God save the mark

• God bless the mark

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)k

God save the mark

1. (somewhat archaic) Ironic expression of distaste.
   • c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii]:

     […] for he made me mad
     To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet
     And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman
     Of guns and drums and wounds,—God save the mark!—
     And telling me the sovereign'st thing on earth

   • 1895, Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan, →OCLC, page 7:

     […] the gnawing pain, the sick faintness, the deadly stupor, the insatiable animal craving for mere food, all of which sensations are frightful enough to those who are, unhappily, daily inured to them, but which when they afflict one who has been tenderly reared and brought up to consider himself a 'gentleman,'—God save the mark! are perhaps still more painful to bear.

   • 2020, Peter Schjeldahl, “The Melancholy Gestalt of Isolation”, in The New Yorker‎:

     The world’s population is atomized among the dying, the ill, the quarantined, the sheltered, the heroically imperilled “essential” (never forget!), and, God save the mark, the blinkered fools.