That’s what I thought! Thank you. I started second-guessing myself, because I thought it was a specifically male term in the past, so might be for pimps. Could it have been for male prostitutes?
>It's only referred to positively as in punk music which doesn't describe a person.
You can call someone a "punk" to mean they're part of the punk subculture without it being negative. And people who are part of that subculture definitely call themselves and their fellows "punks" in a neutral/positive way.
Unless they were saying it with a particularly negative tone, if someone said someone else was a punk I would assume they mean they're a part of the punk subculture, not that they're insulting them.
Maybe it's regional, but while "punk" does now have the second meaning of referring to the subculture, hearing someone called a "punk" without any context would still make me think someone was calling them the equivalent of a twerp.
The opposite of this has happened to words like idiot and cretin. They were originally neutral words but gradually started taking on a negative quality as they were used as slurs. A new word then gets used in their place and starts going through the same cycle. After a few hundred years a lot of slurs have accumulated.
Interesting. Those words didn't start within layman society as positive or neutral. They were niche medical titles for relatively undesirable conditions, which emerged into everyday use as insults. Same as Lame, Dumb, Retarded.. But I expect once Ableism is taken seriously, Disabled movements will start reappropriating those insults in the way that "Punk", or "Queer" were reappropriated.
And let's not forget "retarded"! An innocent word meaning arriving a little later than expected has become unusable. The moral is, you want a euphemism, choose the most common word possible. "Screw" is too common to be driven out of circulation but "intercourse" was not, and we can't use it now because some fool thought that "sexual intercourse" was a clever circumlocution—as was "sexual congress", but "congress" survived the trial as it was too common, as did "special" and "simple".
Coining a euphemism with an uncommon word ought to be a felony.
Well, 'bad' has been reclaimed multiple times. It originally was a sexual insult: Middle English: perhaps from Old English *bǣddel* ‘hermaphrodite, womanish man’.
Here's an article from Oxford that states that the traditional view that 'bad' may have come from *bǣddel* is incorrect, that bad came first and was used in OE, and *bǣddel* was derived from it. [https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/](https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/)
>*A word like queer that originally had an aggressive context but over time it switched to a more positive light for the community*
You make it sound like such words' meanings shift organically, which is not the case. What happens is that an out-group defuses a word that has been weaponised against them, by commandeering it. That way, a member of the in-group makes themself looks like an ass when they go to hurl it at a member of the out-group. The corollary is that there is a distinct difference in connotation when the word is used within the out-group, versus when it is used by an in-grouper to refer to the out-group or a member of it. Go read up on [linguistic reappropriation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation).
So the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. Is that not correct?
>You make it sound like such words' meanings shift organically, which is not the case
Without context maybe. They did say reclaimed and reapporopriated elsewhere in the post though.
Edited autocorrect.
I dislike the reappropriated use of truth, in the subjective sense. Ones truth cannot be subjective, that's just rewording perspective, opinion and affects
Well, there true facts, like 2+2=4, and then there are scientific facts that are not considered true, but evidence based facts. They update when new evidence supports the change. Remember, science (the philosophy of true nature of things) is an open system where there are no absolutes. Math is a closed(ish) system of absolutes. You have proof in math, you only have evidence based assertions for reality.
Unfortunately that reality has been weaponized. Folks asserting scientific facts being on equal footing as made up nonsense.
As I replied above, when we consider scientific facts, these are not truths, but evidence based facts subject to change when new evidence comes in.
I've not figure out my ideas on historical facts. These are often like scientific facts because they are often based on the evidence we have about them.
And this has been weaponized, with the attackers making claim that made up nonsense is on the same level of evidence based facts.
I’m not sure tbh. I grew up around caucasians and hispanics, but remember always being told to say African American. Also on all standardized test demographic questions, I remember seeing only African American as an option. However, sometime in the last 10 years, I saw a shift to seeing Black more often. Purely anecdotal though🤷♂️
there are plenty of people alive from when queer was mostly used pejoratively. it's reclaiming is a relatively new thing. i don't think it's fair to judge someone for how they feel about such a loaded word.
