I think it's the 19th century equivalent of 'F*ck' and thus mutable.

For me it's more, "Wow, I can't believe what you're telling me! You're making this up, right?"

I'm with JanetLand, definately the second of your choices. Then again, she and i are from the same region.

Or is it "[What] The hell [are] you say[ing]!"

I've always heard it as "[What] the hell [did] you say?"

"No! Get out of town! Say it isn't so!"

Fuck if I know.

"By jove! That is a surprising/unexpected thing you have just said and I am expressing some concern about the extent of its veracity!"

For me it's, "What you said is so obvious that I'll make a sardonic acknowledgement of same by seeming to question your statement."

"It's so hot in here."

"The hell you say!"

I don't think of it as the first--i.e. the 'hell' isn't modifying 'say', so that the things you're saying are hell.

It's closer to the second, but I don't have enough of a grasp of linguistics to tell you how I really think it parses. It's like, "hell" is a free-floating intensifier, in a way.

If you think about it, when we say "what the hell are you saying", that's itself sort of hard to parse. Especially because "what in heaven are you saying" is almost a perfect stand-in for the phrase.

Oh yeah, I get what it means - surprise/shock - I'm just having trouble parsing the phrase itself, the way Firas is trying to do. You make a good point about "the hell" which often functions as sort of just an intensifier, the difference between:

"What are you doing?" and
"What the hell are you doing?"
is really just one of intensity.

But in "The hell you say!" , treating "the hell" as an intensifier and removing it, leaving just "You say!" doesn't make a lot of sense, so "the hell" can't just be an intensifier.

...Although we do having the saying "You don't say!" ...which is sort of like "The hell you say!" in meaning, only more surprise and less shock.

Here's a long and confusing discussion of idiomatic uses of "hell" that helps me not too much.

Trying to break this down grammatically is pretty futile. I don't see any reason whatsoever to believe it's a shortened form of a complete sentence in which each word played a well-defined function we could diagram. It's a complete unit by itself.

Hm, this might be good for an AskMe sometime.

You'd better stop--the hell you say may be your own.

I see it as analogous to "Like hell it is!", the bound portions "the hell" and "like hell" acting as a unit modifying an elliptical base clause; so agreed that treating it as an intensifier doesn't make sense.

But my gut says Wolfdog is on the money—there's probably some arguments you could make about the parsing out of elided structural bits, but it seems like such a fixed idiomatic usage that I'm not sure it'll ever satisfactorily submit to a component-wise analysis.

The thing is that while I agree it's sort of a linguistic outlier, I suspect that there's a logic even to that, you know, Chomsky-style. I'd really like to hear what people with lots of experience with idiomatic English discuss it.

I think the missing link here is "the name of". It's an elision, but not of "What the hell did you say?" but "What in the name of Hell did you say?"

Ah, I could see that, dhartung. And I know a few oldsters who use sort of a middle version: "What in th' hell?"

I use "what in the hell" sometimes, too. Swap hell for fuck sometimes there. And I don't find "the fuck you say" problematic either, now that I think about it.

Though whether that's because there's any underlying structural form that is specifically intensifier-shaped there or if it's just because the semantic spillover of hell-as-intensifier makes fuck an acceptable candidate for replacement for me, I dunno.

"Like fuck it is" feels more awkward when I heft it in my mind than does "the fuck you say".