good point, wseiber;
There's a fine, and often impossibly obscure line of demarcation between archaisms and neologisms. In resurrecting old oaths like "gadzooks", we look for meaning in folk etymology that can't provide any chain of evolution of the word. Gadzooks may have meant "God's hooks", but it is unlikely that it did. there's insufficient evidence to claim that the nails on Christ's cross were ever invoked as an oath; less evidence still that these nails were called "hooks". Words evolve, and often when we pluck them out of the past, we use them in new, different ways, and what we thought to be an archaism is in fact so different from its original usage that it becomes new again.
Speaking of hooks--does anyone know if the oo sound in words like hook, book, took, etc., was ever pronounced like the oo in "moon"? My tongue always wants to say book with the long sound of moon or boot.
