Got talking about acceptable swearwords (again) and the origins of words like "bloke".
Scooby Doo's (or rather Shaggy's) "Zounds" is of course a contraction of the blasphemous "God's wounds". In performances of the work of that old potty-mouth Shakespeare, they don't pronounce it to rhyme with "sounds".
So go on then, what's "Zoinks" short for? Bonus points if you are funny.
It's short for Christ's ointment, (let us remember the title Christ is commonly believed to be translation from the Greek meaning the annointed one), Shaggy is tipping us off to the suspect morality of the profligate anointing of Christ with a whole jar of Nard by some woman who probably wasn't Mary Maudlin, the stoner/Gnostic theory of Christ as a user of mood altering chemical embrocation and to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's claim that a swoon relieving unction was responsible for the miracle of the Resurrection.
ReplyDeleteOther scholars will tell you it's all about those possessed pigs whose name had been Legion, but that's silly revisionist nonsense reading far too much into stuff and probably just Frank Muir bluffing.