Dirty Words

A great many words that began as vulgar or crude are now mainstream English. “That blows” is a perfectly modern, acceptable way to describe a dreadful situation. Same with sucks - both of which originally were slang for fellatio, but have become an ordinary part of everyday American English. Time was when queer was derogatory slang for a gay man, but is now standard in the LGBTQ+ lexicon. So called “dirty words” have a long and winding history. In his 1664 Diary, Samuel Pepys described one of his servants as “a most admirable slut”, a term of endearment, a catchall for women of low birth, typically maids. The technical term for what happened to slut is semantic pejoration (when a word becomes negative over time). When it becomes positive it’s called semantic amelioration. To “pimp my ride” is an example of the latter, since originally pimp was a term for a very bad man (and often still is). The ubiquitous American English collective pronoun “guy” - as in “Can I get you guys some drinks?” - started out in England and was naughty indeed. Read on.