It was a different story in Britain, where bloody turned increasingly taboo after its debut in the 17th century. When Eliza Doolittle said "Not bloody likely!" in the opening performance of Shaw's "Pygmalion," in 1914, the scandal was international news; "Shaw's Adjective Shocks," reported The New York Times, in a piece quoting critics and churchmen on the play's "vulgar" and "lurid" language.

That different countries have varying sensitivities is not news, of course.

Still, bloody is a bit of a puzzler for anyone who thinks vulgarity must be related to a word's meaning, because bloody means nothing at all. It may be derived from "the habits of the 'bloods' or aristocratic rowdies" of the late 17th century, says the Oxford English Dictionary; or maybe the repellent associations of the literal bloody were enough to arouse distaste.

But there's no discernible connection with oaths like "God's blood!" or "by Our Lady," or with any other taboos. The shunning of bloody "seems to have been one of those Victorian things," says the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage, and one that persisted into the 20th century: "British newspapers were still printing it as b-y as late as 1946."

In the half-century since, though, the stigma has faded noticeably.

The British advertising board defended its ban on bloody with a survey that showed - as they spun it - that 70 percent of interviewees thought the word was "mildly, fairly, or severely offensive."

But the Australians responded with counterspin: If you group the responses differently, they noted, you get 85 percent saying bloody is either "mildly" or not at all offensive. And when it came to broadcast guidelines, bloody was the tamest word on the list: Only 5 percent of people who called it a swear word thought it should "never" be heard on TV.