Australian cultural scripts—bloody revisited

Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 1167–1209 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Australian cultural scripts—bloody revisited§ Anna Wierzbicka* Department of Linguistics, Australian National University, Baldessin Precinct Bldg 110, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Received 5 August 2000; received in revised form 16 January 2001

Abstract This paper focusses on ‘‘the great Australian adjective’’ bloody and it shows that far from being meaningless, the humble bloody is packed with meaning; and that by unpacking this meaning we can throw a good deal of light on traditional Australian attitudes and values. It argues that the use of bloody furnishes an important clue to both the changes and continuity in Australian culture, society, and speech and also offers us a vantage point from which to investigate a whole network of Australian attitudes and values. Furthermore, the paper shows that the Australian use of bloody also illuminates some important theoretical issues, it demonstrates that frequently used and apparently ‘‘bleached’’ discourse markers do in fact have their own precise meaning, and that this meaning can be revealed by means of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), based on empirically established universal human concepts. It also shows that once the precise meaning of such discourse markers is accurately portrayed, it can provide important clues to the values, attitudes, and modes of interaction characteristic of a given society or speech community. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Discourse markers; Cultural scripts; ‘‘NSM’’ semantic theory; Australian culture; Australian English; Swearing

1. Introduction: ‘‘cognitive ethnopragmatics’’1,2 The way we speak reflects the way we think. Not necessarily at the individual level—a skilled speaker can conceal his or her way of thinking behind carefully §

An earlier draft of this paper was read by Nick Enfield and Cliff Goddard. I would like to thank them both for their detailed and extremely helpful comments. I would also like to thank my family, Clare, Mary and John Besemeres for many judicious comments on the subject-matter. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61-2-6125-3353; fax: +61-2-6125-8214. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Wierzbicka). 1 For an earlier analysis of bloody and related concepts see Wierzbicka (1997). 2 For the term ‘‘ethnopragmatics’’ and the idea of ‘‘ethnopragmatics’’ as a field of study, see Goddard (Forthcoming a). 0378-2166/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(01)00023-6

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chosen words and phrases. At the social level, however, ways of speaking do reflect ways of thinking, in particular, as Franz Boas (1911) emphasized nearly a century ago, ways of thinking of which the speakers are not fully conscious. They reveal, and provide evidence for, patterns of thought. Ways of thinking which are widely shared in a society become enshrined in ways of speaking. Ways of speaking change as the underlying ways of thinking change. There can be a lag between the two, but as one can see by studying ways of speaking at the times of revolutions and other dramatic social transformations, ways of speaking can change very quickly, too, in response to changes in prevailing attitudes. Of course, cultures are not ‘‘bounded, coherent, timeless systems of meaning’’ (Strauss and Quinn, 1997: 3). At the same time, however, ‘‘...Our experiences in our own and other societies keep reminding us that some understandings are widely shared among members of a social group, surprisingly resistant to change in the thinking of individuals, broadly applicable across different contexts of their lives, powerfully motivating sources of their action, and remarkably stable over succeeding generations. (Strauss and Quinn, 1997: 3)

Common expressions and common speech routines involving those expressions are particularly revealing of social attitudes. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer put it well when he said, in his Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976:72): ‘‘Common expressions are not simply the dead remains of linguistic usage that have become figurative. They are, at the same time, the heritage of a common spirit and if we only understand rightly and penetrate their covert richness of meaning, they can make this common spirit perceivable again.’’

To penetrate this ‘‘covert richness of meaning’’ we need an adequate methodology. I believe that such a methodology is available in the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) theory of semantics and in the theory of cultural scripts which is its offshoot. The key idea of NSM semantics is that all meanings can be adequately portrayed in empirically established universal human concepts, with their universal grammar. (For detailed discussion and exemplification, see Goddard and Wierzbicka, 1994; Wierzbicka, 1996a; Goddard, 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka, forthcoming)3 (see footnote3 on next page). The key idea of the theory of cultural scripts is that widely shared and widely known ways of thinking can be identified in terms of the same empirically established universal human concepts, with their universal grammar. (See in particular Wierzbicka, 1994, 1996b,c; Goddard, 1997) In the last few decades, cross-cultural investigations of ways of speaking have often been conceived in terms of an ‘‘ethnography of speaking’’ (Hymes, 1962). This perspective provided a very healthy and necessary corrective to the one-sided search for a universal ‘‘logic of conversation’’ and for ‘‘universals of politeness’’. The theory of cultural scripts, however, proposes that we go still further and complement the ‘‘ethnography of speaking’’ with an ‘‘ethnography of thinking’’; and it offers a framework within which such an ‘‘ethnography of thinking’’ can be meaningfully and methodically pursued.

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I do not see the ‘‘ethnography of thinking’’ as an alternative to the ‘‘ethnography of speaking’’, or, more generally, to the ‘‘ethnography of social practices’’. On the contrary, I believe that we discover shared ways of thinking by studying ways of doing things, including ways of speaking; and further, that the study of social practices, including linguistic practices, is best seen not as a goal in itself but rather, as a path to the understanding of a society’s attitudes and values. The theory of cultural scripts represents a cognitive approach to culture and society; and it offers a methodology which allows us to explore thinking, speaking, and doing in a unified framework.4 The theory of cultural scripts combines an interest in the uniqueness and particularity of cultures with a recognition and affirmation of human universals; and it rejects the widespread perception that, as Sandall (2000: 119) recently put it, ‘‘The enemy of the particular, the local, the idiosyncratic, the cultural is the universal, and the universal is always Bad News’’. In the semantic theory of which the theory of cultural scripts is an off-shoot, the universal is Good News, and it is the universal—in the form of universal human concepts and their universal grammar—which gives us the tools for unlocking the

3 The set of universal human concepts which has emerged from cross-linguistic investigations undertaken by many scholars over the last few decades can be presented in the form of the following table:

English version Substantives:

I, YOU, SOMEONE(PERSON), SOMETHING(THING), PEOPLE, BODY

Determiners:

THIS, THE SAME, OTHER

Quantifiers:

ONE, TWO, SOME, MANY/MUCH, ALL,

Attributes:

GOOD, BAD, BIG, SMALL

Mental predicates:

THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR

Speech:

SAY, WORD, TRUE

Actions, events, movements:

DO, HAPPEN, MOVE

Existence, and possession:

THERE IS, HAVE

Life and death:

LIVE, DIE

Logical concepts:

NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF

Time:

WHEN(TIME), NOW, AFTER, BEFORE, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME

Space:

WHERE(PLACE), HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE

Intensifier, augmentor:

VERY, MORE

Taxonomy, partonomy:

KIND OF, PART OF

Similarity:

LIKE (HOW, AS)

4

Strauss and Quinn (1999: 209) talk about ‘‘the ethnography of the inner life’’, based largely on ethnographic interviews. The ‘ethnography of thinking’ as I understand it is not inconsistent with that idea but it relies primarily on linguistic evidence (interpreted through semantic analysis carried out in terms of universal human concepts).

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secrets of the particular. Every human being, and every human group, is a blend of the universal and the particular. The theory of cultural scripts is based on the assumption that we need to understand people (both individuals and social groups) in their particularity, but that we can understand them best in terms of what is shared; and that one thing that is shared is a set of universal human concepts with their universal grammar. (cf. Wierzbicka, 1996a; Goddard, 1998)

2. Australian cultural scripts: a preliminary discussion In commenting on his current reluctance to discuss Australian attitudes the distinguished poet Les Murray (1999: 168) says that having done a fair bit of it himself, he has ‘‘now grown very distrustful of the conceptual poverty and stereotyping that bedevil the Australian Identity industry, and tried as far as possible to steer clear of any sort of predictable polemic’’. One can sympathize with Murray’s distrust of stereotyping and his dissatisfaction with much of the debate on the issue of Australian culture5 and identity. But there is a difference between, on the one hand, repeating old cliche´s (or, for that matter, coining and marketing new ones), and on the other, systematically exploring and analyzing empirical evidence. One may emotionally identify with aspects of traditional Australian culture, take pride in them, think about them with nostalgia, or one may want to reject and condemn them with disgust, shame, and anger. But whatever attitude—or mixture of attitudes—one chooses, this culture needs to be understood. To quote Les Murray again, the debate about Australian cultural traditions has been marred by ‘‘its pervading acrimony, its frequently dismissive and contemptuous tones, its readiness to bury things before they were dead’’. I would add to this that there is a tendency to bury things before they are explored and methodically and fairly explained. Some of the best clues to the genuine Australian cultural scripts are provided by key Australian words and expressions. To take some examples:

5 The concept of ‘‘Australian culture’’ is of course an abstraction, as is also ‘‘English language’’ or ‘‘Australian English’’. Abstractions of this kind must not be reified, but this doesn’t mean that they are not useful and convenient. To quote Enfield (2000: 57):

‘‘The very idea of the English language is a cultural and metalinguistic artefact. So when we work with categories like English or Lao, this must be kept in mind. And the same goes for ‘Anglo’ or ‘Lao’ culture. What we are really talking about is some set of cultural representations—private representations which are carried, assumed-to-be-carried and assumed-to-be-assumed-to-be-carried—among some carrier group. (...) if we really want to characterize what cultural representations unite groups of people, we had better start with the cultural representation in question, and ask what group of people are united by their sharing it, rather than starting with some group (i.e. an identity, not extensionally defined), and asking what cultural representations are shared among members.’’ These are very good points, I think. I would only add that to ‘‘start with the cultural representations’’ we need to start with tangible words, expressions, and other identifiable linguistic phenomena—such as, for example, the Australian bloody.

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it it it it it it it it

is is is is is is is is

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bad to be a whinger bad to be a sook bad to be a dobber bad to be a bullshit artist (or: bull artist) bad to bignote oneself not very good to be a tall poppy6 good to be a good mate good to ‘‘see through’’ bullshit

Formulae of this kind (whose very intelligibility depends on the reader’s familiarity with certain Australian words and expressions, cf. Wierzbicka, 1997) are not meant to be empirical generalizations about people’s behaviour, but recognizable ‘‘scripts’’ revealing and attesting to some widely held values. Sometimes scripts of this kind (or fairly close approximations to them) can be heard in everyday discourse, being passed on as popular wisdom. Thus a celebrated Canberra rugby player, Laurie ‘‘Lozza’’ Daley, talking about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour on the field (1995: 62) observes: ‘‘On-field violence is for losers, but if a team-mate is about to cop a hammering then I’ll go in swinging because, firstly, you don’t abandon a mate, and, secondly, people are watching and they wouldn’t think much of your character if you slunk off while a buddy was being smashed.’’

The norm described here by Daley (‘‘you don’t abandon a mate’’) can be articulated in the form of the following cultural script: I think about some people like this: ‘‘this person is someone like me I do many things with this person I don’t want bad things to happen to this person, as I don’t want bad things to happen to me’’ I know: if something bad happens to one of these people I have to do something because of this Daley’s sense that these norms are binding is reflected in his second comment, which can be paraphrased as follows: if I don’t do this people will think something bad about me because of this Whether or not folk comments such as those offered by Daley can be regarded as a reliable guide to widely held popular wisdom, linguistic facts such as the wide use 6 The phrase not very good in the formulation of this script has been chosen advisedly. The popular wisdom does not hold that it is bad to be a ‘‘tall poppy’’ but rather, that it is not as good as ‘‘some people’’ might think; and that in any case, the speaker is not impressed by anyone’s status as a ‘‘tall poppy’’.

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of the word mate in Australian English and the very existence of the word mateship provide incontrovertible evidence for the validity of certain widely shared, and even more widely recognized, ‘‘cultural scripts’’. (For detailed discussion, see Wierzbicka, 1997).

