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Sam Hill is an American English slang phrase, a euphemism or minced oath for "the devil" or "hell" personified (as in, "What in the Sam Hill is that?"). Etymologist Michael Quinion and others date the expression back to the late 1830s; [1] [2] they and others [3] consider the expression to have been a simple bowdlerization, with, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an unknown origin.
Old Scratch or Mr. Scratch is a nickname or pseudonym for the Devil. The name likely comes from Middle English scrat , the name of a demon or goblin, derived from Old Norse skratte . [ 1 ]
The Fallen Angel (1847) by Alexandre Cabanel. The most common meaning for Lucifer in English is as a name for the Devil in Christian theology.He appeared in the King James Version of the Bible in Isaiah [1] and before that in the Vulgate (the late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible), [2] not as the name of a devil but as the Latin word lucifer (uncapitalized), [3] [4] meaning "the ...
Dry Guillotine is the English translation of the French phrase la guillotine sèche, which was prisoner slang for the Devil's Island penal colony at French Guiana.It is also the title of several articles by various authors and most notably, a very influential and successful book by former prisoner #46,635, René Belbenoît.
Gweilo or gwailou (Chinese: 鬼佬; Cantonese Yale: gwáilóu, pronounced [kʷɐ̌i lǒu] ⓘ) is a common Cantonese slang term for Westerners.In the absence of modifiers, it refers to white people and has a history of racially deprecatory and pejorative use.
In his book The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, Jeffrey Burton Russell discusses various meanings and difficulties that are encountered when using the term devil. He does not claim to define the word in a general sense, but he describes the limited use that he intends for the word in his book—limited in ...
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The character gui (鬼) can have negative connotations itself without the zi (子) suffix.For example, when it was attached to the Westerners in the term yang guizi (洋鬼子 'overseas devils') during the Boxer Rebellion, to the Japanese military in the term guizi bing (鬼子兵 'devil soldiers') during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and to the Korean collaborators with the term er guizi ...