The word for today is…

ruddy (adj) – 1.
a. Having a healthy, reddish colour.
b. Reddish; rosy.

  1. (Chiefly British Slang) Used as an intensive: “You ruddy liar!” (John Galsworthy).

Source : The Free Dictionary

Etymology : In Old English, there were two related words referring to red colouring: read and rudu. Read evolved into our present-day red. Rudu evolved into rud (a word now encountered only in dialect or archaic usage) and ruddy. Most often, ruddy is applied to the face when it has the red glow of good health or is red from a suffusion of blood from exercise or excitement. It is also used in the names of some birds, such as the American ruddy duck. In British English, ruddy is also used as a colourful euphemism for the sometimes offensive intensive bloody, as 20th-century English writer Sir Kingsley Amis illustrates in The Riverside Villas Murder: “Ruddy marvelous, the way these coppers’ minds work…. I take a swing at Chris Inman in public means I probably done him in.”

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Peter is a fourth-generation New Zealander, with his mother's and father's folks having arrived in New Zealand in the 1870s. He lives in Lower Hutt with his wife, some cats and assorted computers. His...