3. The importance of ‘bloody’ in Australian discourse In this paper, I will focus on another Australian key word: bloody. The word bloody has been known for a long time as ‘‘the great Australian adjective’’ (Haskell, 1940; for discussion see Baker, 1966: 196–200). The Australian National Dictionary (AND) comments that bloody (as an adjective and adverb) is ‘‘used as in general English but from its frequency and ubiquity [is] often thought of as characteristically Australian’’. But is it true that ‘‘the great Australian adjective’’ is used in Australian English ‘‘as in general English’’ and only differs from the ‘‘general English’’ in its ‘‘frequency and ubiquity’’? I will argue that it is not. I will also argue that the very ubiquity of this word in Australian English points to its special importance in Australian culture and raises questions about the Australian cultural scripts reflected in this widespread use of bloody. Before we can articulate these scripts, however, we need first to look at the use and meaning of bloody in some detail. Some readers may raise a brow at this point: ‘‘meaning’’? Does a word like bloody have any meaning at all? Is not the frequent use of bloody by many Australian speakers just an automatic reflex, a kind of linguistic hiccup, with no, or virtually no, meaning at all?7 In this paper I will try to show that far from being meaningless, the humble bloody is packed with meaning; and that by unpacking this meaning we can throw a good deal of light on traditional Australian attitudes and values. At this point let me simply raise the question: why should a person who uses hundreds of ‘‘bloodies’’ every week, and thousands, every year, adhere to this routine at the cost of such an expenditure of energy if this routine did not mean anything to them? In fact, dictionaries of English do acknowledge that bloody has a meaning, although they cannot explore this meaning in depth or articulate it with precision. For example, the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (published in 1989) comments on the expressive use of bloody as follows: ‘‘a. [adjective]. In foul language, a vague epithet expressing anger, resentment, detestation; but often a mere intensive, esp. with a negative, as ‘not a bloody one’’’. In addition, the OED assigns to bloody a separate (adverbial) sense ‘‘as an intensive’’, glossed as follows: ‘‘very . . . and no mistake, exceedingly; abominably, desperately. In general colloquial use 7 Claims of this kind have been made for Cockney (in which the Australian bloody appears to have its roots). For example: ‘‘Cockney swear-adjectives, though very limited in range, are used so much, especially by workmen and less educated teenage youths, that they heavily colour the language. In the speech of some men, every second or third word seems to be a swear or sexual adjective. In fact, however, they have been so much over-used that they have lost practically all their meaning... and the shame is that this habit of being unable or unwilling to choose an appropriate intensifier has spread to younger people’’ (Wright, 1981: 123)

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from the Restoration to c.1750; 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, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) ‘b.....y’.’’ From a semantic point of view, it is striking that the OED makes no attempt to capture the semantic invariant of the word, contenting itself with an open-ended sequence of alternatives: ‘‘anger, resentment, detestation; but often a mere intensive’’; ‘‘very (. . .), exceedingly; abominably, desperately’’. From a sociolinguistic point of view, it is striking that the OED still restricts the use of bloody to the ‘‘lowest classes’’. While these comments have been repeated from the first (1933) edition of the OED (which in turn repeated it after a first fascicle published in 1887), it is curious that they have not been deleted or rephrased in the second edition. From an Australian point of view the comments seem very peculiar even retrospectively: as noted by A. Crombie in 1927, in his memoir After 60 years, Recollections of an Australian bushman, in Australia, ‘‘the bush adjective [i.e. bloody] was neither obscene nor profane’’ (quoted in the AND). In Australia, bloody, while regarded as a mild swearword, was never seen as ‘‘foul’’ nor restricted to the ‘‘mouths of the lowest classes’’. Its use in contemporary Australian speech spans a wide range of genres and registers—including public discourse, such as, for example, interviews given by eminent public figures, with a view to publication. Here are a few quotes from an interview with Bob Hawke included in A place in the sun (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000), a collection of interviews with public figures published in the year 2000. First, Hawke philosophising about life and politics: ‘‘In the end, it’s all about the creation of happiness. That’s what politics is about. It’s what I’m about. That’s what we’re here for, to create happiness. A better life for people. So that they can enjoy their brief time on this bloody planet’’. (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000: 64)

Second, Hawke reminiscing about his University years: ‘‘There were lots of arguments at University. That’s why I set up the International Club. I was appalled by the attitude of lots of people. And as I say, I brought them into my home and went to their places and actually went out of my way to try and raise the moral bloody consciousness (. . .)’’ (Ibid: 65).

And finally, Hawke on education: ‘‘.... the problem is that mankind has suffered a sort of collective lobotomy. One side of the brain, the technical side, has flourished and grown in an exponential sense, and we should value that. (...) What we should be worried about is this other side of the bloody brain’’. (Ibid: 73).

Quotes like these provide an excellent illustration for Les Murray’s (1999: 152) comment about the ‘‘gentrification’’ of the traditional Australian ‘‘larrikin style’’. According to Murray, since the 1960s, ‘‘the larrikin style (...) has become something of an elite style, affected by women as well as men, and may inform the social behaviour of students, artists, journalists, businessmen, even prime ministers. The use of a very salty Australian accent and vocabulary interlarded with learned and literary terms

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is one manifestation of the style. Like blue jeans, it moderates the inegalitarianism of higher education. The larrikin has almost become an Australian variant of the arrived Bohemian, a style now dominant in much of the West, or at least present as an alternative elite.’’

The use in the same sentences of learned, literary, scientific, political and generally ‘‘high-brow’’ vocabulary with words like bloody (and bullshit) is a good case in point. Significantly, such a cultivation of bloody in public language is widespread, as the book A place in the sun testifies. Examples can be readily quoted from politicians of different persuasions, different backgrounds, and different personal styles. For instance, here is another former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, speaking about Asian immigration to Australia and about Hawke’s decision to accept some thirty thousand Chinese students and their families after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989: ‘‘Why don’t they look at the bloody exam results? (...) When people criticise that decision, I ask them, why don’t they just love their country and say, ‘‘Isn’t it bloody marvellous that we’re getting this talent, because it is going to make our country better?’’ (...) The fact is that our economic welfare is increasingly dependent on Asia. Sixty percent of our exports go to Asia. That’s a hell of a lot of your bloody jobs’’. (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000: 70).

Another Australian politician, Peter Wong, born in China and brought up in Indonesia, whose ‘‘Unity Party’’ stands for ‘‘the diversity of the Australian People’’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000: 293) and for ‘‘the spirit of multiculturalism’’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000: 295), is also fond of the word bloody. To quote: ‘‘When I resigned I called a press conference (...). At that time I was really very politically naive, and I didn’t know how to answer their bloody questions’’. (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000: 292).

Finally, the Australian academic and writer, Donald Horne, who also salutes Australian diversity and rejects ‘‘cultural homogeneity’’, nonetheless chooses to express his pro-multicultural stand using the same old Australian cultural symbol— the word bloody: ‘‘Now that’s what being Australian is. And it mustn’t be ethnic. There’s no bloody ethnic Australian. The distinction is between ethnicity and nationality.’’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000: 346.)

Thus, even those commentators who in theory reject the notion that in Australia cultural homogeneity and continuity could co-exist with cultural diversity and change, in fact implicitly acknowledge the need for some cultural continuity and cohesiveness by their use of the word bloody. Another related Australian concept is the ‘‘fair go’’, which Peter Wong calls ‘‘the fundamental Australian value’’ (‘‘The Unity Party upholds the fundamental Australian value of ‘a fair go for all’’’, Cope and Kalantzis, 2000: 294). But even the traditional Australian ideal of the ‘‘fair go’’, while openly admired by some, is attacked and ridiculed by others, as is also the traditional Australian ideal of ‘‘mateship’’. On the other hand, traditional Australian values and attitudes reflected in the central role played in everyday discourse by words like bloody and bullshit are seldom publicly attacked and ridiculed—partly no doubt because they have never been articulated as explicit ideals. One gets the impression that those who reject ‘‘Australian cultural scripts’’ as so much ‘‘bullshit’’

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and ‘‘(bloody) myth’’ do not stop to think what they are doing, and so do not realize that their position is self-contradictory. It is hard to believe that when Donald Horne declares: ‘‘there’s no bloody ethnic Australian’’ he is throwing in the word bloody as an empty flourish. Of course, it could be argued that he is trying to project a certain image, as a politician might do by ‘‘dropping his g’s’’. But there is more to it than that. The word bloody does mean something, and its meaning is not identical with that of any other so-called ‘‘swearword’’ in any other language. It seems clear that when Hawke, or Fraser, or Wong, or Horne use this word they are—consciously or not—showing their allegiance to certain traditional Australian values and appealing to the sense of these values among their readers. They are appealing to certain shared ‘‘cultural scripts’’. An intuitive awareness of these scripts is well attested in ‘‘folk comments’’ like those ‘‘reported’’ by C. J. Dennis, the author of the hugely popular ‘‘Songs of a Sentimental Bloke’’ (on which a very popular film was based): ‘‘Our speech was rough, our ways was tough—tough as our bloody game.’’ (C.J. Dennis 1936, AND.)

Numerous other comments of this kind could be quoted which show that Australians are aware of, and value, the ‘‘roughness’’ of their speech, and that behind that ‘‘roughness’’ lie certain cherished ‘‘cultural scripts’’. It remains to be shown what exactly these cultural scripts are—and the path to this leads via a semantic analysis of the word bloody. Before turning to this analysis, however, it should be said that while the status of bloody in Australian English has undergone certain changes, its use continues to be an important part of Australian culture, which (among many other things) distinguishes it from other cultures, including present-day British culture(s). The frequencies for bloody in two contemporary corpora—the Macquarie corpus of Australian English and the COBUILD corpus of British English—make this point abundantly clear. In the COBUILD corpus of ‘‘UK books’’ (based on 5 million running words), there are on average about 60 occurrences of bloody per one million words, and in the COBUILD corpus of ‘‘Spoken English’’ (based on 9 million running words) the figure is similar (about 50 per million). In the Macquarie corpus, based on published material (18.5 million running words), the corresponding figure is significantly higher (160 occurrences per one million words).8 It might be added that in the Cobuild corpus of American books the occurrence of bloody is extremely low (24.5 per million, that is, less than a half the figure for the UK books, and nearly seven times less than in the Macquarie corpus). According to H. L. Mencken’s classic study The American Language, ‘‘Perhaps the most curious disparity between 8

The exact figures are as follows:

UK Books:

322 in 5.4 million (60 per million)

UK Spoken English:

464 in 9.3 million (50 per million)

US Books:

138 in 5.6 million (24.5 per million)

Macquarie:

3000 in 6 million (160 per million)

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the vocabulary of the two languages is presented by bloody. The word is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as indecent, with overtones of the blasphemous’’ (1936: 311, quoted in Hughes, 1991: 172). A century later, the situation has no doubt changed a little, due to television, films, and so on; but even so, one can surmise that not very many occurrences of bloody in the US corpus stand for its ‘‘swearword’’ use at all.9 The high frequency of bloody in Australian speech does not mean that this word is perceived as acceptable to everyone. On the contrary, its expressive value is linked with a perception that ‘‘for some people’’ it is not acceptable. This wide use of a word regarded by some people as unacceptable shows that many speakers place a special value on presenting themselves as breakers of some other people’s conventions. Hughes (1991: 172) quotes on this point, with approval, Mencken’s (1936: 311–312) comment that ‘‘The more it [bloody] is denounced by the delicate, the more it is cherished by the vulgar’’. As I will argue in more detail below (see Section 6), in Australia, a certain defiance against ‘‘the delicate’’ is written into the very meaning of the word bloody itself.

4. ‘Bloody’ in parliamentary debates It is not only its frequency which distinguishes the use of bloody in Australian English from its use in British English. To begin with, there is the characteristically Australian use of bloody in highly positive collocations, such as bloody marvellous, or bloody beautiful, which I will discuss in more detail later. There are no such examples in the British corpus.10 Furthermore, there is also a marked difference in the type of discourse in which bloody can freely occur. The language of parliamentary debate is a good case in point. In the British parliament, bloody is used only rarely, and when it does occur, it tends to be the subject of elaborate explanations and profuse apologies. In the Australian parliamentary debates, on the other hand, it is, at least latterly, quite commonplace and in most cases it passes without any comment. The following examples come from Hansard for the ACT Legislative Assembly: I think $500,000 for the ACT to spend on Namadgi is bloody good news. (22/6/ 1995, p. 1089.) This government takes the view that if you are in deficit it is bloody stupid to borrow money to invest money. (20/9/1995, p. 1559.) She [Ms.Follett] knows that her leadership is under challenge. It will be, because she is doing such a bloody hopeless job—a totally hopeless job. (21/2/1996, p. 101.) They [supermarkets] have the hide to offer cheaper groceries, have they? Unbloody-believable. (27/6/1996, p. 2407.) 9 It is striking that in Jay’s (1992) extensive book-length study of swearing in America there is no mention of bloody at all. 10 This does not mean, needless to say, that such positive collocations NEVER occur in British English.

