Pygmalion

The first night of George Bernard Shaw’s comedy Pygmalion in 1914 became a cultural milestone in the history of swearing in England entirely through the use of bloody . Shaw (1856–1950) modified the original classical legend of Pygmalion to show how class notions in the United Kingdom were dominated by criteria of accent and propriety in speech. In his play a professorial phonetician, Henry Higgins (based on Henry Sweet), decides to transform a London Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into a lady by giving her an upper-class accent as well as appropriate clothes and manners. The experiment succeeds, until Eliza reverts shockingly to her natural low-class speech, a dramatic moment that Shaw exploits through an incongruous juxtaposition of style and content:

LIZA [with perfectly elegant diction]: Walk! Not bloody likely! [Sensation]
I am going in a taxi. (Act III)

In a way that now seems entirely absurd, the popular press sensationalized the whole episode, the Daily Sketch giving it this buildup:

One word in Shaw’s new play will cause sensation .
Mr. Shaw introduces a certain forbidden word.
WILL MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL SPEAK IT?
(cited in Huggett 1969, 127-28)

Almost a whole page was devoted to the future utterance, which did indeed cause a scandal. What was alluded to by the press as “SHAW’S BOLD BAD WORD,” “the unprintable Swearword,” “THE ‘LANGWIDGE’ OF THE FLOWER GIRL,” “the Word,” and numerous other evasions, provoked in the first night audience “a few seconds of stunned disbelieving silence” and then hysterical laughter for at least a minute and a quarter (Huggett 1969, 136-37). Yet the performance provoked headlined responses: “THREATS BY DECENCY LEAGUE,” “THEATRE TO BE BOYCOTTED,” and “I SEE NO OBJECTION SAYS PRIME MINISTER” (Huggett 1969, 141). Although the Bishop of Woolwich insisted that “The Word should be banned,” bloody became the catchword of the season. So did pygmalion , in the ironic use “not pygmalion likely!” Shaw, who had rightly intuited that the censor would not interfere (having passed bloody twice before), commented a week later in a statement in the Daily News:

I have nothing particular to say about Eliza Doolittle’s language…. I do not know anything more ridiculous than the refusal of some newspapers (at several pages’ length) to print the word “bloody,” which is in common use as an expletive by four-fifths of the British nation, including many highly-educated persons.

By contrast, in the New York performance the word “failed to cause any stir” (Mencken 1936, 311). Richard Huggett comments that “the Americans … were not in the least shocked by the Word, regarding it as a charming and delightful piece of English slang” (1969, 171). The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) notes that bloody is still “considered uncommon and widely regarded as a typical Briticism.”

The play was a succès de scandale and subsequently reached a global audience as the musical My Fair Lady (1956), filmed in 1964. It is ironic that Shaw, a serious dramatist who developed the genre of “the play of ideas” in over forty plays, should have become associated in the public mind principally with one swearword in this comparatively slight piece. Yet after this sensational use, bloody was not heard again on the stage until Noel Coward’s Red Peppers in 1936 (de Jongh, 2000, 185). The episode showed the inherent double standard and hypocrisy surrounding the use of coarse language.