Broken my promise to shut up ...

The Guest who suggested that " For example, to say "it's by our lady cold outside", "by our lady hell" doesn't really make sense, even though Jonathan Swift attempted it.

It is possible for language to develop as e.g.

"By our Lady, it is cold"
"Berlady, 'tis cold"
"B'Lady, 's cold"
"Bloody cold"

Language certainly does change over time; I firmly believe that English came about because the Angles and Saxons finally tired of making adjectives agree with their nouns (in both Latin and German).

And guess what ! Someone told me that the word, "Birlady" occurs in Shakespeare. It's in some clowns hilariously unfunny speech, like, "By the Mass, th'art as addle-pated as a coxcomb that has lost his way at Spitalfields, Birlady and God's Sonties ..."

Unfortunately, he can't remember which clown. Neither the Young nor the old Gobbo, I tried those two. I'll look up Fabian and Feste tonight.