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What are you explaining for? I did not ask you the bloody question. (12/12/1996, p. 4820.) . . . those people in Mental Health Services (...) are doing a bloody good job. (27/ 2/1997, p. 577.) Mr. Whitecross: I have a supplementary question, Mr. Speaker. (...) Mr. Corbett: A good question. Mr. Humphries: What a bloody dumb question, if you (...) ask me! (3/8/1997, p. 2826.) The use of bloody in the Australian parliament is not always accepted without protest, but this tends to happen only in cases of a personal attack, as in the following example: Mr. Moore: You are a bloody liar, and you know it. Mr. Berry: Mr. Moore! Mr. Speaker: Order! Come on! (24/6/1997, p. 2017.) ... that would be a result of Mr Berry’s bloody stupid questions—I withdraw the word ‘‘bloody’’. (17/4/1996, p. 1001.) When an apology for the use of bloody is offered, it tends to be perfunctory or humorous. For example: If you adopt the standard which they are arguing for today, Ministers will be dropping like flies, every bloody week that the Assembly sits. Excuse the French. (24/22/1999, p. 3601.) In the British parliament the occasional use of bloody is treated rather more seriously, as the following examples (from the House of Commons) illustrate: The ruling group on Westminster council wants to deal with Waitrose, Tesco and other supermarkets, and with Howard de Walden Estates, so that those involved can make a bloody great profit- [Interruption.] I am sorry; a huge profit. My cockney origins are getting the better of me. I am upset that education is to get a kick in the teeth from Westminster council and from a Conservative Government who pretends to be neutral. (26/6/1995.)

Mr Cook: That is fine from the point of view of career development, but it is not much bloody good in terms of taking care of children. Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Order. I know that the hon. Gentleman feels strongly about the matter, but I would ask him to moderate his language somewhat. Mr. Cook: I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, for using the term ‘‘bloody’’, if that was the word that caused offence. Was there any other? Madam Deputy Speaker: Not yet. Mr. Cook: I had no intention of causing offence, I promise you, and I promise the House. I apologise for using the term ‘‘bloody’’—but I still feel as strongly as

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that, or even more strongly. (6/12/1995.) Mr. Faulds: Bloody disgrace. Madam Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for Warley, East (Mr. Faulds) should keep his temper—nobody in the House wants to hear it. Mr. Newton: I shall say as calmly as I can to the hon. Gentleman that, if we felt that Bosnia did not matter, we would not have recalled Parliament during the recent short recess precisely because of an important development that needed to be debated. Thus in the House of Commons, speakers guilty of letting the occasional bloody slip in apologize not only for the use of a word regarded as improper, but also for their social origins, for causing offence to the House, and for the loss of emotional self-control. From an Australian point of view this sounds excessive. A hundred and seventy years ago, Edward Gibbon Wakefield in his ‘‘Letter from Sydney’’ (quoted in Hornadge, 1980: 76) wrote: ‘‘Bearing in mind that our lowest class (the convicts) brought with it a peculiar language, and is constantly supplied with fresh corruption, you will understand why pure English is not, and is unlikely to become, the language of the colony. (...) Terms of slang and flash [criminal argot, A.W.] are used, as a matter of course, from the gaols to the Viceroy’s palace, not excepting the Bar and the Bench. No doubt they will be reckoned quite parliamentary, as soon as we have a parliament.’’

The use of bloody in the Australian parliament at the turn of the century confirms the validity of Wakefield’s insight: it is not just the frequency of bloody which distinguishes Australian discourse from other Englishes but also its sociolinguistic and socio-cultural status. What remains to be done is to elucidate the meaning of this key word, and its place in the over-all network of Australian cultural scripts.

5. Why ‘bloody’? But why focus on bloody? Why not study shit, crap, and above all, ‘‘modern’’ ‘‘fwords’’ (f..k and f..king)? Or, for that matter, why not discuss Australian swearing in general? There is a widely shared perception that swearing plays a particularly important role in Australian English, more so than in other Englishes. Why not, then, discuss the special role of swearing in Australian English in more general terms, rather than concentrate on one particular swearword? I believe that Australian swearing in general is indeed an important field of study which has received relatively little attention in the past. (For pioneering efforts in this direction, see in particular, Taylor, 1975, 1976; Hill, 1992; Kidman, 1993). But there can hardly be a fruitful study of ‘‘Australian swearing in general’’ without a study of individual swearwords (a synthesis requires some groundwork). Still, if one must choose, why focus on bloody rather than on something else? In fact, there seems to be a growing reluctance in Australia to discuss the traditional Australian ‘‘b-words’’: bugger, bullshit, and above all bloody. The very salience of this word in Australian speech over the last two centuries has meant that it has

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attracted a great deal of non-scholarly attention and has become part of a stereotype image of Australians. As a result, many Australians who still use bloody on a daily basis have come to find references to the Australian use of bloody tedious, and seem to prefer to be seen as people who use ‘‘f-words’’ rather than the old ‘‘b-words’’: ‘‘fwords’’ seem to many not only more modern but also sometimes more chic—and almost more ‘‘progressive’’. (As one of my students, a punk, recently said to me, ‘‘bloody is a word that my grandfather used to use; I only use f..., and so do all my friends’’.)11 I do not dispute the accuracy of my punk-student’s self-assessment. Nonetheless, I believe that bloody is much more important as a key to Australian culture and Australian ‘‘cultural scripts’’ than are any ‘‘f-words’’ or other expletives currently seen as more ‘‘trendy’’ than the old ‘‘b-words’’. One reason for this is the place of bloody in the 200 year period in which Australian culture developed and consolidated its distinct character (largely, though of course not exclusively, in opposition to British culture). Another reason is that of historical continuity: my punk-student’s experience (or perception) notwithstanding, bloody is still widely used in Australia, as, for example, numerous recent citations in the Macquarie Corpus of Australian English demonstrate; and it has been used widely for over two centuries, in ways which have always struck overseas visitors as distinctive. Of course Australian culture has been changing, but change is not inconsistent with continuity; and in fact, change itself can only be understood against the background of continuity (without some continuity, it would not be a case of cultural change but of a cultural death). For example, the fact that the word bloody can now be used in the Australian parliament, and that the word bullshit can now be used freely in print, illustrates both the change and the continuity in the Australian culture and society. In addition to the important role of bloody in the Australian past and its role in linking the past with the present, bloody plays an important role as a unifying element in contemporary Australian society. ‘‘F-words’’ do not have this role because they are inherently divisive: the person who is using an ‘‘f-word’’ is aware that many people within Australian society itself find it offensive and he or she is deliberately disregarding the potential offence in order to express a strong feeling. As a first approximation, this can be represented along the following lines: f..k, f..king

11 An anonymous reviewer asks: ‘‘Is it necessary to ask why the investigator doesn’t study fuck or shit?’’. Personally, I am in sympathy with this reaction. If I have nonetheless felt the need to justify the ‘‘preferential treatment’’ given here to bloody, it is because of the reactions of several Australians to my paper and to the talk based on it (which I gave at the Workshop on Ethnopragmatics at Melbourne University in July 2000); to many Australian colleagues, anxious to avoid stereotyping, it is important that the increasing use of fuck and shit in Australia (at the expense of bloody) should also be acknowledged.

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I feel something (very bad) now I want to say something because of this many people think that some words are bad words these people think that it is bad to say these words I want to say a word like this now I know that if someone heard this word this person could feel something bad because of this I don’t want not to say this word because of this The reference to ‘‘many people who think that these words are bad words’’ makes ‘‘f-words’’ as it were counter-cultural; and what is perceived as the greater intensity of the ‘‘f-words’’ can be explained in terms of their ‘‘shock value’’ of which the speaker is not only aware but in fact relies on.12 As for the common Australian interjection shit!, it does not have the same syntactic potential as bloody. For example, it could not be substituted for bloody in utterances like ‘‘those bloody women!’’, ‘‘he was a bloody character!’’, or ‘‘it is a bloody good story’’. As an interjection, which cannot be syntactically integrated into the utterance, it cannot be used as a comment on some aspect of the proposition currently being expressed. Bloody is not an interjection, although it can be used as one in the combination bloody hell! and a few others. Since it can be syntactically integrated in a sentence (as an adjective and adverb) it can be used as a comment on various aspects of what is being said; and this gives it the potential to be used across a wider range of speech genres than a mere interjection could. For example, it is no accident that in parliamentary debates one is more likely to come across phrases like ‘‘three whole bloody years’’, ‘‘you bloody unionists’’, ‘‘a bloody hopeless job’’ or ‘‘a bloody good job’’, than exclamations like ‘‘bloody hell!’’. At the same time, the defiant ring of bloody as a mild ‘‘swearword’’ is not divisive but, on the contrary, uniting: the tacit assumption among the users of bloody is that most other Australians would not find this word ‘‘horrid’’ or its use offensive. To put it differently, bloody symbolically unites Australians against the rest of the world, rather than divides them against one another. This is another reason why bloody is potentially more useful to politicians than, for example, ‘‘f-words’’, and why bloody rather than these other ‘‘stronger’’ swearwords can be heard in parliamentary debates. As I will discuss later, one of the important Australian cultural scripts has to do with being ‘‘like other people’’ and being seen as someone who wants to be ‘‘like other people’’. The use of bloody is an important symbol of being ‘‘like other peo-

12

One may wonder whether in British English bloody does not still include a reference to ‘‘many people’’ (who think that it is a ‘‘bad word’’), rather than to ‘‘some people’’. Of course, in England, too, most theatre audiences would no longer be shocked on hearing the word bloody, as they reportedly were in 1930 when George Bernard Shaw made a flower-girl in his play Pygmalion say ‘‘Not bloody likely!’’ (Wright, 1981: 123). Nonetheless, as the Hansard materials (not to mention the OED) illustrate, in England bloody is still assumed to be regarded by ‘‘many people’’ as a ‘‘bad word’’.

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ple’’. The use of bloody by politicians in general, and by the leader of the ‘‘Unity Party’’ in particular, epitomizes this function of this old but enduring Australian cultural symbol.

6. The two meanings of ‘bloody’ In using the word bloody, the speaker expresses a feeling concurrent with the utterance—usually, but not always, a ‘‘bad feeling’’: when I say this I feel something (bad) This expressive function of bloody is highlighted in the following example from a parliamentary debate: You funded it, (...) and you tell me that you are going to drop their bloody funding down to one year. How dare you! I withdraw the expression ‘‘bloody’’, Mr. Speaker. However, I do not withdraw the feeling that I put behind this. (24/6/ 1998, p. 948.) Here, the expressed feeling is plainly a ‘‘bad feeling’’, as the concurrent exclamation ‘‘How dare you!’’ makes clear. The Australian National Dictionary (AND) treats bloody as polysemous, distinguishing its use as an adjective from its use as an adverb. The adjectival use is defined as follows: ‘‘an intensive, ranging in force from ‘mildly irritating’ to ‘execrable’’’. The adverbial use is described as ‘‘an intensive: extremely, very’’. Thus, the AND links the adjectival use with ‘‘bad feelings’’, while presenting the adverbial use as not necessarily linked with bad feelings. Despite some apparent counter-examples, I believe the AND is essentially right on this point. For example, the following sentences (otherwise neutral in their content) unmistakably convey a ‘‘bad feeling’’ on the part of the speaker.13 And bloody Ralph! (Blanche d’Alpuget, 1981) South bloody Africa! (George Johnson, 1964) Where is that bloody kid? (Sally Morgan, 1987) ‘You sound like a bloody lawyer’, Judith said. (Blanche d’Alpuget, 1981) The ‘‘bad feeling’’ is a semantic contribution of the word bloody (used as a nominal modifier), and can be represented as follows: when I say this I feel something bad By contrast, used in a (broadly speaking) adverbial way, bloody does not neces13

Unless otherwise indicated, all the attributed and dated examples given without a page number come from the Macquarie Corpus of Australian English.

