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blue murder
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Where does the saying come from?
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In France around 1612 there existed the word 'morbleu!', an exclamation formed from the word 'mort', death, and 'bleu', blue. The 'bleu' was a euphemism for 'dieu', meaning God, so the full expression was not so different from the English 'God's death!' of about the same period. The better known 'sacre bleu' contains the same euphemism. The expression is now virtually redundant in the French language but by the mid 17th Century it had travelled to this country where it was translated into the now familier ' blue murder' ..
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