September 25, 1996

Odd's bodkins

I work with a guy named Botkin, to whom we refer from time to time as Odds Bodkin. What is an odd bodkin, and in what context is the expression used?

Odd's bodkins is a mild profane oath, which literally means 'God's dear body!' It's now archaic, but was used as an exclamation like God damn! or a host of others.

The usual form of the second word is bodikin, which is a diminutive of body (the diminutive suffix -kin is found in such other words as lambkin). The expression occurs in Shakespeare (Hamlet: "Odds bodikins, man," with a variant reading from the Quarto of "bodkin"), Fielding, and Smollet, among others. Expressions like this were very common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; some other examples are 'sblood (God's blood), 'snails (God's nails), zounds (God's wounds), and gadzooks (God's hooks).

The word is unrelated to bodkin 'a small dagger or pointed instrument', which itself occurs in Hamlet, in the "to be or not to be" speech ("He himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin"). This word dates back to the fourteenth century, and is of uncertain origin.