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sarily suggest a ‘‘bad feeling’’ of any kind, and in fact can be associated with a ‘‘good feeling’’, as in the following example: ‘‘A bloody good definition of the desert’’, he said, and chuckled. (Lawson Glassop, 1944.) Of course, bloody used as an adverb (or, more generally, non-adjectival discourse marker) can also be associated with a bad feeling, as in the following example: ‘‘That will be all, thank bloody you’’, a voice inside me hissed as I swallowed hard and made my last play. (Geoffrey Quinlan, 1990.) Generally speaking, however, when bloody is not being used as a nominal modifier, the nature of the feeling can only be guessed from the context. For example, the word chuckled offers a positive clue, whereas hissed provides a negative one. When no clear positive or negative clue is provided, bloody as a non-adjectival discourse marker still suggests a feeling, but an unspecified one. The polysemy of bloody is sufficiently demonstrated by the unmistakable difference between utterances like ‘‘Bloody Ralph!’’ (a bad feeling) and ‘‘Bloody funny!’’ or ‘‘Bloody amazing!’’ (an unspecified feeling). (In fact, the negative implications of utterances like ‘‘Bloody Ralph!’’ are so clear that the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Colloqualisms: Aussie Talk (1984: 31) goes so far as to ascribe to bloody used of people a separate sense: ‘‘difficult; obstinate; cruel’’.) More difficult to establish are the exact conditions under which the two meanings are realized. Although the matter requires further investigation, by and large the generalization given in the AND is, I think, valid: when bloody is used as an adjective modifying a noun it implies a bad feeling (‘‘I feel something bad’’), otherwise it implies an unspecified feeling (‘‘I feel something’’). The validity of this generalization is somewhat clouded, however, by the existence of some apparent counter-examples. First, there are some set expressions in Australian English such as, above all, bloody oath and bloody beauty, where bloody conveys an unspecified rather than a bad feeling. (Of course bloody beauty as a whole conveys a very good feeling, but this can be seen as the contribution of beauty rather than of bloody). Furthermore, bloody beauty can be used as a model, giving rise to ‘‘bloody marvel’’, ‘‘bloody genius’’, ‘‘bloody paradise’’, ‘‘bloody palace’’, and so on. Some examples: A bloody marvel! (Frank Hardy, 1950) You’re a bloody genius, Jack! (Frank Hardy, 1950) It’s bloody paradise! (James McQueen, 1984) ‘‘This isn’t a hospital, you know, it’s a bloody palace.’’ (Colleen McCullogh, 1975) The link between ‘‘bad feelings’’ and adjectival use of bloody is also clouded by the fact that bloody can be used as a discourse marker relating to a whole phrase, and can often be inserted in the middle of the phrase, where it may find itself before a

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noun. There are certain types of phrases where such an addition of bloody (without any bad feeling) is particularly common. Thus, a phrase with a numeral, like twenty years, or a hundred uniforms, can be expanded by insertion of bloody: ‘‘I’ve known youse for twenty bloody years, Ron’’, Curly said, ‘‘and I still haven’t worked out who Tim gets his looks from.’’ (Colleen McCullogh, 1979). A hundred bloody uniforms wouldn’t do anything for you, boy. (David Williamson, 1972). A phrase with the semantic element ‘‘all’’, such as the whole lot, no doubt, or every thing, can be similarly expanded: ‘‘The whole bloody lot.’’ Kelly grinned excitedly. (D’Arcy Niland, 1955). I watch every bloody thing. (David Williamson, 1972). There is no bloody doubt about it. (David Williamson, 1972). Other quantitative expressions, like a bit or more, can also be so expanded. For example, a bit of luck can be expanded to a bloody bit of luck, and more brains, to more bloody brains: By ginger, a bloody bit of luck I didn’t take my pants off, too. (Norman Lindsay, 1938.) This one has more bloody brains and guts than any of us three. (Joan Lindsay, 1967.) Extremely positive expressions like ‘‘wonderful place’’ or ‘‘marvellous bloke’’ can be expanded to ‘‘wonderful bloody place’’ and ‘‘marvellous bloody bloke’’: . . . it’s a wonderful bloody place, Jack, and you’ll love it up there . . . (George Johnson, 1964.) ‘‘I think you’re a marvellous bloody bloke.’’ (Randolph Stow, 1965.) The exact conditions under which a bloody preceding a noun functions as a modifier of the whole phrase and conveys an unspecified rather than a bad feeling require further investigation. Two points, however, are worth noting: first, that in phrases like a marvellous bloody bloke or a wonderful bloody place, bloody can be moved to a pre-adjectival position without a change of meaning: a bloody marvellous bloke, a bloody wonderful place; and second, that while bloody Ralph! is fully idiomatic, a bloody bloke and a bloody place are not (in Australian English, apparently in contrast to British English).14 14 In plays by British authors bloody is sometimes used in phrases like bloody woman or bloody man. I could not find any such examples in Australian plays, and all the speakers of Australian English whom I have consulted regarded them as slightly odd.

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Finally, the ‘‘emphatic’’ (neutral rather than ‘‘bad’’) bloody is often added to a whole saying which expresses an attitude or an evaluation. For example, ‘‘That’s the spirit’’ can be expanded to ‘‘That’s the bloody spirit’’ (Frank Hardy, 1950), ‘‘Forget your troubles!’’ to ‘‘Forget your bloody troubles!’’ (Henry Handel Richardson, 1917), and ‘‘He is a character!’’ to ‘‘He is a bloody character!’’ (‘‘the locals called him a bloody character’’, Frank Hardy, 1963). In these examples, bloody seems to be modifying a noun without implying a bad feeling, in fact, however, it modifies the saying as a whole. This applies to set phrases and ready-made sayings like ‘‘that’s the spirit!’’, ‘‘forget your troubles!’’ or ‘‘he is a character!’’, which appear to function as not fully analyzable units. If bloody can be inserted in the middle of a word (e.g. unbloody-believable!), it can also be inserted in the middle of a set phrase. Thus, in ‘‘It’s the bloody cat!’’ bloody modifies cat (and implies a bad feeling), whereas in ‘‘That’s the bloody spirit!’’ bloody does not modify spirit (and no bad feeling is implied). Accordingly, in what follows I will distinguish two distinct meanings of bloody— bloody1, which includes the component ‘‘when I say this I feel something bad’’, and bloody2, which includes the component ‘‘when I say this I feel something’’.15 I would not claim that ambiguity between bloody1 and bloody2 can never arise. In spoken language, such an ambiguity would usually be resolved by the intonation and facial expression (and of course by the context, both linguistic and situational). In most sentences, however, the structural clues (adjectival vs. non-adjectival use) seem to be sufficient to show which of the two meanings is intended. If bloody is inserted in the middle of a word (as in un-bloody-believable) or when it is used adverbially (and precedes an adjective, as in bloody funny) it is always bloody2. On the other hand, the sentence ‘‘it’s the bloody cat’’ (in contrast to ‘‘it’s the cat’’) clearly implies that the speaker ‘‘feels something bad’’ (if only very mildly ‘‘bad’’), and since there are here no contextual, prosodic or other clues which could explain this implication, it must be attributed to bloody (the adjectival bloody, i.e. bloody1). In addition to the ‘‘feel bad’’ and ‘‘feel’’ components, both meanings of bloody include other components as well, which I will try to identify in the next three sections.16

7. The nature of the feeling expressed by ‘bloody’ As we have seen, the feeling expressed by bloody can either be ‘‘bad’’ (bloody1) or unspecified (bloody2). But what kind of ‘‘bad feeling’’ is expressed by bloody1 and what range of unspecified feelings can be expressed by bloody2?

15

It should be emphasized again that neither ‘‘I feel something bad’’ nor ‘‘I feel something’’ are meant to be idiomatic English expressions but rather, semantic formulae couched in NSM, that is, in a semiartificial semantic metalanguage. They are meant to be intelligible through, rather than couched in, ordinary English. 16 Needless to say, I am not suggesting that the listeners have to consciously identify the syntactic role of bloody in order to determine its meaning in a particular context. But the observation that ordinary users of language often rely, subconsciously, on syntactic information to interpret the meaning of a polysemous word can hardly be regarded as controversial.

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Let us begin our inquiry into the nature of these feelings by looking more closely at the bad feelings conveyed by bloody1. As we have seen, the OED links bloody with ‘‘anger, resentment, detestation’’, and the AND ascribes to it an expressive force ‘‘ranging (...) from ‘mildly irritating’ to ‘execrable’’’. While formulae of this kind are clearly unsatisfactory in that they fail to capture the semantic invariant, it is surely not an accident that neither dictionary mentions, for example, ‘‘sadness’’, ‘‘anxiety’’, ‘‘fear’’ or ‘‘depression’’. And indeed, sentences like the following sound strange: ? ‘‘Where is that bloody kid?’’ he said sadly. ? ‘‘Shut the bloody door, will you?’’ she said fearfully. To account for the apparent incompatibility of bloody with reporting words like ‘‘sadly’’ or ‘‘fearfully’’, I would suggest that the emotional attitude implied by bloody is active, like that of anger, and that this can be captured in a component along the lines of ‘‘I want to do something because of this’’. This is why a sentence with bloody would usually not be interpreted as a ‘‘whinge’’ (with its implication that ‘‘I can’t do anything’’), even if without bloody it could be so interpreted. The very insertion of bloody tends to ensure that such an interpretation is no longer available. For example, if someone says ‘‘I’m losing my bloody patience’’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 1992), this person seems to be trying to ensure that he or she still sounds ‘‘tough’’. Admittedly, such a strategy is not always accepted, as the following example illustrates: 17 An interesting parallel is provided by the use of exclamations like Christ! or Jesus! in Australian English, which sound angry, in contrast to the British English exclamation Oh Christ!, which is normally associated with feelings like regret or fright (and generally, helplessness rather than an impulse to act). A few examples, first from the English playwright Simon Gray (1986) and then from the Australian playwright David Williamson (1993/1975):

REG: (...) BEN: ANITA: SACKLING: QUARTERMAINE: SACKLING:

You didn’t do your National Service, I take it. Oh Christ! Sorry, I mean no. (p. 57) Are you growing a beard? Oh Christ! (Feeling his chin) I forgot! (p. 213) What—where? At my place—oh Christ! Don’t say I forgot to invite you. Well you’re invited. (p. 267)

As these examples illustrate, the exclamation Oh Christ! is normally not associated with anger, aggression or defiance. By contrast, the common Australian exclamation Christ! sounds angry and defiant. To illustrate: ROBBY: GORDON: GERRY: JOCK: PETER [to Hans] HANS:

I think we might call Mr Fletcher over. [over-enthusiastic] Why not. Christ, that’ll spike his guns. His jaw’ll hit the floor. (p. 64) Laurie thought that you and Tony and Ted had some sort of permanent conspiracy not to drop him. Christ, no. If he’s been playing up we’ll put him down like a shot. (p. 147) Are you worried about the tank, shithead? Christ, no. I’m more worried about the holidays. (p. 11)

In Australian speech, Christ! is closely related to the adjectival bloody, since it, too, expresses a bad feeling (‘‘I feel something bad’’), an active attitude (‘‘I want to do something because of this’’) and a desire to break a social taboo (in fact, ‘‘Jesus bloody Christ’’ is a common collocation). The difference is that Christ! sounds aggressive (‘‘I want to do something bad because of this’’) and also more deliberately offensive (‘‘many people think that it is bad if a person says some words when this person wants to do something bad, I want to say something like this now’’).

