bloody is in daily use and so is Blimey, among Londoners in particular.
Marilyn Yurdan
December 6, 2009