Taking the Lord’s name in vain

Although it sounds like something Fred Flintstone would yell after dropping a bowling ball on his foot, ‘Gadzooks’ was one of the Renaissance’s worst swear words. A contraction of ‘By God’s hooks’, or more literally, ‘By the nails in Christ’s cross’, Gadzooks was an ‘oath’ – an offensive or emphatic word or expression uttered in anger or shock.

In 1606, Parliament passed a law making it illegal to “jestingly or profanely” use God’s name on stage, and the word largely disappeared thereafter. Another casualty of this overreach was ‘zounds’ or ‘By God’s wounds’. Shakespeare began to swap out the word ‘God’ for ‘Heaven’ in his later works, such as Othello.