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‘I’m sick to death of this bloody holiday’, he whinged, blaming Janet. (Ross Fitzgerald, 1987.) Here, the speaker who uses bloody is trying to sound, roughly speaking, angry (and to imply ‘‘I want to do something because of this’’), but the narrator rejects this and interprets the sentence as a ‘‘whinge’’ (‘‘I can’t do anything’’). Similarly, when on the face of it someone expresses something like pity or compassion with a sentence like Poor bloody Alec! (Kylie Tennant, 1946.) the insertion of bloody seems to be meant to ensure that the speaker still sounds ‘‘tough’’. Yes, they do feel ‘‘something bad’’, but they do not want to project an image of someone who is reduced to utter helplessness (‘‘I can’t do anything’’). The very fact that the collocation ‘‘poor bloody (X)’’ is very common in the Macquarie corpus, supports this interpretation. (It maybe particularly important to sound ‘‘tough’’ when in fact one is feeling sorry and probably helpless.) A few more examples: .. and poor bloody David Meredith ... (George Johnson, 1964.) Poor bloody Poms! (T.A.G. Hungerford, 1983.) Poor bloody bird, I thought. (Dal Stevens, 1986.) The use of bloody ensures that the speaker can combine their expression of feeling sorry for someone with a seemingly active attitude: ‘‘I want to do something’’. But what exactly can a person do in a situation in which they seem to be only able to say bloody? That’s just it: they can say bloody (or bugger, as in poor bugger— another common Australian collocation)—and in doing so, they can symbolically break ‘‘some people’s’’ social taboo. Thus, insignificant as it may seem, the use of bloody can always serve as a symbolic act of defiance, and so as a tool for projecting a culturally valued image17 (see footnote 17 on the previous page). This defiant, rebellious, active, ‘‘larrikin’’ image can be portrayed, in part, as follows: some people think that some words are bad words these people think that it is bad to say these words I want to say a word like this now A person who says bloody signals that they want to express their feelings, and also, that they are not going to describe these feelings in any detail. They do, however, signal that their feeling is associated with an active attitude: ‘‘I want to do something’’. The combination of the semantic components: ‘‘I feel something bad’’ and ‘‘I want to do something’’ links bloody1 with ‘‘anger’’. The full meaning of the English words anger and angry includes more than a reference to ‘‘bad feelings’’ and to ‘‘wanting to do something’’, but it does include these two components. (For detailed discussion, see Wierzbicka, 1999.) The meaning of bloody (bloody1) can be represented more fully (though still not exhaustively) as follows: when I say this I feel something bad I want to do something because of this

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some people think that some words are bad words these people think that it is bad to say these words I want to say a word like this now In the case of the ‘‘adverbial’’ bloody2 (as in, for example, ‘‘bloody amazing!’’ or ‘‘bloody funny!’’) no bad feeling is being expressed, but the unspecified feeling which is being expressed is also linked with an active stance (‘‘I want to do something because of this’’). Even when one does want to say that one feels helpless and depressed, the use of bloody adds an active edge to the utterance, as a comparison of variants A and B shows: A. I am depressed. B. I am bloody depressed. Exclamations expressing highly positive feelings (e.g. ‘‘You bloody beauty!’’) are compatible with bloody but only if the sentence as a whole is compatible with an active attitude. For example, a person who exclaims: ‘‘You bloody beauty!’’ may jump from their seat, clap their hands, shake their fists in jubilation, and so on (or at least look as if they wanted to engage in such behaviour). Accordingly, I would propose for bloody2 a semantic formula along the same lines as that assigned to bloody1, with the only difference being that between ‘‘feel bad’’ and just ‘‘feel’’: when I say this I feel something I want to do something because of this some people think that some words are bad words these people think that it is bad to say these words I want to say a word like this now

8. ‘Bloody’ as a sign of truth and sincerity The traditional Australian ethos valued truth and authenticity in human relations, and was suspicious of what was seen as fake, non-genuine, purely conventional. The key word reflecting this aspect of the Australian ethos was dinkum, reportedly (AND) from the Cantonese expression din kum, ‘real gold’, used by Chinese workers during the gold rush. Dinkum is now seldom used in Australian English, except in the phrase fair dinkum and perhaps dinkum Aussie. Even these are perceived as archaic, and when used, are often rendered in a stylised way, as a kind of cultural quotation. In the past, however, the word dinkum played an important role in the Australian ethos and selfimage, as the following citation in the AND vividly illustrates (Knyvett, 1918): ‘‘One of these spies was only discovered through misuse of a well-known Australian slang word .... He was getting a lot of information and seemed to know several officers’ names, but he bungled over one of them, and on the officer he was speaking to inquiring ‘Is that dinkum?’ he answered: ‘Yes, that’s his name!’ There was no further investigation, he was shot on the spot.’’

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The Australian National Dictionary glosses dinkum as ‘‘reliable, genuine; honest, true’’. As the examples given in the AND illustrate, the main focus of this word appears to have been on a person or thing really being what they were said to be— and fully deserving to be called that. For example: He was a real dinkum bloke. (T. Shepherd, 1976.) They reckoned I was now entitled to call myself a dinkum Queenslander. (Ruth Conquest, 1963.) You’ll be a dinkum Aussie soon, Kochansky, he said. (J. Waters, 1954.) If a person was said to be simply ‘‘dinkum’’ this could be taken to refer to their ‘‘genuineness’’ as a human being, for example: He was rough, but he was dinkum. (G. Wilmott, 1944.) How is the ‘‘dinkum’’ ethos related to the key speech routine involving the use of bloody? When bloody is described as ‘‘a mere intensifier’’, or as a substitute for very or exceedingly, the link between bloody and dinkum is lost. In fact, however, bloody (in contrast to very) is by no means restricted to gradable predicates and it is closer to really (non-gradable) than to very (gradable). For example, a sentence like: I’m losing my bloody patience. (James MacQuinn, 1984.) is better compared to ‘‘I’m really losing my patience’’ than to ‘‘I’m getting very impatient’’. Similarly, when someone says ‘‘What a bloody awful smell!’’ (S. Hogbotel, 1973) what is meant is not a smell that is ‘‘very awful’’ but rather one that is ‘‘really awful’’. As we have seen, the AND describes both the adjectival bloody1 and the adverbial bloody2 as ‘‘an intensive’’, elaborating in the case of bloody2: ‘‘extremely, very’’. But this explanation clearly does not apply to the adjectival bloody, as in ‘‘bloody Ralph!’’ or ‘‘it’s the bloody cat’’ (‘‘*very Ralph’’, ‘‘*it’s the very cat’’). What does it mean, then, to call this use of bloody, too, ‘‘an intensive’’ or ‘‘an intensifier’’? The mystery is solved, I suggest, when we note that the impression of ‘‘intensification’’ can be due to two different semantic elements, ‘‘very’’ and ‘‘true’’ (‘‘truly’’). When we consider words like un-bloody-believable it becomes clear that what is involved here is not the idea of ‘‘very’’ (*‘‘very unbelievable’’) but rather, the idea of ‘‘true’’ (‘‘truly unbelievable’’)—not in the sense of abstract truth predicated about some propositions but in the sense of truthful speech by the present speaker, here and now; and this can apply to both the adverbial and the adjectival use of bloody, thus allowing us to explain in unitary terms why both these uses are perceived as ‘‘intensives’’.18 18

In other languages, too, so-called ‘‘intensifiers’’ can be based either on the concept VERY or on the concept TRUE. For example, in Italian so-called ‘‘absolute superlatives’’ like bellissima, from bella ‘beautiful’, can be shown to include in their meaning the element VERY (‘very beautiful’), whereas reduplicated intensifiers like bella bella can be shown to mean ‘truly beautiful’ rather than ‘very beautiful’. Expressive reduplication is applicable also to non-gradable adjectives such as nero ‘black’ (e.g. i capelli neri neri ‘truly black hair’) and even to some nouns (e.g. caffe` caffe` ‘true coffee, real coffee’). (For detailed discussion, cf. Wierzbicka, 1986b, 1991).

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Returning now to dinkum, dinkum was not the opposite of ‘‘false’’ but of ‘‘not real’’. ‘‘False’’ applies, essentially, to sentences (a sentence can be either ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘false’’), but ‘‘not real’’ can also apply to objects and people; for example, a piece of metal can be ‘‘not real gold’’. The word dinkum does include a reference to ‘‘truth’’, but it also includes a reference to people’s perceptions of things. Things are not always what they seem to be, or what they are said to be; but this particular thing— ‘‘a dinkum X’’—really is what it seems, or is said, to be. Similarly, when people say something they are not always saying something true and so their words cannot always be accepted as valid; but when I call someone a ‘‘bloody fool’’ I mean that this person really is a fool. Establishing a link between bloody and really enables us better to account for sentences where there does not seem to be any relation between bloody and the propositional content, for example: Get it your bloody self. (Wal Watkins, 1971) Here, bloody has clearly nothing to do with the factual truth of the sentence (which is not a statement), but it can still be roughly glossed as ‘‘I really (truly) mean it’’. It is thus related not to some aspect of the propositional content but rather to the speaker’s stance. In order to capture this aspect of bloody (relevant to both bloody1 and bloody2) I would propose the following phrasing of the relevant component: ‘‘when I say this I say something true’’. Thus, when one says something negative about someone or something, as in ‘‘he is a bloody fool’’, bloody can be understood as vouching for the validity and truth of the negative judgment: I say: he is a fool when I say this I say something true On the other hand, when bloody relates exclusively to the sentence’s illocutionary force (that is, roughly, the speaker’s stance) it can be interpreted as vouching for the genuineness of the expressed attitude. For example, in the sentence: ‘‘Go on, put the bloody thing down’’, Ivor said. (Wal Watkins, 1971.) bloody seems to imply not only that the speaker feels something bad but also that he ‘‘means’’ what he says: I say: I want you to do it I think you will do it because of this when I say this I say something true Perhaps for this reason, bloody is often used with the imperative, and also in sentences expressing an intention to definitely do something. For example: I’m pulling out in the bloody mornin’. (Nino Culotta, 1962.) ‘I’m not’, Lunt said with finality, ‘saying a bloody word’. (Thea Astley, 1974.)

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That’s the last time I’m using one of those bloody things. (Gabrielle Corey and Kathy Lette, 1979.) ... determined I would go through it, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by bloody word—and destroy it! (Blanche d’Alpuget, 1982.) In all such sentences bloody seems to emphasize the speaker’s determination: when I say this [that I will do it] I say something true More generally speaking, whenever bloody cannot be understood as vouching for the truth of the sentence itself, it can be understood as vouching for the speaker’s sincerity. For example, in the sentence: Gets bloody cold these nights. (David Malouf, 1984.) bloody vouches for the correspondence between the sentence and the external state of affairs described in it: ‘‘it gets really cold these nights’’. On the other hand, in Bob Hawke’s declaration about the creation of happiness for people as a goal of politics in general and his personal goal in particular (‘‘so that they can enjoy their brief time on this bloody planet’’), bloody appears intended to vouch for the speaker’s sincerity (‘‘when I say that that’s what politics is about and what I am about I say something true’’). In both cases, however, the same semantic formula applies: ‘‘when I say this I say something true’’. The link between bloody and truth (‘‘dinkum’’ truth) is clearly reflected in the once common collocation ‘‘bloody oath’’, or ‘‘my bloody oath’’, for example: My bloody oath. (Nevil Shute, 1952.) ‘‘My bloody oath’’, Ivor said. (Wal Watkins, 1971.) My bloody oath. (Harold Lewis, 1973.) It is also reflected in the combination ‘‘bloody good’’ and its variants, where the speaker is vouching for the validity of the positive evaluation. This use of bloody is so important in Australian English that it requires a separate discussion.

