"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/11/17 (doggone, zounds, gadzooks, gorblimey, deuce and dickens, mince)

Thank you to Mtthew Barnes, who e-mailed in and said, "Couid you explain how we ended up with the expression "doggone""? You have to say that with a bad Anerican accent, really - doggone. Where does it come from? And so most of us would associate doggone, as I say, with America and perhaps slightly vexed cowboys in Hollywood westerns. And from its very earliest days, it goes back to the mid-1800s, it's been used to express annoyance, ecpecially in the phrase, "Well I'll be doggone". And dogs don't really come into it at all. I don't think Matthew will be surprised by that. The expression is simply what's known as a minced oath. In other words, it's a euphemism for a swear word or a profanity in some kind. Ans doggone is simply a politer way of saying goddammit, with "dog" operating here as back slang for God. Back slang is when a word is usually just simply spelt backwards, like yob for boy, etc. But in past centuries, there was a lot of oath mincing going on in English, because direct references to God were considered profane, and of course still are for some people too. So, the old-fashioned exclamation, zounds or zoonds, which you will find in comics quite often, is the euphemism for God's wounds, or by God's wounds, reffering to the stigmata of Christ. And gadzooks was a softening of  by God's hooks, which is an allusion to the nails of the cross. And there are so many more, and don't always involve Jesus or Christ. Many do, like jeepers creepers, Jiminy Cricket, beggora, etc, but for Peter's sake, that's another one that we think of, that was St. Peter who was being reffered to there. Gorblimey we know was God blind me. That was a euphemism for that. Deuce and dickens - what the deuse?, what the dickens? - both euphenism for the  Devil. But I mentioned that word minced oath, which is linguistic term for what these are, and they're called that because to mince your words means to cut them short. Mince goes back to the Latin minutus, which gave us minute obviously, but meaning small. And to mince one's words, we have Shakespeare to thank for exact expression. It goes back to Genry V, and Henry says to his French princess, "I know no ways to mince it in love, but directly to say I love you". And from that it was to speak candidly and fully, not mincing your words, not mincing youe oaths at all, but to give them in full without any cutting up at all.