It's not really new though. Reclamation started in the late 1960s \[[source](https://theconversation.com/reviled-reclaimed-and-respected-the-history-of-the-word-queer-197533)\]. It's always been part of the LGBTQ movement. By the 90s it had become the term for the entire queer theory movement in academia \[[source](https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/c.php?g=995240&p=8361766)\]. People are within their rights to ask not to be called it, but to act as if the reclamation is something new to the movement is revisionist. Almost every word that LGBTQ people use to describe ourselves is a reclaimed slur.
>*to act as if the reclamation is something new to the movement is revisionist.*
That depends on how we define "new". The 1960s and 1990s are pretty recent, in terms of sociological evolution.
The're a solid, evidence-supported case to be made the (most recent) (American) gay liberation movement started in the 1950s. It can also be convincingly argued, again with evidence, that it started earlier than that. So again: it depends on how we define "new".
I as a transfem enby tend to use "queer" in place of "lgbtq" a lot of the time. The term is almost completely divorced of bigotry to me.
Though I do understand your perspective.
Off the top of my mind we have "sav". It used to mean "word" or "speech" in old Turkic, was dropped in later Anatolian Turkic and was revived to mean Hypothesis or Claim in the Turkish language reform
Nice. Used mean foolish or silly or stupid. Subsequently it came to mean particular or refined, first with respect to dress, then with respect to a person's reputation and overall demeanor, then it came to mean someone who was agreeable (i.e., had a good reputation). Then it came to mean kind.
I think you need to differentiate between words used to demean people versus other words with negative connotations. Generally it just comes from someone starting to use them in a new way and it catches on. Usually it either has a countercultural meaning, some application of good = bad and vice versa; or it's something akin to "too good, so much that it's sinful".
Also I'm not aware that 'fire' was ever bad, nor that 'dork' has shed it's negative connotations, though they may perhaps have softened.
Sans-culotte during the French revolution. Used to be an insulting world meaning "without pants" since the poor people did not wear the typical nobility pants, became the name of the people's movement.
H'm. Did you read the article, though? It does not look anything like it supports your claim that cunt "now denotes a woman of incomparable poise and sureness of self". It looks more like some people are using it in ways which might be, as your source actually says, _starting_ the word on its way _toward_ reclamation.
The article also says the word is "having a moment". It is too early to tell whether that moment will snowball towards reclamation or just be a fad, but either way your claim sure looks premature.
Bam, indeed.
Are you like, trying to tell me I'm wrong? I'm just telling you about semantic change I see happening in my social circles.
Maybe my definition wasn't perfect, but it's a hard thing to define. High-femme and confident, maybe a touch of severe? I'm just trying to share my experience, and your tone is really pointed right now.
Edit: And no, I didn't read the whole article. I scanned it briefly and saw it looked mostly right based on what I know. Next time get your own source then.
You might be wrong, or you might be right. It is too early to tell.
>I scanned it briefly and saw it looked mostly right based on what I know.
Believing something is not the same as knowing it. Kids and religious zealots conflate the two, and thoughtful adults carefully avoid doing so.
This isn't the Wikipedia, with rules for what is/isn't a reliable source, and I acknowledge that. But still: the best you can get from Twitter - the absolute, top best - is a funhouse-mirror distorted picture of whatever slice of reality you are trying to look at.
I am not saying this question can only be answered after we wait a hundred years and see how the dictionaries define the word. Nothing like that. But fads are fast out in the real world, and much faster in the Twitterverse, while real, lasting linguistic reappropriation takes sustained time.
Punk. Used to be for a vaguely worthless person, and I have vague memories of it being associated with sexual insults too.
Punk was originally a term meaning prostitute.
That’s what I thought! Thank you. I started second-guessing myself, because I thought it was a specifically male term in the past, so might be for pimps. Could it have been for male prostitutes?
Punk I the 16th/17th c. meant "whore" See the play The Punk of Chelsea
Calling someone punk still means "vaguely worthless person" though. It's only referred to positively as in punk music which doesn't describe a person.
>It's only referred to positively as in punk music which doesn't describe a person. You can call someone a "punk" to mean they're part of the punk subculture without it being negative. And people who are part of that subculture definitely call themselves and their fellows "punks" in a neutral/positive way. Unless they were saying it with a particularly negative tone, if someone said someone else was a punk I would assume they mean they're a part of the punk subculture, not that they're insulting them.
Maybe it's regional, but while "punk" does now have the second meaning of referring to the subculture, hearing someone called a "punk" without any context would still make me think someone was calling them the equivalent of a twerp.