9. ‘Bloody good’ As noted earlier, in Australian English bloody is often used in very positive contexts, in particular, in combinations such as bloody marvellous, bloody great, bloody wonderful, bloody beautiful, bloody beauty, bloody beaut, or bloody nice. Some examples with bloody marvellous: ‘Christ’, I whispered, ‘she’s bloody marvellous!’ At the end of the first act I was infatuated. (Lawson Glassop, 1944) It was a bloody marvellous concept. (Blanche d’Alpuget, 1981)

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‘This is bloody marvellous’, was an often-repeated comment. (A. Fisher, 1986.) Examples with bloody great: This is bloody great. (Bluey, 1975) That’s a bloody great idea! (Bluey, 1975) Des said that he had come across a bloody great idea for his hold. (Bert Newton, 1977) Examples with bloody beautiful, bloody beaut and bloody beauty: You bloody beaut! (Lawson Glassop, 1944) The little bloody beauties. (Kylie Tennant, 1946) You bloody little beaut! (J.E. Macdonnell, 1958) It was the bloody beautest bull’s eye you’ve ever seen. (George Johnson, 1964) They’re so bloody beautiful. (Blanche d’Alpuget, 1981) ... his heart beats like a bloody beauty. (Barry Dickins, 1985) ... The ASAQ set about telling feˆte patrons what a bloody beaut sport this is ... (Tracks, 1992) Examples with bloody wonderful: ‘‘... and tell her I’m fit as a fiddle and having a bloody wonderful time.’’ (George Johnson, 1964) ... it’s a wonderful bloody place, Jack, and you’ll love it up there. (George Johnson, 1964) It is remarkable that in the British corpora of English (COBUILD’s ‘‘Spoken English’’, 9 million running words, and COBUILD’s ‘‘UK books’’, 5 million running words) collocations like ‘‘bloody marvellous’’, ‘‘bloody great’’, ‘‘bloody nice’’, ‘‘bloody wonderful’’ or ‘‘bloody beautiful’’ are not attested at all. Nor do these corpora record any examples of ‘‘bloody beauty’’ or ‘‘bloody beaut’’, of which the Macquarie Corpus records numerous examples. The collocation ‘‘bloody good’’ does occur in the British corpus of Spoken English, but only occasionally, and it clearly does not have the same salience as in Australian English, where it has given rise to a whole family of superlatives. Before considering the meaning of such characteristic Australian superlatives, let us first consider the meaning of bloody in the more basic collocation bloody good, as in the following example: This is a bloody good story. (Blanche d’Alpuget, 1981) It seems clear that in this sentence bloody does not suggest that ‘‘I feel something bad’’; at the same time, however, there is no reason to assume that the speaker ‘‘feels something good’’ (cf. e.g. ‘‘this is a bloody good reason to leave / to get rid of X’’). Rather, bloody suggests here that ‘‘when I say this I feel something’’; in addition, it

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seems to suggest that ‘‘I say this because I want to say something true (not because I want to say something good)’’. The exact nature of the feeling is not explained, beyond the same clue as in negative contexts: that it is ‘‘active’’ rather than ‘‘passive’’ (‘‘I want to do something’’), and also, that to express what I feel I want to say what some people regard as a ‘‘bad word’’. The collocation bloody good would normally be understood as implying ‘‘very good’’ (just as bloody cold would normally be taken as implying ‘‘very cold’’, and bloody hot—‘‘very hot’’. There is no need, however, to posit for this reason a third meaning of bloody, including the element ‘‘very’’. In certain contexts, the phrase bloody good could be understood as a defiant affirmation that something really was good, without the added implication that it was very good. The semantic formula, then, which has been assigned to bloody in general can be seen as applicable here, too. Turning now to overtly superlative (enthusiastic) collocations such as bloody marvellous we will note first of all that they are fully symmetrical to negative collocations like bloody awful. While awful by itself implies that ‘‘when I think about it I feel something bad’’, bloody awful implies, in addition, that ‘‘when I say this I feel something’’. Similarly, while marvellous by itself implies that ‘‘when I think about it I feel something good’’, bloody marvellous implies, in addition, that ‘‘when I say this I feel something’’. Furthermore, in both cases, the addition of bloody implies that ‘‘I say this because I want to say something true’’. But in the case of bloody marvellous there is an extra reason for this assurance of truthfulness—not part of the meaning but a highly probable implication: I say this because I want to say something true (not because I want to say something good) In other words, I say this not because I want to sound like a nice guy, but because even I, tough and unsentimental as I am, can’t help thinking something very good about this particular thing and feeling something good because of this. Or: ‘‘I say this in spite of myself, I don’t like to be gushing, but I have to be truthful’’. I mentioned earlier that there is a hidden link between the use of bloody and the use of bullshit in Australian English. This link is easy to see in the case of the positive use of bloody. Bullshit implies that someone says something not because they want to say something true but because they want to manipulate other people into thinking something (in some ways, therefore, it is an opposite of dinkum). A few examples: You’d get yourself a new bird, a real one, no catholic girls’ school bullshit and pretence about her. (William Nagel, 1975) I thought there was a fair degree of bullshit about Oxford. (Blanche d’Alpuget, 1982) Don’t give me that bullshit! (Frank Moorhouse, 1988) You saw through all the bullshit. (Frank Moorhouse, 1988)

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To describe somebody else’s words as ‘‘bullshit’’ means to express something along the following lines: sometimes people say something because they want other people to think something not because they want to say something true this is something of this kind By calling something ‘‘bloody good’’ or even ‘‘bloody marvellous’’ I am signalling to the hearer that, roughly speaking, I am not ‘‘bullshitting’’ but rather saying something genuine, something ‘‘dinkum’’. Bloody does not serve here to signal more intensive feelings but rather to assure the hearer that I am saying what I am saying because I want to say something true (and, by implication, not because I want to say something good). Thus, the positive use of bloody can be interpreted, as it were, as a mark of the speaker’s sincerity. This is particularly clear when the praise applies to the addressee. For example, when someone says something like: It is bloody nice of you to come out all this way. (Murray Bail, 1988) Davy, I can’t tell you how bloody grateful I am. (George Johnson, 1964) I think you were bloody marvellous. (James McQueen, 1984) they appear to be using bloody to forestall the suspicion that they are saying something purely conventional. Bloody adds here something like ‘‘I mean it’’, or, in my terms, ‘‘I say [that I think] this because I want to say something true’’ (and not merely because I want to say something good). The use of a ‘‘bad word’’ is particularly effective in such a context, because it signals that the speaker is not a follower of social conventions. If social conventions are explicitly being rejected then (it is to be inferred) in saying ‘‘it is nice of you’’ the speaker must be saying something sincere rather than something purely conventional. At the same time, the use of bloody shields the speaker from the embarrassment of sounding overly enthusiastic, appreciative, or affectionate. It provides a shield for the ‘‘indecent’’ exposure of good feelings, as well as adding credibility to the positive judgment expressed. For example, in David Malouf’s novel ‘‘Johnno’’ the hero (‘‘sprawled out on the dirty floor, his hair a bird’s nest’’) says to his friend ‘‘Dante’’, who has a more ‘‘civilized’’ and conventional personal style, the following: ‘‘Really Dante, this is bloody good of you. It is! I want to be frank with you, I’ve been drinking. In fac’, I am absolutely bloody PISSED.’’ The contrast between Johnno’s deliberately outrageous style of behaviour and the conventional ring of the phrase ‘‘good of you’’ could undermine the credibility of Johnno’s expression of gratitude; and the insertion of bloody counteracts this. At the same time, Johnno maintains his image as a larrikin. (A person like Johnno could never say—except ironically—‘‘it is very good of you’’, or ‘‘it is good of you’’; he

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can, however, say ‘‘it is bloody good of you’’.) The following short example is equally eloquent: How bloody good to see you, old cock! (George Johnson, 1964) This could be a textbook illustration of one familiar Australian ‘‘cultural script’’ (see Section 10.5). The following example with bullshit (and, more specifically, with bullshit artist) is another: ‘‘If there is one thing the Australian people don’t like it is a bullshit artist. (Murray Bail, 1988)

10. ‘Bloody’ and cultural scripts 10.1. ‘Bloody’ as a sign of belonging When one reads interviews with public figures published in the year 2000 and studded with bloody one is struck first of all by the vitality and force of cultural scripts based on the idea of ‘‘likeness’’: ‘‘like me’’ and ‘‘like other people’’. When a Prime Minister or a university professor makes a point of using bloody in public discourse, this is bound to bring to mind the familiar Australian script which can be formulated in simple and universal concepts as follows: it is good if other people can think about a person: ‘‘this person is someone like me’’ The linguistic evidence for this script cannot be discussed here in any detail; I will, however, point out the central role of the semantic component ‘‘someone like me’’ in a host of Australian keywords, expressions, and conversational routines including mate, mateship, dob in, dobber, altered surnames like Thommo for Thomson or Gibbo for Gibson, first name forms like Shaz for Sharon, Gaz for Gavin, or Lozza for Laurie, and so on. (For further discussion, see Wierzbicka, 1986a, 1991, 1992, 1997). Another familiar script, based on the notion ‘‘not like other people’’ (combined with the notion that ‘‘I am someone very good’’), can be formulated as follows: it is bad if a person thinks: I am someone very good I am someone not like other people with its offshoot: it is bad if a person thinks:

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I want other people to think about me like this: ‘‘this person is someone very good, this person is not someone like other people’’ The evidence for these last two scripts is provided by the proverbial Australian folk comment about a ‘‘Pom’’ (i.e. an Englishman): ‘‘he thinks he is better than me’’, and related collocations like ‘‘Pommy upstart’’, ‘‘a jumped-up Pommy bastard’’ and ‘‘whinging Poms’’. A prototypical ‘‘whinging Pom’’ is not simply someone who tends to ‘‘whinge’’ but most particularly someone who tends to ‘‘whinge’’ about Australia and assume that England is superior to it. A characteristic example from the beginning of the twentieth century is provided by ‘‘The plaint of the Pommie’’ (1913, AND): ’Orrible country, there isn’t no doubt of it. Nothing but sunshine and flowers and sport. Tell me, oh, tell me a way to get out of it, Back to old Lambeth, for ’ere yer gits nought. And a more recent quote (T. Keneally, 1972, AND): I’d pass a law to give every single whingin’ bloody Pommie his fare home to England. Back to the smoke and the sun shining 10 days a year and shit in the streets. Yer can have it. The allergy to any presumption of superiority is not limited to ‘‘Poms’’, although it may have its roots in Australian attitudes to England, and Australian perceptions of England’s attitudes to Australia. Australian words and expressions like to bignote oneself, a tall poppy, to cut down tall poppies, to knock down, knockers, and so on provide ample evidence for this allergy. The celebrated rugby player ‘‘Lozza’’ Daley captures some of this traditional attitude in his recent comment on his own success and fame when he explains that ‘‘the big test is how you handle it all because if it is allowed to go unchecked it can cause one huge problem, a ‘big-head’’’, and sums up: ‘‘no one likes a big-head’’ (Daley and Clyde, 1995: 40). This recalls Les Murray’s (1999: 152) comment that ‘‘the use of a very salty Australian accent and vocabulary interlarded with learned and literary terms (...) moderates the inegalitarianism of higher education’’. The combined use of abstract intellectual vocabulary and of the bloody routine seems at times to send an appeasing message to the ‘‘man-in-the-street’’: ‘‘don’t think that because I use words like this I think that I am not someone like other people’’. This message combines smoothly with the one described earlier: ‘‘I want you to think: this person is someone like me’’. 10.2. ‘Bloody’ as a token of defiance In the year 2000, the use of bloody—like the wearing of blue jeans—can be a sign of belonging. But 150 years ago, however, when the English traveller A. Marjor-

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ibanks was writing his ‘‘Travels in New South Wales’’, its basic function was clearly different. ‘‘The word bloody is the favourite oath in that country. One man will tell you that he married a bloody young wife, another, a bloody old one; and a bushranger will call out, ‘Stop, or I’ll blow your bloody brains out’. I had once the curiosity to count the number of times that a bullock driver used this word in the course of a quarter of an hour, and found that he did so twenty-five times. I gave him eight hours in the day to sleep, and six to be silent, thus leaving ten hours for conversation. I supposed that he commenced at twenty and continued till seventy years of age . . . and found that in the course of that time he must have pronounced this disgusting word no less than 18,200,000 times.’’ (Quoted in the AND.)

Given the isolation of the Australian bush and the famed taciturnity of Australian men (interspersed with sporadic ‘‘yarns’’ with their mates), the estimate of 10 hours talking a day may be rather far off the mark, but even if the figure of 18 million were to be reduced to 1 million or to a mere 100,000, the point remains: the frequency of bloody in Australian speech was for a long time extremely high, and the cultural script or scripts enacted in this conversational routine must have been extremely important. If we try to look at it from the point of view of an Australian man like the one whose use of bloody Marjoribanks recorded, we must again ask the question: what was so good about this routine that made people follow it (at the cost of such an expenditure of energy)? And the first answer that suggests itself is that it must have had to do with the high value placed on something like a spirit of defiance and the rejection of social conventions. The cultural script in question can be formulated as follows: it is good if a person thinks something like this: ‘‘some people think that some words are bad words these people think that it is bad to say such words I don’t want not to say such words because of this I can say such words I want to say such words’’ This script is of course related to a broader script of defiance, rebelliousness, and larrikinism: it is good if a person thinks: ‘‘some people say that it is bad to do some things I don’t want not to do these things because of this’’

19 An anonymous reviewer raises a difficulty at this point: ‘‘Apart from the oddness of invoking ‘‘truth’’ in the case of, say, directives, should not a linguistic formula be clear, explicit, and unambiguous?’’ But first, it is not ‘‘truth’’ (an abstract and perhaps complex concept) which is being invoked here but the simpler concept of ‘‘really / truly’’, as in I really (truly) mean it; and second, a linguistic formula which intends to portray the speaker’s meaning should not be any more precise than what the speaker is conveying: if the speaker’s message is vague the corresponding explication should be vague to exactly the same degree. (For detailed discussion, see Wierzbicka (1986c.)

