Sunday Word: Deucedly

[sallymn]

deucedly [doo-sid-lee,dyoo-]

adverb:
(chiefly British, informal) devilishly, damnably: extremely

Examples:

It's deucedly hard to contemplate a Rolls-Royce without putting it on a pedestal, because they never feel like mere motorcars, somehow transcending glass and metal to symbolise fine taste, high achievement, or whatever it is you want your Rolls to say about you. (Leow Ju-Len, 2021 Rolls-Royce Ghost review - Haunting beauty, The Business TimesMarch 2021)

Only a deucedly cunning or blinkered view would consider Owaisi as doing politics that challenges the constitutional regime. (Badri Raina, How AIMIM Has Emerged As the Principal Challenger of the BJP, Not 'Secular' Parties, The Wire, November 2020)

"Young Reggie Foljambe to my certain knowledge offered him double what I was giving him, and Alistair Bingham-Reeves, who's got a valet who had been known to press his trousers sideways, used to look at him, when he came to see me, with a kind of glittering, hungry eye which disturbed me deucedly. Bally pirates!" (P G Wodehouse, 'Jeeves And The Hard-Boiled Egg')

George's engagement to Peggy seriously affected the lives of two people who are deucedly well known in society. (Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull, A Butterfly on the Wheel)

Why people, because they are in a steamboat, should get up so deucedly early I cannot understand. (William Makepeace Thackeray, Little Travels and Roadside Sketches)

Origin:

Formation from deuced: late 15c, dews, 'the 2 in dice or cards,' also 'a roll of 2 in dice' (1510s), from Old French deus (Modern French deux), from Latin duos (nominative duo) 'two' (from PIE root dwo- 'two'). The spelling -ce from -s to reflect voiceless pronunciation is as in dice, pence, etc.

Deuced became a mild oath by 1710, about 50 years after it was first attested in the sense of 'bad luck, the devil, etc,' perhaps because two was the lowest score, and probably by similarity to Latin deus and related words meaning 'god.' According to OED, 16c Low German had der daus! in the same sense, which perhaps influenced the English form. (Online Etymology Dictionary)