Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

This is it; the end of the road. Well, the end of the alphabet, anyway. Our Word for the wise © series has reached its conclusion and after today, after Z, we must move on. So, here goes:

zounds is a euphemism dating from the days when uttering the name of God was suppressed. What readers of archaic works often regard as a mild expression of surprise or annoyance is, in fact, a late 16th century shortening of "by God's wounds!" Similar to "zounds" is "gosh", which the Oxford English Dictionary termed a "mincing pronunciation of GOD". It is fascinating that in three centuries English went from the openness of medieval religious swearing so obvious in Chaucer to the Puritan injunction against profanity.

When swearing moved its focus from the religious to bodily functions, we begin to see an erosion of the name of God in forms such as gospel ("God's message"), gossip ("relation to God") and "goodbye" ("God be with you").

Goodbye is a good word with which to end our Word for the wise © adventure. Over the past 26 weeks (!), the trek from A to Z has shown, in a small way, the enormous social and semantic changes that have taken place in English during the past millennium, and thanks to the "Categories" feature of Movable Type you can now spend hours enjoying Rainy Day's Word for the wise ©.