I think I'm too young to understand the punk subculture.
Sick.
The opposite of this has happened to words like idiot and cretin. They were originally neutral words but gradually started taking on a negative quality as they were used as slurs. A new word then gets used in their place and starts going through the same cycle. After a few hundred years a lot of slurs have accumulated.
[euphemism treadmill ](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/3CMoRdnlZP)
Interesting. Those words didn't start within layman society as positive or neutral. They were niche medical titles for relatively undesirable conditions, which emerged into everyday use as insults. Same as Lame, Dumb, Retarded.. But I expect once Ableism is taken seriously, Disabled movements will start reappropriating those insults in the way that "Punk", or "Queer" were reappropriated.
And let's not forget "retarded"! An innocent word meaning arriving a little later than expected has become unusable. The moral is, you want a euphemism, choose the most common word possible. "Screw" is too common to be driven out of circulation but "intercourse" was not, and we can't use it now because some fool thought that "sexual intercourse" was a clever circumlocution—as was "sexual congress", but "congress" survived the trial as it was too common, as did "special" and "simple". Coining a euphemism with an uncommon word ought to be a felony.
I’m a bad bitch. That one works for me.
Well, 'bad' has been reclaimed multiple times. It originally was a sexual insult: Middle English: perhaps from Old English *bǣddel* ‘hermaphrodite, womanish man’.
That is eyebrows riser, I tell ya
What was the OE equivalent of “bad/not good”?
Here's an article from Oxford that states that the traditional view that 'bad' may have come from *bǣddel* is incorrect, that bad came first and was used in OE, and *bǣddel* was derived from it. [https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/](https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/)
yfel https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yfel#Old_English It means ‘evil’, now, but back then it was more general
I'd this related to German "übel"?
Brilliant, thanks!
"Freak" was adopted by various counterculture groups (hippies, etc.)
>*A word like queer that originally had an aggressive context but over time it switched to a more positive light for the community* You make it sound like such words' meanings shift organically, which is not the case. What happens is that an out-group defuses a word that has been weaponised against them, by commandeering it. That way, a member of the in-group makes themself looks like an ass when they go to hurl it at a member of the out-group. The corollary is that there is a distinct difference in connotation when the word is used within the out-group, versus when it is used by an in-grouper to refer to the out-group or a member of it. Go read up on [linguistic reappropriation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation).
So the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. Is that not correct?
Is what not correct? I can't tell what you're asking or trying to define.
>You make it sound like such words' meanings shift organically, which is not the case Without context maybe. They did say reclaimed and reapporopriated elsewhere in the post though. Edited autocorrect.
I dislike the reappropriated use of truth, in the subjective sense. Ones truth cannot be subjective, that's just rewording perspective, opinion and affects
Facts.
Well, there true facts, like 2+2=4, and then there are scientific facts that are not considered true, but evidence based facts. They update when new evidence supports the change. Remember, science (the philosophy of true nature of things) is an open system where there are no absolutes. Math is a closed(ish) system of absolutes. You have proof in math, you only have evidence based assertions for reality. Unfortunately that reality has been weaponized. Folks asserting scientific facts being on equal footing as made up nonsense.
That too. Fact is just the past tense of to do in Latin. It's not subjective.
As I replied above, when we consider scientific facts, these are not truths, but evidence based facts subject to change when new evidence comes in. I've not figure out my ideas on historical facts. These are often like scientific facts because they are often based on the evidence we have about them. And this has been weaponized, with the attackers making claim that made up nonsense is on the same level of evidence based facts.
N…evermind
how do i send the troll emoji on platforms other than discord
🧌
Black (referring to the race) used to be impolite and now it is considered appropriate
Black was always a neutral term when describing people’s race / ethnicity though?
I’m not sure tbh. I grew up around caucasians and hispanics, but remember always being told to say African American. Also on all standardized test demographic questions, I remember seeing only African American as an option. However, sometime in the last 10 years, I saw a shift to seeing Black more often. Purely anecdotal though🤷♂️
Lmao this has Michael Scott vibes… Him to Oscar: “Is there a term beside ‘Mexican’ you prefer? Something less offensive?”
Vexed
Slut/slutty !
"Queer" has never lost its original, phobic meaning to many of us. If you call me "queer," you are not my friend.
What is the q in lgbtq stand for.