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The important place given to out-law figures like Ned Kelly in the Australian legend is clearly related to this script. (It is only a short step from the defiant ‘‘I don’t want not to do these things because of this’’ to the rebellious ‘‘I can do these things’’, ‘‘I want to do these things’’.) For the average person, however, ‘‘saying bad words’’ could be felt as symbolically fulfilling the same function as the daring involved in ‘‘doing bad things’’. 10.3. ‘Bloody’ and the desire for truth in interpersonal relations As discussed earlier, the frequent use of bloody appears to have also reflected a search for genuineness in interpersonal relations. In the harsh Australian conditions, where individuals had to rely on other individuals to survive, it was important to be able to think that other people’s words could be trusted. It was important to know that what other people said was ‘‘dinkum’’, that behind words there would be actions, that human relations could be based on truth, not on social conventions, verbal graces, polite verbiage, long words, smooth phrases, ‘‘bullshit’’ of any kind. The distrust of ‘‘bullshit’’ went hand in hand with the appreciation of truth, of words which were not ‘‘empty words’’ intended to please or to impress, but which said what one really meant. The use of bloody could be seen as a token guarantee of that. For example, the sentence quoted by Marjoribanks: Stop, or I’ll blow your bloody brains out. could be loosely paraphrased as Stop or I’ll blow your brains out—and I mean it. These considerations, as well as other linguistic evidence (especially to do with bullshit and its family) suggest the following cultural script:19 it is good if a person says things to other people because this person wants to say something true not because this person wants these people to think something about something 10.4. ‘Bloody’ and the cult of the active (‘‘fighting’’) spirit As discussed earlier, bloody is associated with an active attitude; and while the range of feelings conveyed by it is quite broad they are all feelings linked with the semantic component ‘‘I want do do something’’. In the case of bloody1 (roughly speaking, adjectival), this component is combined with the component ‘‘I feel something bad’’, and the combination of these two components links bloody1 with anger. Consider for example the following two sentences: He’s just wrecked Jillie’s career for his own bloody advantage. (C.J. Koch, 1978) ‘‘Jesus bloody Christ, what a lot of bastards you dirty buggers are!’’ (Colleen

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McCullogh, 1975) If the word bloody were deleted in these sentences, it would still be clear that the speaker ‘‘feels something bad’’; but depending on the intonation, the speaker’s mood could be seen as depressed, despairing, bitter, disgusted, and so on. The addition of bloody, however, seems to add here an active, as it were angry tone: ‘‘I want to do something because of this’’. Sometimes this ‘‘angry’’ edge of bloody (or bloody well) is overtly acknowledged, as in the following dialogue (Randolph Stow, 1965): - ‘You talk like a bloody Pommy’, Mike said. - ‘I bloody well do not’, Rob said, angrily. But even when it is not, the very use of bloody encourages such a reading, unless the context overtly excludes it. One more example (Thomas Keneally, 1972): It’s those bloody Catholics again, evicting the poor bloody Protestants. The speaker shows that he is sorry for the Protestants (‘‘poor’’), but it seems also quite clear that he is angry with the Catholics, and that in both cases (whether he is focussing on the Catholics or on the Protestants) he ‘‘wants to do something because of this’’. Facts of this kind suggest the following cultural script: when a person feels something bad it is good if this person thinks: ‘‘I want to do something because of this’’ A script of this kind is supported by other linguistic evidence as well. Above all, it is supported by the positive aura of the Australian word battler, the importance of which in the traditional Australian discourse and the traditional Australian ethos cannot be doubted. Without wishing to undertake here a full discussion of this important concept I will note the following semantic components of battler: bad things have been happening to this person for some time this person has felt something bad because of this this person doesn’t think because of this: ‘‘I can’t do anything’’ this person thinks: ‘‘I want to do something because of this’’ The same ethos is reflected in the key Australian expression good on you!, which— unlike the pan-English well done or congratulations—does not imply a success or achievement but which salutes a ‘‘fighting spirit’’. (For further discussion, cf. Wierzbicka, 1992: 389–391) Typically, one says ‘‘good on you’’ to a person who in a difficult situation ‘‘wants (or has wanted) to do something’’. This is closely related to the ‘‘anti-whinging’’ script:

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when a person feels something because something bad happened to this person it is bad if this person thinks: ‘‘I can’t do anything because of this I want someone else to know this’’ it is bad if this person says many things about it to other people

10.5. ‘Bloody’ and the expression of ‘‘good feelings’’ As mentioned earlier, an ‘‘unchecked’’ expression of good thoughts and good feelings is sometimes felt to be problematic in traditional Australian culture. The well-known Australian use of the word bastard in a positive sense is a good indication of this. The familiar form of greeting: ‘‘G’day you old bastard!’’ testifies to the reality of a cultural script which discourages unqualified expression of good feelings (especially in interaction between men). The greeting implies that the speaker is pleased to see the addressee and feels something very good towards him but that he does not want to put these good feelings on record and prefers to be heard saying a word that ‘‘some people think is a bad word’’. The use of collocations like bloody marvellous, bloody beautiful, or bloody beauty is clearly related to the ‘‘g’day you old bastard’’-routine, as also are phrases like ‘‘bloody good to see you’’. Why should the expression of very good feelings be seen as problematic in Australia? The two obvious reasons relate to credibility and image. Saying overtly that ‘‘I think that something is very good’’ and that ‘‘thinking about it I feel something very good’’ can be taken as insincere, and as an attempt to create a good impression and to please someone, and so it can be suspect. If I want the addressee to believe that I really mean my enthusiastic appraisal I may feel a need to counteract this suspicion. Using bloody can serve this function very well, because by doing so I convey the message that I don’t care about social conventions as such, about what ‘‘some people might think’’, and so if I do say something very positive I do so because I really mean it. But this consideration of credibility is also linked to the question of one’s image. According to the traditional Australian ethos, it is not good to be seen as a person who tries to please others or to create a good impression. Therefore, if I do want to express some very positive thoughts and feelings I may feel the need to overcome some resistance on my own part: ‘‘I don’t want to say often that I think something very good and feel something very good because of this, but on this particular occasion I just can’t help myself’’. This implied overcoming of an inner resistance makes an utterance like ‘‘Bloody marvellous!’’ particularly emphatic, more so than ‘‘Really marvellous!’’. By using bloody I am signalling to the hearer that I am not the 20

In my earlier discussion of whinge (Wierzbicka, 1997: 181–182), I assigned to whinge, inter alia, the component ‘‘I want someone to do something because of this’’. The validity of this component is questioned by Michael Clyne (1994: 50), and upon further consideration of data, I believe he is right on this point.

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kind of person who would readily express very good thoughts and very good feelings; rather, I am the kind of person who by preference expresses bad feelings (of course, of the ‘‘I want to do something’’ kind, not of the ‘‘I can’t do anything’’ kind). In fact, even a phrase like bloody beautiful often seems to be associated with a defiant tone which suggests a residual ‘‘bad feeling’’. For example, when the son of the designer of the Australian national flag defends it against critics, saying (as reported in the daily newspaper The Australian): It’s a bloody good flag, it’s a bloody beautiful flag. (C. Stewart, 1992.) one gets the impression that bloody signals both his good feelings for the flag and his bad feelings towards anyone who might deny that it was a good flag. One might even wonder whether the use of bloody in a positive context does not usually carry with it a whiff, a suggestion, of some bad feeling towards some imaginary target— perhaps towards someone who might want to deny the truth of what the speaker is affirming. I have not included any mention of a bad feeling of this type in the explication of phrases like bloody beautiful, in the belief that it probably is not a part of the semantic structure of these phrases as such; but the message of a concurrent bad feeling may easily attach itself to the phrase and be conveyed by the intonation, as was the case—one imagines—in the utterance about the flag. What cultural scripts are suggested by all this? Unexpectedly, perhaps, the very frequent use of bloody in Australian discourse suggests a far greater readiness to express emotions than is the norm in English speech in England. It is not seen as bad (or very bad) to say bloody, because it is not seen as bad to say that I feel something when I do feel something. Of course, it is bad to ‘‘whinge’’—to say that I feel something bad because I think: ‘‘something bad happened to me, I can’t do anything because of this’’. (For a detailed discussion of whinge, see Wierzbicka, 1991, 1997).20 It is not bad, however, to say that I feel something bad if I indicate at the same time that ‘‘I want to do something because of this’’. On the other hand, it may indeed be seen as bad (from an Australian perspective) to want to say often that ‘‘I feel something very good’’ (especially if I indicate that my very good feelings are due to thinking that something is very good). Accord-

21

Grice (1975: 53) describes ‘‘irony’’ as follows:

‘‘Irony. X, with whom A has been on close terms until now, has betrayed a secret of A’s to a business rival. A and his audience both know this. A says ’X is a fine friend’. (Gloss: It is perfectly obvious to A and his audience that what A has said or has made as if to say is something he does not believe, and the audience knows that A knows that this is obvious to the audience. So, unless A’s utterance is entirely pointless, A must be trying to get across some other proposition than the one he purports to be putting forward. this must be some obviously related proposition; the most obviously related proposition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward.’’ My own explication of irony, formulated in simple and universal human concepts, is largely, but not entirely, consistent with Grice’s description. In particular, it does not include the idea of ‘‘obviousness’’, which I think applies to sarcasm rather than to irony.

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ingly, when I do want to say that I feel something very good, it is good to signal at the same time that in general I am not someone who wants to do this often; it is good to signal that in general I tend to express bad feelings rather than good feelings; that I don’t seek to please other people and that in principle I think nothing of breaking social conventions. 10.6. ‘Bloody’ as a tool for expressing sarcasm Bloody is often used in Australian English to express sarcasm and a whole range of related attitudes. Some of these attitudes can be described with a single word, such as ‘‘sarcastic’’, ‘‘sardonic’’, ‘‘biting’’; others can only be identified by means of an unnamed cognitive scenario. Rather than try to analyse this whole spectrum of attitudes and communicative strategies here, in what follows I will focus on the named strategy of ‘‘sarcasm’’. Thus one can easily express sarcasm by combining bloody with an adjective of positive evaluation, as in phrases like bloody clever, bloody charming, or bloody funny. In fact, even ‘‘superlative’’ phrases like bloody great or bloody marvel can also be used sarcastically; especially in sentences where the superlative praise is directed at the addressee. Some examples: You’re a bloody marvel, I hope they can breed off you. (Richard Beckett, 1986) Ha bloody ha. (Rodney Hall, 1987) ‘It’s a bloody wonder she ain’t flooded it out long before now’, Bill sniggered. (Colleen McCullogh, 1975) That’s a bloody fine attitude, that is’, retorted Corrigan. (Frank Hardy, 1950) ‘You’re so bloody clever with your robberies at the Trades Hall’, John West said. (Frank Hardy, 1950) Let’s find this bloody marvel. (James McQueen, 1984) This is not the place to undertake an in-depth analysis and detailed discussion of sarcasm, irony, and other related phenomena, or to try to survey the extensive literature on the subject (see, in particular, Grice, 1975; Ducrot, 1984; Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Haiman, 1998), but a few brief remarks will be in order. An utterance like ‘‘ha-bloody-ha’’ can be described as sarcastic but not as ironic because the intended message is obvious (‘‘not funny’’)—far too obvious for irony. In irony, the intended message is meant to be intelligible but not obvious; and is not necessarily intended for the addressee but quite possibly for some other audience, present or imaginary.21 By contrast, in the case of sarcasm the intended message is indeed meant to be obvious, and obvious to the addressee. Formulaically: [Irony] if someone hears this, this someone can know what I think [Sarcasm] when you hear this, you will know what I think In sarcasm, then, it is not a matter of ‘‘if’’ but of ‘‘when’’, not ‘‘someone’’ but ‘‘you’’, not ‘‘can know’’ but ‘‘will know’’.

