Today's Sermon: Zounds! Oh, Tabernacle!

At least one Washington Post reporter and his editor think they're onto something new...

In French-Speaking Canada, the Sacred Is Also Profane

Quebecers Turn to Church Terms, Rather Than the Sexual or Scatological, to Vent Their Anger

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service

MONTREAL -- "Oh, tabernacle!" The man swore in French as a car splashed through a puddle, sending water onto his pants. He could never be quoted in the papers here. It is too profane.

So are other angry oaths that sound innocuous in English: chalice, host, baptism. In French-speaking Quebec, swearing sounds like an inventory being taken at a church.

Zounds! You'd think that The Washington Post had single-handedly uncovered a sinister Quebecquois plot to corner the market on sacrilegious euphemisms.

Ahem...

These are the words, with their probable original meanings and the dates of their first quoted use in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Zounds: God's wounds (i.e., the injuries suffered by Christ on the cross). 1600.
Gad, Egad: God. 1673.
Gadzooks: God's hooks (i.e., the nails use to fix Christ to the cross). 1694.
Gosh (gosh-darned, gosh-awful, etc.): God. 1757.
Golly: God. 1775.
Darn: Damn. 1781.
Tarnation: Damnation. 1790.
Dang: Damn. 1793.
Jiminy (or Jiminy Cricket): From Gemini or Jesu Domine. 1803 (1664 for Gemini).
Drat2: "God rot". 1815
Crikey: Christ. 1838.
Sam Hill: Hell. 1839.
Doggone: Probably from "God damn". 1851.
Heck: Hell. 1865.
Gee: Jesus (or possibly Jerusalem). 1895.
Gorblimey: God blind me. 1896.
Jeez: Jesus. 1923.
Jeepers (or jeepers-creepers): Jesus Christ. 1929.

Jesus on a pogo stick, y'all! There's nothing new under the sun, and French Canadians aren't out to blaspheme their way to hell, either.

What the hell is blasphemy, anyway, and have I just committed it? --snip--

With great narrative subtlety and interpretive flair, Word Crimes explodes these would-be truths about blasphemy. In nineteenth-century England, Marsh demonstrates, a spate of blasphemy prosecutions--she counts more than two hundred between 1817 and 1883--accompanied the birth pangs of modernity. In these trials, blasphemy law was no mere shield for the vulnerable heart of religion. Instead, prosecutions for blasphemy defined the more elusive category of the unspeakable: "what you may not say" and how you cannot say it (7). What the Victorians held sacred, Marsh makes clear, was less the Bible than Literature, less creed than class. By the century's end, blasphemy had become, quite simply, "a class crime of language," a means to establish "a single standard for public discourse that it was impossible for the less educated to observe." The law of blasphemy, in sum, had "criminalized vulgarity" and sacrilized taste (8).

I'll swan! (trans. I'll swear on it!)

Thus Endeth Today's Sermon.

Go forth today and remember the swear words of your childhood... the ones your parents couldn't help but utter when the hammer hit the thumb instead of the nail or the pot on the stove boiled over. If this is your idea of a bad Christian, the halls of the hell you believe in are surely full today! Think it over.

I mean it, damn it!



Best bar bet in the world: Delilah didn't do it.
Judges 16:19-- And she made him (Samson) sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head.