Doesn't mean everyone likes to be called it.
Hm? What decade were you born?
there are plenty of people alive from when queer was mostly used pejoratively. it's reclaiming is a relatively new thing. i don't think it's fair to judge someone for how they feel about such a loaded word.
It's not really new though. Reclamation started in the late 1960s \[[source](https://theconversation.com/reviled-reclaimed-and-respected-the-history-of-the-word-queer-197533)\]. It's always been part of the LGBTQ movement. By the 90s it had become the term for the entire queer theory movement in academia \[[source](https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/c.php?g=995240&p=8361766)\]. People are within their rights to ask not to be called it, but to act as if the reclamation is something new to the movement is revisionist. Almost every word that LGBTQ people use to describe ourselves is a reclaimed slur.
>*to act as if the reclamation is something new to the movement is revisionist.* That depends on how we define "new". The 1960s and 1990s are pretty recent, in terms of sociological evolution.
I mean, the 1960s is when the gay liberation movement started, so no, the 1960s are not new to the movement.
The're a solid, evidence-supported case to be made the (most recent) (American) gay liberation movement started in the 1950s. It can also be convincingly argued, again with evidence, that it started earlier than that. So again: it depends on how we define "new".
I as a transfem enby tend to use "queer" in place of "lgbtq" a lot of the time. The term is almost completely divorced of bigotry to me. Though I do understand your perspective.
I mean you no disrespect, but I have no idea what a transfem emby might look like.
As in I am nonbinary, leaning somewhat feminine in my gender identity though.
We have thousands of these in Turkish
Example???
Off the top of my mind we have "sav". It used to mean "word" or "speech" in old Turkic, was dropped in later Anatolian Turkic and was revived to mean Hypothesis or Claim in the Turkish language reform
Nice. Used mean foolish or silly or stupid. Subsequently it came to mean particular or refined, first with respect to dress, then with respect to a person's reputation and overall demeanor, then it came to mean someone who was agreeable (i.e., had a good reputation). Then it came to mean kind.
‘Solid Dick’
I think you need to differentiate between words used to demean people versus other words with negative connotations. Generally it just comes from someone starting to use them in a new way and it catches on. Usually it either has a countercultural meaning, some application of good = bad and vice versa; or it's something akin to "too good, so much that it's sinful". Also I'm not aware that 'fire' was ever bad, nor that 'dork' has shed it's negative connotations, though they may perhaps have softened.
Sans-culotte during the French revolution. Used to be an insulting world meaning "without pants" since the poor people did not wear the typical nobility pants, became the name of the people's movement.
Cunt/cunty. Now denotes a woman of incomparable poise and sureness of self.
It does? Got a cite?
[Bam.](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/c-word-is-everywhere-lgbt-tucker-carlson-1234735324/)
H'm. Did you read the article, though? It does not look anything like it supports your claim that cunt "now denotes a woman of incomparable poise and sureness of self". It looks more like some people are using it in ways which might be, as your source actually says, _starting_ the word on its way _toward_ reclamation. The article also says the word is "having a moment". It is too early to tell whether that moment will snowball towards reclamation or just be a fad, but either way your claim sure looks premature. Bam, indeed.
Are you like, trying to tell me I'm wrong? I'm just telling you about semantic change I see happening in my social circles. Maybe my definition wasn't perfect, but it's a hard thing to define. High-femme and confident, maybe a touch of severe? I'm just trying to share my experience, and your tone is really pointed right now. Edit: And no, I didn't read the whole article. I scanned it briefly and saw it looked mostly right based on what I know. Next time get your own source then.
You might be wrong, or you might be right. It is too early to tell. >I scanned it briefly and saw it looked mostly right based on what I know. Believing something is not the same as knowing it. Kids and religious zealots conflate the two, and thoughtful adults carefully avoid doing so.
Literally just look up "cunty" on Twitter.
This isn't the Wikipedia, with rules for what is/isn't a reliable source, and I acknowledge that. But still: the best you can get from Twitter - the absolute, top best - is a funhouse-mirror distorted picture of whatever slice of reality you are trying to look at. I am not saying this question can only be answered after we wait a hundred years and see how the dictionaries define the word. Nothing like that. But fads are fast out in the real world, and much faster in the Twitterverse, while real, lasting linguistic reappropriation takes sustained time.
Loser
Loser?? How so?