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For example, no mental effort or alertness is required to understand the message of a sarcastic utterance like ‘‘ha-bloody-ha’’. Irony can be missed by the addressee, and the addressee may not even be expected to see it: it may be meant to go over the addressee’s head; but sarcasm is meant to be noticed by the addressee. The reason why a sarcastic remark is usually easy to interpret is because all it requires is a kind of simple reversal from ‘‘good’’ to ‘‘bad’’ (for example from ‘‘original’’ to ‘‘unoriginal’’, or from ‘‘funny’’ to ‘‘not funny’’), whereas in the case of irony this is not necessarily the case. Furthermore, a sarcastic utterance is meant to offend the addressee, to make them ‘‘feel something bad’’ (not for a long time but when they hear the utterance). This is not necessary in the case of irony, which can be directed at someone other than the addressee. Haiman (1998: 20) states that ‘‘what is essential to sarcasm is that it is overt irony intentionally used by the speaker as a form of verbal aggression’’, and I think this is essentially right. Translated into simple and universal concepts this observation can be formulated as follows: I think when you hear this you will feel something bad I want this A sarcastic utterance shows also that the speaker ‘‘feels something bad’’, which again is not necessary in the case of irony. In fact, irony often seems ‘‘cool’’, and this is part of its effect: a negative judgment is implied (‘‘I think something bad about something’’) but the speaker seems in full control of his/her feelings and may even sound unpleasantly smug and superior in not ‘‘deigning’’ to combine the bad thought with a bad feeling. By contrast, a sarcastic utterance sounds cruder (no subtle mental gymnastics are required, although a certain verbal ‘‘cleverness’’ is implied, in so far as one thing is being said with words, and another, with one’s tone); but it is certainly not ‘‘cool’’. It clearly expresses a ‘‘bad feeling’’ and at the same time it directly (and aggressively) engages the addressee. But the aggression involved in sarcasm is short-lived: it appears to find a release, pleasurable for the speaker, in the very act of ‘‘clever’’ verbal expression. This can be portrayed as follows: I say this because I feel something bad at the same time I feel something good because I can say this The phrase ‘‘I can say this’’ is vague; it can refer to the freedom of expression and

22

Sperber and Wilson (1995) say that ‘‘genuine irony is echoic, and is primarily designed to ridicule the opinion echoed’’ (p. 241), and that ‘‘irony plays on the relationship between the speaker’s thought and a thought of someone other than the speaker’’ (p. 243). In my view, an ironic utterance like ‘‘he is a fine friend’’ (Grice, 1975: 53) does not have to echo somebody else’s presumed thought. I agree with Haiman (1998), however, that such an ‘echoing’ relationship between the speaker’s words and someone else’s (the addressee’s) presumed thought exists in the case of sarcasm.

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also to one’s (supposed) cleverness or wit. An ironic utterance like Grice’s (1975: 53.) He is a fine friend depends on the context for its ironic interpretation. By switching from the third person to the second, and by signalling with clear prosodic clues that one doesn’t mean what one says and that one ‘‘feels something’’ one could easily convey a sarcastic attitude: Oh, you’re such a fine friend. . . Part of the sarcasm here consists in an obvious intention to sting the addressee. Finally, a sarcastic utterance appears to attribute to the addressee the good thought which one is mockingly formulating as one’s own. For example, if I say to someone, sarcastically, ‘‘My heart bleeds for you.’’ I am attributing to this person the thought that I must be sorry for him or her—and I am clearly showing that I am not.22 This brings us to the following formula: sarcasm (a) I say something good about something (b) I don’t think this (c) I think you think this good thing about it (d) I think something else about it (e) I think something bad about it (f) I don’t want to say with words what I think (g) I think when you hear this you will know what I think (h) when I say this I feel something bad (i) at the same time I feel something good because I can say this (j) I think when you hear this you will feel something bad (k) I want this Haiman (1998: 24) sums up his discussion of sarcasm as follows: ‘‘to sum up, sarcasm is characterized by the intentional production of an overt and separate message ‘I don’t mean this’ in which the speaker expresses hostility or ridicule of another speaker, who presumably does ‘mean this’ in uttering an ostensibly positive message’’. This is largely consistent with the formula proposed here, except for one detail: in the formula proposed here the speaker’s ‘‘verbal aggression’’ (Haiman’s term) is directed specifically against the addressee, ‘‘you’’. Bloody is useful as a tool of sarcasm, because when it is combined with a word of positive evaluation, it highlights the fact that the speaker doesn’t mean what he or she says but rather seeks to convey a ‘‘bad thought’’ which is easy to reconstruct. At the same time, it conveys a ‘‘bad feeling’’ which cannot be mistaken for a good feeling. For example, without bloody a sentence like

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How bloody original. (Sydney Morning Herald, 1993) could conceivably be taken (and mistaken) for an expression of genuine appreciation; with bloody, however, it is clearly sarcastic. Even more obviously, the sentence ‘‘ha-bloody-ha’’ could not be mistaken for an expression of genuine mirth. Thus, sarcasm by itself is an expressive device conveying a feeling (a bad feeling); and the use of bloody (itself an expressive device capable of conveying a bad feeling) facilitates the expression of sarcasm in Australian discourse. Although these generalizations of course require further study and documentation, it would appear that in British English discourse, irony is valued more highly than sarcasm, whereas American cultural scripts appear to value ‘‘openness’’ (cf. Carbaugh, 1988) and ‘‘friendliness’’ (cf. Hochshild, 1983; Renwick, 1980; Bellah et al., 1985) rather than either irony or sarcasm. The relatively wide use of sarcasm in Australian English—apparently wider than in either British or American English (cf. e.g. Renwick, 1980)—suggests a cultural script along the following lines: (a) when I feel something bad because I think that someone thinks something good about something, I can say something to this person because of this (b) I don’t have to say with words that I don’t think the same (c) I don’t have to say with words that I feel something bad (d) I can say something else with words (e) when this person hears this this person will know what I think (f) at the same time this person will know what I feel Why is a relatively free use of sarcasm allowed in Australian culture? Perhaps this liberal view of sarcasm is consistent with the assumption that when one feels something like anger one can show it by saying something. If sarcasm is a form of verbal aggression, then certain forms of verbal aggression are accepted in traditional Australian culture—but only certain forms: brief, to the point, and preferably linked with some wit. (The brevity is implied in the component: ‘‘when i say this I feel something bad’’—not ‘‘when I think about it’’, which could go on for a long time, but only ‘‘when I say this’’.) Different cultures suggest different ‘‘cultural scripts’’ for dealing with anger-like feelings. For example, in Chinese culture there is a script for ‘‘swallowing one’s anger’’ (cf. Ye, 2000). In Malay culture, there is a script suggesting a silent withdrawal from interaction (cf. Goddard, 1996). Jewish-Yiddish culture offered an outlet in the form of a rich tapestry of curses (often verbally inventive and witty), such as, for example, the following two (cf. Matisoff, 1979): May a fiery pain meet her, the way she talks! (p. 65) My wife—must she live?—gave it away to him for nothing. (p. 68) Australian culture has its own favourite strategies. Saying some brief ‘‘bad words’’ (such as bastard, bugger, and also bullshit) is one of them. Saying something sarcastic is another.

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As mentioned earlier, bloody is a convenient tool for expressing not only sarcasm, but also various other attitudes which are valued in Australian culture. To give just one example: ‘Everyone is so bloody obliging’, he grumbled. (Rodney Hall, 1987.) Here the speaker is not being sarcastic, but he is still being deliberately ‘‘prickly’’, deliberately ‘‘not nice’’. Without ‘‘bloody’’, the sentence ‘‘everyone is so obliging’’ could be taken to imply that ‘‘I feel something good (because everyone wants to do good things for me)’’. By using bloody, the speaker can convey the message that ‘‘I don’t think this’’ and in fact ‘‘I feel something bad’’; he can show that he doesn’t want people to think that he feels something good, and also that he doesn’t want to say anything that would make them feel something good. 10.7. A summary of cultural scripts involving ‘bloody’ The cultural scripts relevant to bloody which have been discussed here can be summarized as follows: 1. when I feel something because I think something good about something it is not bad to say that I feel something 2. it is bad to say that I feel something bad because I think: ‘‘something bad happened to me I can’t do anything’’ 3. it is not bad to say that I feel something bad if I say at the same time: ‘‘I want to do something because of this’’ 4. when I want to say that I feel something bad it will be good to do something else at the same time some people think that some words are bad words these people think that it is bad to say these words it will be good if I say something like this at the same time 5. it will be bad if I say often that I feel something very good when I want to say that I feel something very good it will be good if I do something else at the same time some people think that some words are bad words these people think that it is bad to say these words it will be good if I say something like this at the same time 23 Similarly, conversations in Singapore English are liberally sprinkled with the sentence-final particle lah (roughly, ‘‘I think you can know what I mean’’ or ‘‘I think you know what I want to say’’). Again, far from being meaningless, or ‘‘bleached’’, lah differs in meaning from other Singapore English particles, and its frequent use is as culturally revealing as the frequent use of bloody in Australia, or of ne in Japan. (For detailed discussion see Besemeres and Wierzbicka, submitted.)

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Generally speaking, an exploration of the use of bloody in Australian discourse leads to the conclusion that there is in Australian English (as compared with British English) evidence of heightened emotional expressivity (cf. scripts 1 and 3 above). The frequent use of bloody in Australian speech amounts to a frequent expression of two messages: ‘‘when I say this I feel something bad’’ (bloody1) and ‘‘when I say this I feel something’’ (bloody2). The frequent use of bloody, I have argued, is not a meaningless reflex, but rather a meaningful pattern of behaviour, sending repeatedly the message ‘‘I feel something’’, or more specifically, ‘‘I feel something bad’’ (plus, roughly speaking, ‘‘I’m tough, I’m rough, I’m dinkum’’). Of course, some people inject bloody into their speech more often than others, and for some, injecting it may become a habit. But habitual linguistic behaviour is not necessarily meaningless. For example, in Japanese, a very frequently used discourse marker is ne, which means, roughly, ‘‘won’t you agree’’ or ‘‘I think you and I think the same’’ (cf. Minegishi Cook, 1992; Kamio, 1994, 1995; Itani, 1996), and many Japanese pepper (or rather sugar) their speech with ne as liberally and as habitually as many Australians pepper theirs with bloody. This does not show that either ne or bloody are meaningless; on the contrary, it shows that different messages tend to be habitually sent in Japanese and Australian culture.23

11. Conclusion Bloody continues to be an important, if diminished, cultural symbol in Australia. To be correctly interpreted, it needs to be seen in relation to other cultural symbols—both those whose importance in Australian life has declined and those which are still flourishing. It furnishes an important clue to both the changes and continuity in Australian culture, society, and speech. It also offers us a vantage point from which to investigate a whole network of Australian attitudes and values—some changing and some remarkably resistant to change. In addition to its importance for understanding Australian culture and society, the Australian use of bloody also illuminates some important theoretical issues. It shows that frequently used and apparently ‘‘bleached’’ discourse markers do in fact have their own precise meaning, and that this meaning can be revealed by means of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, based on empirically established universal human concepts. Furthermore, it shows that once the precise meaning of such discourse markers is accurately portrayed, it can provide important clues to the values, attitudes, and modes of interaction characteristic of a given society or speech community. The exploration of bloody presented here highlights the fact—still often ignored in the literature on pragmatics—that language use depends not only on universal implicatures or ‘‘principles of politeness’’ of one kind or another, but also on norms and assumptions which are largely culture-specific. It demonstrates that, on the one hand, pragmatics is closely related to culture and on the other, that culture is embedded in meanings; and that to understand culture as it is reflected in language use, we must understand the meaning of all linguistic expressions, including the most

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‘‘pragmatic’’ ones among them: discourse markers, terms of address, conversational speech formulae, interjections, ‘‘response signals’’, and so on. As I argued many years ago (Wierzbicka, 1985), pragmatics cannot be divorced from semantics; and if it is not to fall into the ethnocentric trap of absolutizing the linguistic practices of one society as universal principles of conversational behaviour (or ‘politeness’) it must rest on a firm cross-linguistic and cross-cultural basis. Paradoxically perhaps, only universal human concepts can give us a reliable foundation for studying language use across cultures in a way which can faithfully reveal culture-specific norms of human communication and human ‘cognition’. Ways of speaking depend on ways of thinking, and ways of thinking are reflected in the meaning of linguistic expressions. To be fruitful, the study of a society’s or community’s ‘‘cultural scripts’’ must go hand in hand with the study of meaning. Crosscultural pragmatics needs semantics, and semantics needs a theory and a methodology. This article aims to show how the NSM semantic theory can fulfil these needs.

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