Re: USAGE: English adverbials 'the heck', 'the hell', etc.

--- John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...> wrote:
> Ph. D. wrote:
>
> >John Quijada wrote:
> >> I'm especially curious as to why
> >> such phrases carry the highly unusual
> compositional
> >> structure of DEFINITE ARTICLE + NOUN being used
> >> adverbially. I can't think of any other types of
> nouns used
> >> this way in English
> >
> >Why the dickens don't you call me?
> >Where the blazes have you been?
> >They trashed the crap out of his house.
> >They beat the daylights out of him.
> ___________________
> Ah!  I'll grant you 'dickens' and 'blazes', but I'm
> wondering whether in
> the last two examples, 'the crap' and 'the
> daylights' are simply
> conventionalized synonyms/substitutes for something
> like 'inside(s)'
> or 'innards.'
For me this conjures up a conjectural lineage that
might have started with a rite of exorcism meant to
literally "beat the devil out of someone" supposedly
possesed.

Also, at the beginning of the industrial revolution
during the mass exodus of country folk to the cities
there was an old saying to the effect that "you can
take the man out of the country, but you can't take
the country out of the man."

Perhaps "getting the country out of the man" is
analgous to "whipping the hell out of the troublesome
boy"  in that if the boy was "a real hellion," as they
used to say, it was because he had too much of hell in
him, and that hell had to be beaten out of him.

"Blazes," is, of course, a euphemism for "hell," and
since a hotter burning natural gas fire burns blue,
"beating the blue blazes out of someone" is an obvious
intensification, not of the beating act itself, but of
the intensity of the hellfire that burns within him.

Now Dickens wrote some pretty shady trouble makers
into his works and a trouble maker used to be called
"a real dickens" so "beating the dickens" out of
someone again seems to refer literally to the
practical matter of beating the trouble making
tendancy out of him.

Another euphamism for trouble maker was "snot" as in
"he's a real snot."  So "beating the snot out of
someone" follows naturally, although that might also
derive from the nasal fluids exuded as the result of a
punch in the nose.

All hypothetical, of course.

--gary

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