" I’m not sure anyone still says gadzooks, but it was from God’s hooks—the nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. We can see Odds bodkins emerging from “God’s body” in Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part II has a line “God’s body! The turkeys in my pannier are quite starved.” (It’s not one of Shakespeare’s more iconic lines.) The Bard added the “cutesifying” suffix -kin later when Hamlet says, “God’s bodykins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Leaving off the g and y, then, yields the queer little locution Odds bodkins! we now vaguely associate with men in stockings fencing on staircases (or at least I do). "

― John McWhorter , Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter — Then, Now, and Forever