Severity
Originally, the word "bollocks" was the everyday vernacular word for testicles—as noted above, it was used in this sense in the first English-language bible, in the 14th century. By the mid-seventeenth century, at least, it had begun to acquire coarse figurative meanings (see section on "bollocking"), for example in a translation of works by Rabelais.
It did not appear in Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary of the English language. It was also omitted from the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary and its 1941 reprint, finally appearing in the 1972 supplement. The first modern English dictionary to include an entry for the bollocks was G. N. Garmonsway's Penguin English Dictionary of 1965.
The relative severity of the various profanities, as perceived by the British public, was studied on behalf of the Broadcasting Standards Commission, Independent Television Commission, BBC and Advertising Standards Authority. The results of this jointly commissioned research were published in December 2000 in a paper called "Delete Expletives?". This placed "bollocks" in eighth position in terms of its perceived severity, between "prick" (seventh place) and "arsehole" (ninth place). By comparison, the word "balls" (which has some similar meanings) was down in 22nd place. Of the people surveyed, 25% thought that "bollocks" should not be broadcast at all, and only 11% thought that it could acceptably be broadcast at times before the national 9 pm "watershed" on television (radio does not have a watershed). 25% of the people regarded "bollocks" as "very severe", 32% "quite severe", 34% "mild" and 8% considered it "not swearing".
A survey of the language of London teenagers (published in 2002) examined, amongst other things, the incidence of various swearwords in their speech. It noted that the top ten swearwords make up 81% of the total swearwords. "Bollocks" was the seventh most frequent swearword, after "fucking", "shit", "fuck", "bloody", "hell" and "fuck off". Below "Bollocks", were "bastard", "bitch" and "damn", in eighth, ninth and tenth places. This research regarded these words as swearwords in the context of their usage but noted that some might be inoffensive in other contexts.
Read more about this topic: Bollix
Famous quotes containing the word severity:
“In compassionate men, severity is a virtue.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A Man who always acts in the Severity of Wisdom, or the Haughtiness of Quality, seems to move in a personated Part: It looks too Constrained and Theatrical for a Man to be always in that Character which distinguishes him from others.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)