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Throughout most of the 19th century, it was considered either in poor taste or outright dangerous to speak the word "Devil." The superstitious believed literally in the saying, "Speak of the devil and he appears." Saying his name "Devil" outloud, they thought, causes the actual Devil to physically come to you. So you can see why people found various words to use in place of "Devil," like "You little dickens," or "What the dickens is wrong with you," and so on, which is just a random choice of an unusual word. Interstingly, most people believed much the same about the word "Hell," convinced it was dangerous to speak the actual word. So they'd say, for example, "I got mad and told him to go to the other place," in order not to say "go to hell."

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16y ago

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